What do you do when you know you should be attending a weekly industry meetup but just can’t seem to get there, week after week?
As the crow flies, the nearest industry meetup to my home is North Shore Coffee Morning (#nscm) held each Thursday morning in Mosman, on Sydney’s leafy lower north shore.
It’s a great meetup: small, interesting, diverse group of people, good coffee, and great networking. According to Google Maps it ought to take me about 14mins to drive there, but I find Google Maps is rarely right about trip durations in Sydney, and typically it takes me between 20-30mins to get there, find a park and lob on in. Since I can only afford to spend an hour at #nscm, I’m taking two hours out of my highly productive morning and spending as much time on the road as I am networking with the regulars.
What to do? Why not create my own ‘lower North Shore coffee morning’ instead? I have a spacious living area with a lovely outlook, a great Italian coffee machine, good coffee beans, and enough cups and seats for about twelve people. I enjoy playing barista. Ticketing can be done quickly and easily in the cloud for next to nothing these days (see Amiando, Eventbrite and Eventarc for starters) and I can use a cheap ticket to (a) cover the cost of coffee, milk and muffins; and (b) give people some motivation to actually attend rather than (as I do) say they’ll try to make it. Any money left-over after consumables will be donated to Oxfam via my Trailwalker Sydney 2010 team. Maybe I can have the industry networking event come straight to me.
So tomorrow, in my home, Lower North Shore Coffee Morning will have its debut. If it goes well and people enjoy themselves, it might make a monthly reappearance. Tickets for this first iteration are limited to 12 and as I write this, there are only three tickets remaining.
If you’d like to come, it’s not too late — just use the order form below.
If you come, please bring passion, enthusiasm, good humour and curiosity. Also, please bring either a book, an artwork or some music to lend/give to someone else. Use of the WiFi, fireplace, comfy chairs, garden, huggy old dog and rope swing are included in the ticket price. The Twitter hashtag is #lnscm.
I wasn’t going to write about the tragic incident between Israeli forces and the Gaza relief flotilla — this is usually a blog about my work and the issues facing my profession. And so much of it seemed inevitable from the moment the flotilla was first organised — a motley collection of dodgy vessels carrying people representing a broad spectrum of issues would limp towards the Gaza coast, it would be intercepted by the Israeli military, who would arrest those on board with maximum gusto, jail or deport those on-board, confiscate everything and then claim it’s own investigation would prove that it had done nothing wrong. Initial condemnation of Israel’s action in the West would be limited to strong words, the pro-Israel community would try to explain that the State of Israel was indeed threatened by a few liberals and journalists and a rusty Turkish cruise liner, and then to finish up, we’d see a reaction to that suggesting that the event might not be as black-and-white as “Israel = bad, flotilla = good.”
Andrew Günsberg’s post, “Reading Then Thinking Speaking Then Listening” is a great example of the latter. He discloses his conflict of interest up front and encourages his readers to think twice, that it might not be all black-and-white and good-versus-evil. He encourages them to read a book about the background to the occupation of Gaza and talks about how the Israeli population isn’t always in favour of the way its government and its military behaves.
It’s all good, reasonable stuff, but it misses a crucial question: what was the only action committed by the Israeli forces during this incident for which there’s no justification? Firing shock grenades and tasers at the occupants of a foreign-registered vessel while in international waters? Use of high-velocity paintball rounds and live ammunition at close quarters against non-combatants? Taking foreign nationals from outside Israel’s borders and detaining them indefinitely or deporting without access to legal representation or appeal?
No. The only indefensible act of the state of Israel in this matter was the effective and almost total censorship of all communication arising from the incident so that the only significant record of events will be that provided by Israeli military video crews.
Flotilla activists interviewed by a journalist immediately prior to the attack (AP Photo/IHH)
According to eyewitness accounts, journalists were the first target of the Israeli action, including blocking cellphone and satellite communications from well prior to the incident to well after it had concluded, to prevent video, audio and text evidence being broadcast from the scene. Two Australian ABC reporters were immediately detained, with one, photographer Kate Geraghty reportedly tasered as she tried to upload images via satellite.
