My Technology Addictions

I have been busy working, working over the past 6 months and have not even spent much time online. I have visited twitter a few times in the past month but not much before that.

I mentioned in twitter last night that I was finding it hard to be inspired about updating my blog and couldn’t think of anything to write about. I had a couple of replies. one from diane cordell suggesting I write about having writers block. The other suggestion was from Mo Kargas with a link to the Lazy Bloggers Post Generator

This was fun and here is my result:

OMG! I just remembered I have not updated this since they let me out!… You would not believe how insane my life has become. Please don’t abandon me!.

I am flat out with discovering time doesn’t stand still, personal projects, just generally being a slave to every man and his dog, my day is full to overflowing from sun-up to sun down and beyond. I am totally exhausted. I need some perspective.

I won’t promise anything to you but I will make more of an effort to blog more often. Truly! Until my paycheck dawneth..

So in answer to having writers block I think it is more to do with needing a holiday and working too much. So after a hectic 6 months and as we start second semester I have made a few changes and had some changes thrust upon me.

I have had a fabulous holiday with my family in Melbourne and 7 days in Mt Buller skiing. This was a big change from the beaches we live down the road from in Western Australia. On return from our holiday I came to the conclusion that “Reality Sucks”.

Holiday over and back to work, big changes here also. I don’t have any lecturing work this semester so now need to start getting more work in through my business. This is a bit scary but also exciting.

The thing I like about working for myself is that I get to do the things I love. Programming and I have been also doing some contract work customising documents for businesses. This has involved working on their premises and also from home. I have been making spreadsheets more efficient and in some case instead of having 5 or more different versions of the one document I have managed to work them all into one document with a bit of code. These have all been Microsoft based documents but I am looking at setting myself up to learn some Apple based software also.

So after reading back through this post I don’t think it is so much writers block as the fact that my work has changed and not so education based now and if I do continue with my blog my posts will start to reflect this. So I will probably be back.

Tags: Web 2.0

I seem to have started a few posts saying I can’t believe it is ……. since I posted to my blog and here I go again. Wow haven’t done anything since December ‘07 . I came to have a look at the many many spam comments that have come into my blog and delete them, because of this I have set comments to approval before they are seen. Then I thought I would have a look at what new themes were available and selected one.

After doing this I thought I had better not be so slack and actually create a post so ……. here it is.

I have been so busy over the past term, I have taken on some extra work at TAFE and most of my classes have kids between 16 – 18 who would normally be in the school system but due to one thing or another school has not worked for them. In Western Australia we have a policy where students need to be in full time education or work until the end of the year they turn 17. So if school doesn’t fit they have come to TAFE. Having these kids for 13 hours over three days is full on and this combined with my software development business has not left me much time and as such almost all of my online activities have suffered, until now – school holidays the following images sums things up nicely especially with my recent train trips to Perth and my lack of internet access on my ancient nokia phone.

Geek and Poke Sounds of Silence

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Geek and Poke Twitter Abstinence Syndrome

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I have met some really great people on twitterand facebook and my friends and followers continue to grow. Having these online contacts is good especially when working from home as it stops me feeling isolated. So if you haven’t yet used twitter or facebook have a go and see what you think. As with most things on a computer if you have a use for it whether it is software, online communities or even surfing the internet you will pursue with it if not you may view these things as time wasters but you wont know unless you try them yourself. Anyway enough chat for one night and with lots more thoughts rattling around in my head I will be coming a back a bit more often, hopefully someone will still be reading this.

Tags: CoolStuff, Web 2.0

e-consultation

The Australian Federal Government is preparing itself to enter the blogging realm. An article in the online Australian IT titled Canberra plans citizen sample blog yesterday states “FEDERAL plans to enter the world of blogging are well under way, with a discussion paper due soon on the proposed “rules of engagement”.” The blog will be up and running by March and will be a place that the public can comment on policy, it wont be a free for all and genuine and constructive comments would be welcomed!

They have concerns that the lobby groups or other anonymous identities may infiltrate and manipulate the blog. Will this just be another place on the web that the government places information for us to read and if we wish to place a  positive/constructive comment then that comment may appear on the blog? Censored comments – that’s an interesting concept, we have the ability to censor, delete and even change comments that are placed on our blogs but most of us would only use these options if we get comments that detail illegal activities, pornographic, spam or are racist and discriminatory.

At the end of the day a blog provides a place for conversation and I would have thought that e-consultation would benefit from conversation not censorship, will we see a spin off of blogs that will continue the conversations? Just by denying it they will in fact make it flourish elsewhere way. I suppose that is just another case of  ”not in my backyard”.

The article states that a spokesman for Special Minister of State Gary Nairn said ….”genuine and constructive comments”, I could not find another mention of this, a speech delivered by Mr Nairn in August mentions the possible introduction of blogs and talks about the things like the need for  moderation of comments would need to be looked at. I hope they do look at this and not take the Big Brother attitude and take the time to consult with people from the blogging communities both users and readers, not people who “know” about these things about do not “participate” in them.

I have tried to stay pretty much on track with this blog and that hasn’t been too hard as technology is a wide and varied field. I don’t want to get into political discussions (am I now censoring?) but as this does loosely relate to technology I thought I would place it here.

Tags: FutureTrends, Web 2.0