today 18/10/2008 was the Sydney Drupal Camp - held at University of NSW campus in Camperdown & hosted by the Drupal Australia Group. Ryan Cross did a fantastic job organising the "unconference" with assistance from many people in the group. I'm too tired right now to write up my notes about it - suffice to say it was a great event and I learnt a few new tips to try out. I'll try write more tomorrow & post the photos (I only took a few) after some sleep. I'd helped out by recording audio of the sessions which will be uploaded to the group site & available for those who couldn't make it.
attached are the raw notes I took during the day - pasted below for searching purposes. I spent all day in the "B" area - which was beginners, but they went through some of the new drupal 6 modules I haven't used much yet. area "A" was more for the hardcore programmers.
I went to the Sydney Drupal Usergroup - October Meetup last night - my first one in Sydney. previously I've only been to the drupal sessions at fosdem 2005 in Brussels as I'd never been to Brussels and wanted to see what it was like. I'd been using drupal for a couple of years at the time and was testing upgrades. initially this site was a custom made php site that I coded to let me do data entry for events / news items and display them on the site in the same format I used for the mail lists which had been running for a few years prior to the site - so at the time, the custom php site saved me time. but also I found I spent a lot of time getting the site to work and adding new features, so when a friend (thanks Damian) asked me over to try out some CMS's including Drupal and we got it working in about an hour, I was hooked! the format of the articles was not exactly the same as what the previous site had been using, but it was so much easier to manage! I can't remember the exact date I moved the site to drupal, but by looking at the the wayback machine pages, it seems to have been in june / july 2003 - maybe 23rd july??
so, back to the Sydney meeting...
I was surprised to see so many people there - probably around 25-30 people. I hadn't realised drupal was so popular in Australia - though to be honest, I hadn't really checked for a few years. even the European and USA conferences and meetings are really popular now! great to see!! and there's so many books available.
I've been in Brisbane for past 12 days - catching up with lots of old and new friends. Valli & Dave moved to the UK. Frankie and I made a video - he'd kept a Strawberry from Strawberry Fields '96 and took it out for dinner last thursday night, so we made a video of the strawberry wandering the streets of the Valley looking for some of the old clubs which have since closed down.
Strawberry looking for lost clubs in the Valley
How Frankie found his Strawberry
I went to the Reunion Rave at the Met on friday night. it was a fantastic party! the djs played all the old tracks that were played at clubs years ago Thief's set was a highlight - he played tracks from Magic Roundabout @ Metropolis + The Site, as was the return of Vision Four 5. The screens in the MET were amazing too - the visuals were so crisp & clear. The lasers in the main room were great too. I caught up with so many people and danced most of the night. could hardly walk on Saturday though! but as Custa said "it's because of the hard floors - not because of my age or the fact I haven't used those muscles in a long time" sounds right to me!
I took some photos and video clips throughout the night, but most of the time I forgot I had the cameras as I was too busy talking and dancing. I think this is why I have hardly any photos from parties back in the day!
so now I'm listening to Damage's Soul Mix - a great set to wind down after holidays and first day back at work. I'm really liking his selection in this mix. the terntable jediz guys are doing well. sheep's back in Brisbane, and Freestyle's records are selling for crazy prices on discogs - 80 EURO for the 2006 Roy Davis Jnr remix "The Session" 12''. good to hear! I've heard they're going to be playing some regular (additional) gigs soon too.
crowdsourcing is defined by Jeff Howe from wired.com on his site http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com as "Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call." [The White Paper Version] and [The Soundbyte Version] "The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.". He coined the term then later wrote a book about the subject : Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. I think Facebook and Myspace are good examples of crowdsourcing these days - having regular people provide content for their sites. As is wikipedia. And even to a small extent this site - but I tend to provide 90% of the content here!
article abstract : "In April 2006, there were nearly 22,000 members of the Iowa State University community registered in Facebook. Two years later there are nearly 35,000 members, an increase of nearly 60 percent."
The Holga is a 120 film toy camera that produces colourful, sometimes vignetted photos and is used in the field of LOMO photography otherwise known as lomography. There are different models of Holga cameras.
the lomography.com site has thousands of examples of lomographic photos such as this one :
there's lomographic exhibitions too which feature lomowalls
"A Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of Alan Turing's Seminal Paper "On Computable Numbers" featuring a debate on the limits of intelligent machines and a lecture on Turing's contributions."
The Re-Cycle Wallah blog outlines a project to attempt to redesign the Indian cycle rickshaws in Ahmedabad with aims of "lowering human exertion by at least 30% and lower maintenance whilst keeping prototyping cost under re.5000; the outcome retail price is also to be under re.5000(around $125). Simultaneously providing a micro-credit loan scheme so the riders can own their own rickshaw rather than renting from a middle man." they are interested in ideas and feedback - you can post a reply to one of the articles on their site.
there was a question on the Acoustic Ecology mail list about permanent outdoor sound installations. some of these were mentioned by people on the list :
::: Derek Holzer mentioned Max Neuhaus & his talk at the Tuned City seminar :
"... His work is quite subtle and very strong conceptually. One piece in particular I remember him presenting at Tuned City in Berlin http://www.tunedcity.de was a piece for a public park, where the speakers were hidden under the ground and the sound emerged from what appeared to be drainage grills. Actually, the sound didn't seem to emerge from ANYWHERE, which was the beauty of it. Max said he spent quite a bit of time developing the (weather and vandal-proof) sound systems for these kinds of installations." -- Derek Holzer
Marcus is looking for some long lead articles about his upcoming tv show. I offered to post something here then have had limited net accesss (excuses!). so some research on him. he's already all over the net!!
Born 1974
Australia
Residence Australia
Nationality Australian
Marcus Westbury (b. 1974) is an Australian festival director, writer and media maker. He is currently based in Melbourne, Australia where he created the three part TV series Not Quite Art for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation screened during October-November 2007.
Contents [hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Arts and Festivals
1.2 Media Projects
2 Other
3 Media Coverage
4 External links
today I've been watching interviews with Dennis Potter, a British playwright who's work was mostly broadcast on British televison in 1960s through to 1990s up until his death in 1994. Chris Case had sent an email to the TechGnosis mail list which put me onto them.
first I watched his last interview with Melvyn Bragg in 1994.
