Hello hello, I am currently posting to several blogs all at once with Ping.fm, but for some reason, it seems to have stopped working with Myspac blogs, keep an eye on my status instead and you will see all my latest posts elsewhere!

I forget where half the people I know even live anymore, so here's our plans for our forthcoming Overseas trip and maybe we can meet up somewhere if you so wish... let me know :-)

18th - 22nd June : Shanghai
23rd : Munich
23rd - 26th : Berlin
27th - 1st : Lincolnshire
2nd : London
3rd - 5th : Bath
5th - 7th : Reading
7th - 10th : New York
11th - 13th : Montreal
14th - 16th : San Fransisco


Phew! Let me know if you live in or around any of those places!

Chinch :-)

City Library Street Press tomorrow (20th May)

The Craft Cartel discuss spreading the word and messages with handmade goodies and projects.

The Craft Cartel is about providing community support for makers of objects that don’t normally have a space within the retail sphere. We support crafters who use innovative techniques, recycled materials, make provocative statements or just crafters who don’t have the capacity to make a full time living out of making what they make. We recognise and seek to promote the value to our communities and our environment of buying interesting and wonderful handmade objects as opposed to mass produced plastic crap. We also see the importance of strong communities and we like to open the craft cartel experience to people of all walks of life. We do not subscribe to art wank and we are prone to ridiculing the pretentious.

Visit www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/libraries or call (03)96589500 for more details and to confirm a space.

citylibrarystreetpress.blogspot.com

Express Media and The City Library Street Press Workshops Present:

Future Text : a panel on the future of mobile technology and publishing.

Wednesday May 6 in the City Library Seminar Room, 253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne.
6pm.
Free!

With Dr Belinda Barnet, Paul Green and Yasemin Sabuncu.

Join us as panel members discuss new directions in mobile phone technology. Will we be doing all our reading on our phones? What are the limits? What does the future look like?

Dr Belinda Barnet is Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University. She has also worked in web and mobile production and has research interests in electronic writing. Her PhD was on the history of hypertext and the internet. She has spent time in the mobile industry, delivering mobile sites and content services to Telstra.

Paul Green has post graduate qualifications in arts and software development. For the past 8 years has been working with mobile internet in a variety of media. His default mode of expression is the written word and reckons there is nothing new, just different ways of doing the same thing.

Yasemin Sabuncu is currently developing a project that uses technologies such as mobile phones to make urban art more accessible. Art Seam takes the audience on a tour of the urban landscape. It allows users to explore, document and participate with these cities in real and virtual worlds, with their art and with their culture.


Visit www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/libraries or call (03)96589500 for more details and to confirm a space.

citylibrarystreetpress.blogspot.com

Big Brother Britain : www.chinchillamedia.com/2009/04/26/big-brother-britain/
Gnome vs KDE : www.chinchillamedia.com/2009/04/26/gnome-vs-kde/
Improve your User flow : www.chinchillamedia.com/2009/04/26/looking-to-improve-your-user-flow/
Optus says 'Yes' to Internet filter :www.chinchillamedia.com/2009/04/26/filtered-internet-optus-says-yes/
Jaunty Jackelop : www.chinchillamedia.com/2009/04/26/jaunty-jackalope/

Should Cyclists pay Tax : www.greenrenters.org/2009/04/should-cyclists-pay-tax/

I’ve been intending to write this for months, but never quite got around to it, a theme that will run through this article… I was also quite proud of the piece and was hoping I might be able to get it published, but alas, no joy in that area and as I say above, it’s content is long overdue.

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve been attempting to write a book for the best part of a year, I never quite made it past the research stage but have learnt about many fascinating things along the way.

The book was intended to be a fictional and modern reworking of Revelations, not an original concept I know, but I’d done my research to achieve as much accuracy as possible and was intending to place the narrative in the modern equivalent of a biblical chronicler, our incessant and omnipresent media.

It looks increasingly like the book will never get written though, firstly due to time constraints and secondly due to one of the constants in my life, the fact that frequently when I make predictions, they come true. I was intending to use the book to pre-empt the collapse of the ‘Western Empire’, through equivalent modern catastrophes and during my time wasting the past few months, this seems to be happening and I feel the book will be, or is, too late.

