Ok, so most of us have enough matter between our ears to know that the environment is struggling right now, with some unfortunate consequences ahead if we as a race continue to turn a blind eye — well, not everyone is turning a blind eye, but enough of the people with power are. With that in mind, a group of Aussies have come up with an idea where they are asking bloggers around the world to participate in Blog Action Day. As of right now over almost 1000 blogs have been signed up, including this little one. It doesn’t matter if you blog for fun or it is a business venture for you — if you care about the environment and want to say something about it, you can have your chance on October 15.

Spread the word!

Well, this week I am officially unemployed — my choice, because I applied for a position, got it and now have a week in between leaving my previous and starting my new one.  So I have the liberty of blogging when others are going to work.  If I could just work out some way to do this for a living — quite nice to sit and do something pleasurable for “work”.  

Well, back to reality I guess.  I think this new position will hold some more interesting aspects compared to the previous one, which was intense paper warfare — there was nothing to motivate one, just a bunch of ever growing deadlines. I will miss the student contact however — well, most of the students — some of them can be very good at manipulating the truth.  So to the title of this blog —  I woke around 6am, and just lay there and listened.  It is quite interesting to hear how the world wakes. I left the window open in my bedroom last night — supposedly it is winter, however mother nature seems to think otherwise, with quite warm temperatures yesterday and into the night.  It felt good to have the fresh air coming in.  I live in a fairly wooded area of Brisbane, so having the window open meant that this morning I woke to a shaded landscape, not yet touched by the rising sun.  Particularly noticeable was the sound of the kookaburras — if you’re not familiar, imagine a bunch of birds laughing in unison.  It is a distinctive sound, and as a kid our parents used to tell us that the ‘burras were laughing at us.  To this day I still remember that.  

Also amongst the plethora of sounds, I can hear the parrots that are everywhere, plus the occasional crow making its presence felt.  As the sun rose and the time moved on, the pattern of sounds changed from nature to human created — ahh yes, the sound of the University traffic.  I live on a shortcut for many headed up the hill to the University of Queensland, so the buildup started early, at around 6:45am.  But there are other sounds as well — someone close by must be doing some renovation, because I can hear the sound of nails being hammered, wood sawed, and paint going on a wall (nah — just joking with that one — my powers of hearing aren’t that well defined – not after having attended so many loud concerts over the years). Now there’s a butcher bird outside my window — it’s like living in a rainforest here, except that there’s a major road only a few metres away.  

More later… 

One thing you will come to know about me over time is that I like to talk. Yep, no denying that trait. I’m an extrovert, and that’s my excuse. I thank my lucky stars that I am “talkative”, because being able to comfortably talk to people from all walks of life means that I have some cool conversations. Take just now for example — I was making a cup of tea downstairs and got to talking to Jean, a woman originally from Singapore who now calls Brisbane her home for the time being. The conversation covered many aspects of life — from our own experiences of having moved to live in another country; my reading patterns — how I buy books and despite the best of intentions, often don’t finish them off; to Monopoly, and how I am the current champion in the house. A discussion with me will never be boring, I assure you of that.

Jean said that talking to me is always a learning experience for her — that made me feel pretty darn good, because she was obviously getting from the conversation what I was. The chance to learn about someone else and what their background was, their likes and dislikes, and their hopes for the future. Interacting with others is an important use of my spare time. I highly recommend it. 🙂

Well, I need to do some stuff, so this is it for this posting….maybe one more later on.

The reference there is to blogging. 🙂

Looks like the last time I blogged was on July 3. I shake my head at how long ago that was, but to be fair, I’ve been working my butt off at work, often extending long into the night. I managed to meet two major deadlines by putting the extra effort in, though I doubt that will be recognised — not a lot of positive vibes where I hang out during the working week. However — that is all about to change, because I have just been offered a new position, so I leave this job on August 10 and start my new one, as a training specialist with the TAFE system in Queensland on August 20.

I’ve done a lot of training in the past and I enjoy imparting knowledge to people. This position will be a combination of face-to-face and distance learning for the staff of the system — blended learning I guess you could call it. What is even better is that it goes hand in hand with the Masters program I am trying to finish off, so there’s a two-way benefit from it; the ability to use real-life experiences in the pursuit of my own learning, at the same time bringing in some of the theories of adult learning that I have amassed in my head over time. The position is based in the city, which is fine by me — I like the feel one gets from being there — there’s a certain vibrancy, and at the end of the day there are many options for having a bite to eat, drink and relax. One “dangerous” thing for me is that there are 2 Apple resellers in the area, so I may have to be careful in that regard, given my interest in Apple gear. 🙂

I’m looking forward to a quiet weekend — this old body of mine needs some rest. I guess that’s what happens when one pushes the envelope at work.

Better get myself off to work….have a great weekend!

Well, I’ve been away from the blogging world doing some other things. They include reading a couple of excellent books, taking part in some professional development courses at work (one of which will be extremely helpful when I write my masters thesis), and doing some self-reflection. Being away also meant that I didn’t spend as much time online and therefore missed a lot of posts from my fav bloggers. I’ll probably check a few out tonight before bed.

The news that I allude to is once more from the chimp in the Whitehouse, and his outrageous (yet, hardly surprising) decision to hand Scooter Libby a get out of jail free card.

Paul Begala over at the Huffington Post said it well when calling Chimpy a tough hombre:

“Tough enough to execute Karla Fay Tucker — and then laugh about it. Tough enough to sign a death warrant for a man whose lawyer slept through the trial — and then snicker when asked about it in a debate. Even tough enough to execute a great-grandmother who murdered her husband — after he abused her…”;

“Mr. Bush is tough enough to invade a country that was no risk to America, causing tens of thousands of civilian deaths and shedding precious American blood in the process. Tough enough to sanction torture. Tough enough to order an American citizen arrested and held without trial.”, and

“But if you’re rich and right-wing and Republican, George is a real softie. As George W. Bush demonstrated in giving Scooter Libby a Get Out of Jail Free Card, he is only compassionate to conservatives.”

I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised, because every day there’s something new on the political scene in the land of the free. Now, I know there are those out there in the world who would tell me that corruption happens on all sides of the political world, and I would agree totally. But it seems to me that this current administration seems to think it is above the laws of the land, and every day flouts the law and does what it wishes with no regard whatsoever for the consequences — because, as we now see, there are no consequences. When you consider that Paris Hilton served more time than Libby; that Judith Miller for her role in the outing of Valerie Plame also served time, yet the Cheney right-hand man gets off pretty much scott free, then you have to start to wonder where America is headed. Then again, the decline started when the administration rigged and stole the first election. Ok…off my soapbox and back to something else.

Those books I read — the first was a great story by a woman who gave up a life in the shadow of her husband’s corporate career, and headed out into the world, aiming to find herself and at the same time live among various cultures. really live! No 5 star hotels, no luxury cars, she travelled an often stony road full of dangers, but came out the other end in good shape. The book is “Tales of a Female Nomad”, by Rita Golden Gelman. I couldn’t put the book down — it wakened the anthropologist in me. The other book, “Fighting Masoud’s War” tells the extraordinary true story of a resistance leader’s fight against the Soviet invasion of his homeland, Afghanistan in the late 60’s. CNN interviewed Masoud for its Cold War series, and it gave a good insight into who Masoud was and what he stood for. Sadly, 2 days before the Sept 11 attacks on the US, he was assassinated, with a belief that it was on the orders of Osama Bin Laden. Newsweek conducted the last interview with Masoud, just 2 weeks before the assassination.

Well, time to check out what my blogging friends have been up to. 🙂

I’ve always been interested in geography — at primary school I loved to learn about other places, cultures, physical entities such as volcanoes, rivers, mountains, the oceans etc. My favourite place was the town library, and I spent many hours there after school and on Saturday mornings learning about these things that had a hold of my focus. As I got older, I joined an international penfriends club and soon had letters coming from some amazing places in the world. For a kid growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, of course there was no internet, so books were about the only way to discover more.