Because lets face it, over the past 18 months it’s been feeling a bit ‘end of days’ hasn’t it? Financial Collapse, Environmental crisis, natural disaster after natural disaster, you’d be forgiven for feeling somewhat nihilistic.

Or are things really any worse than they’ve ever been? In times like these it’s important to take a step back and look at things constructively, history does indeed repeat itself, even if outside of living memory. One of the most important phrases to note of recent times is ‘the worst xxx since records began’, because generally accurate historical records have only existed for around 200 years and even in humanities minute history, that is an incredibly short time span. Who are we to say there weren’t ravaging bushfires 400 years ago, or tsunamis that destroyed cities 500 years ago? In fact we’re almost certain there were, so why do we hold our own era in such high esteem and think that what we’re experiencing is so unique?

In regards to the financial crisis I feel it is important to look into one of the eras of history that most fascinates me, the Romans. A strong, powerful and dominant empire that spread over and influenced a large area and amount of people, we still feel its effects today. It lasted nearly 1000 years, a vast amount of time when compared to the paltry few centuries of the current Anglo/American/Colonial empire that is slowly drawing to a close. When the Roman Empire finally limped to it’s messy end, the world surrounding it was shaken by a sudden vacuum, the collapse of trade and economies plunged the western and Mediterranean regions into the bleak dark ages. It took time, but people finally got over it, humanity bounced back, the Phoenix rose from the flames, we moved on, forgot about it and got back to the dull normality of everyday life.

The Human race has a remarkable capacity to change, adapt and survive, that’s why we’re still here. Whilst it sometimes seems hard to imagine your average lethargic modern Joe competing in a Darwinian survival of the fittest, we probably will and we’ll probably make it fine out the other side of whatever faces us.

I feel another book coming on…

Unless of course another species beats us in the race of the fittest…
Or mother nature reminds us really how strong she is…
Or we blow ourselves up…
Or we poison ourselves and our atmosphere…

In which case no one will care if I finish the book anyway.

Miscellaneous
Rutgers breaks the record for the most amount of Waldos / Wallys (surely!) in one place...
Billy Brag and Kate Nash at the G20 protests 

Green
Where do gadgets go to die?
5 ways to greenify your home
The end to Greenwash
Solar powered beer bottles

Tech
Email client popularity
Campaign monitor and Wordpress join forces

From the Man himself....

"As a writer myself, I can tell them about writing techniques and tricks, or I can focus on how to manage yourself professionally as a writer - that is, how to get you work out there, how to approach publishers and publication opportunities, and so on. I've published poetry, short stories, and articles, so I've encountered a range of different types of publication. And I brought my first book out last year, so that could also be a useful discussion.

I can also tell them about publishing from the other side of the fence, given that I have several years of experience working as a magazine editor and particularly as a poetry editor. This could cover both the mechanics of how to approach editing someone else's work, and the broader stuff of how to manage a publication financially and administratively - so, distribution, advertising, marketing, sales, grants, etc.

Then as a performer I've done a lot of work, including some pretty big venues supporting bands and so on, and I've won various competitions. So I could give advice on how to write for performance, on how to approach performance, and how to prepare for competition. And I've worked for a couple of years as a gig convenor, so again, I could talk about the administrative, promotional, and organisational aspects of running performances."

Visit www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/libraries or call (03)96589500 for more details and to confirm a space.
253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne CBD
citylibrarystreetpress.blogspot.com

I've decided to go through another phase of consolidating blogs...
So, from now on I will just tell you about some of my new posts and you'll have to toddle off and read more detail than I can provide here...

Technology :
Operating System heaven and hell
Wikileaks raided
In Game ads more effective
YouTube under the thumb

Environment :
Green Cities of the future

Misc :
5 modern abandoned cities
5 Green Tech projects

Jees, I know everyone wants to find hidden meaning in everything, but surely this is going slightly too far?
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/4544-secrets-of-the-last-supper-video.htm

Whilst I find the creation of new musical instruments quite fascinating, I can’t help but wonder why they always have to be hi-tech, why not a new stringed or wind instrument?
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/multimedia/2009/03/gallery_instruments

This kind of fuses two of my fascinations, technology and religion into an unholy fusion…
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/17/too-busy-to-pray-dont-worry-indulgences-are-back/