I was reading a post over at the Infonaut blog which got me thinking about how addresses are created. The post refers to a story in the Toronto Star about a city of 2 million people, Managua in Nicaragua, which has no street names nor house numbers. Hard to imagine how anyone could find places, but it appears that more descriptive titles are used as addresses. It’s an interesting read. Here’s an example:

“Somewhere in this lakeside Central American town, there’s a woman who lives beside a yellow car. But it’s not her car. It’s her address. If you were to write to her, this is where you would send the letter: “From where the Chinese restaurant used to be, two blocks down, half a block toward the lake, next door to the house where the yellow car is parked, Managua, Nicaragua.”

It reminded me of a friend who lives in rural Victoria, just outside of Melbourne. The first time I went to visit her was on a road trip I made from my home town (Toowoomba, Qld) to Warrnambool (Vic). Her instructions were something that would be at home in Managua: “…my house is 2 fields past the barn with the red door and old holden ute rusting in the paddock.” Now her address is a little more “normal” than that, but it was kinda funny at the time to be looking for visual signs instead of house numbers and street names.

That Infonaut organisation does some interesting work with data — they use GIS mapping to display health-related information. For example, their current map of the month shows the number of people per physician in Canada. This is a relatively new field within the geography field — health geography. The power of GIS is quite amazing, in many ways. I had a conversation with a state manager of McDonald’s recently and he told me that before Maccas builds a new store, they use data from GIS to analyse the socio-economic structure of the surrounding area — it seems that they look for lower-income areas, where the population may have a tendency to eat fast-food more than those with higher levels of income. Sad corporate tactic, but I guess they all have to make a profit.

One last post before heading off to bed. I was looking at a blog called Strange Maps earlier on. What an interesting concept — the use of maps to display certain statistics or historical facts. For example, the most recent post shows the US States renamed for countries with similar GDP’s. Looks like Canada equates to Texas (in stats only I would think…hope??) 🙂

Very interesting indeed…

I’ve been reading the nightly email I get in from the Seattle Times — it’s a great newspaper, and holds a little more interest for me because I visited Seattle on my last trip in the USA in May 2006, a couple of months before heading home to Australia . The area surrounding Seattle is rich in scenery and traditions, like all places on this earth. One of the sections I enjoy reading is called “A Few of My Favorite Things”, which locals write in to highlight their favourite place relating to the topic, which this week is “favorite movie theaters“.

So, I got to thinking about some of favourite things. Probably my favourite place to get ice-cream is a family owned business called Sarris Candies, located in Canonsburg, a small town south of Pittsburgh. The history of the business is worth reading, and a visit recommended if you like chocolate, candies, and best of all, ice-cream. It has an ice-cream parlour set up inside the store — so, if you’re ever on a drive from Pittsburgh, headed to perhaps North Carolina (it’s on the main route south) head on over to Sarris. It’s in a sleepy little town, also known as the birthplace of Perry Como. I was just reading about the history of Canonsburg — and what an interesting story it is — I’m a bit of a history buff, and love to read up on how places came to be. If you’re interested, check out this link.

A favourite place to see a concert, with just a couple of hundred others, for me undoubtedly would be a place called Mr Small’s. At first glance, it’s in an odd location. In another small town outside of Pittsburgh, in what was an old, dis-used church, has risen an entertainment venue with a feeling of intimacy – you are so close to the performers that it’s like sitting and talking to them. They primarily attract up and coming artists, though occasionally there are some headline acts as well. I was lucky (I think) to see Beth Orton there — great performance. Not content to just have live bands, the owners have also built a state-of-the-art recording facility, as well as a skatepark, and renovated rooms geared toward the visiting performers.

Fish and chips — yum! I’ve heard people I work with raving about a local fish and chip place called A Salt and Battery — so I checked out their offerings this afternoon, and wasn’t disappointed. Great chips especially! It probably is the best place I’ve come across in a while, though if you ever want the best shrimpburger in the world, get yourself to the Big Oak Drivein, located on the main road on a narrow stretch of land called the Emerald Isle, North Carolina. In what looks like it could have been a diner at some point, the place is a local hangout — they almost need a traffic cop to control the throngs of cars that descend on the place from opening to close.

Well, all this talk of fish, chips and shrimp has made me a little peckish…so I will end off here and maybe go see what I can rustle up in the kitchen.