These Australian journalists aren’t Hamas apologists, anti-Israeli propagandists or easily-duped greenhorn reporters. They are both seasoned, professionally unbiased reporters working for an international broadcaster with an unblemished and rigidly enforced code of non-bias and independence. Israeli forces had been informed they were on the vessel, they identified themselves to the commandos storming the vessel, but they were nevertheless assaulted and had their equipment not just confiscated but methodically destroyed, even to the point of tearing up the notebook journalist Paul McGeough had been writing his reports into once satellite and cellphone communication had been blocked.
So far, Israel’s government has refused widespread calls for an inquiry into the incident from many UN nations including Australia, so maybe an inquiry will never happen. But if there ever is an inquiry by the Israeli military or anyone else, the only significant body of evidence will be eyewitness accounts and the video footage recorded by the Israeli military’s own video teams. You can easily discount the evidence of the flotilla’s eyewitnesses as being the rantings of terrorist sympathisers, as Israeli military inquiries habitually do. Which leaves the only version of events those recorded by the Israeli military itself.
Sorry, but I’ve got a degree in journalism and media studies, and I know how easy it is to influence opinion by selective editing, or just by pointing the camera one way and not another. The only hope we ever had of knowing the truth of the flotilla incident would be to compare and contrast the Israeli military’s own footage with that supplied by the independent professional media accompanying the flotilla. Now that there’s only one source of video footage, there’s no hope of knowing what really happened.
I’m as prepared as the next realist to remain open to the idea that Israeli forces may have done their best to minimise casualties and separate combatants from non-combatants on-board the flotilla vessels. That injuries and deaths on board happened accidentally and without intent in the heat of the moment. That some of the flotilla’s occupants were aggressors and initiated some of the violence that occurred. Perhaps even that Israel would have delivered the cargo of aid intact and in a timely fashion as they’d offered to do if the flotilla diverted to the Israeli port of Ashdod.
But — and it’s a huge but — there’s only one motivation I know of for blocking independent news coverage of the incident, and that is to hide the truth of what really occurred from the world community, from the international Jewish community and the citizens of Israel.
If you feel like being realist about this incident, by all means reserve judgement until ‘we know more about what happened’ but ask yourself who’s made sure you’ll never really know for sure, and what their motivation could possibly be.
Paul McGeough on the rise of Hamas, while remaining independent, unbiased and unassaulted. (ABC Fora)
It does for me. I have to be really careful with my movie choices when I’m flying internationally, for fear of looking like a big sook in front of complete strangers.
(This post started out as a comment on fatpaddler.com, where Sean mentions crying while watching The Cove. But me, I’ll cried in anything with a sad moment. Well, anything except romantic comedies starring Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston, which are sad for 120mins straight and I just can’t watch those at all.)
I googled some studies that show a link between long-term high-altitude and changes in oxytocin reception.
Oxytocin (as we all remember as husbands who paid close attention in pre-natal classes to try and minimise the risk of being torn to pieces by our demonically-possessed spouses in-between contractions) makes us very emotional.
So, I have a hunch: that the rapid reduction in air pressure as the plane ascends affects our ability to absorb oxytocin, the hormone that makes us cry when watching movies.
Perhaps the change in air pressure (from sea level to about the same pressure as you’d get at 8,000ft) in short time it takes to get to cruising altitude might effect your oxytocin receptors quite markedly for a short period. Your brain notices the shortfall and instructs the hypothalamus to dramatically increase production.
The meal service begins, the in-flight entertainment gets going, and by the time you get through the inflight interface and the ads to the emotional part of the movie, your body has managed to catch up, and is now fully adapted to the new atmospheric pressure.
But by now, your bloodstream is flooded with all that additional oxytocin the brain had ordered. All that’s required now is a small audio-visual cue in the movie and you’ll weep.
Now, I’ve got no data to back this up, no study at all. In fact, I had a lot of trouble understanding anything real scientists had to say about oxytocin and altitude. So I can’t really call it a theory, since that would require a hypothesis and I can’t even be bothered to write one of those properly. So let’s just call it a hunch. A suspicion. An opportunity to exclaim, “Aha! I had a hunch that was the case back in 2010! If only they’d listened!” to my grandchildren (who of course won’t be at my nursing home in person. They’ll just subscribe to my lifestream and pretend they’re viewing it.)
While I’m rambling, let’s extend my hunch a bit further still: if your oxytocin receptors are affected when you suddenly gain altitude, it makes sense it also happens when you lose altitude. Perhaps when the plane descends to land, you’re left without enough oxytocin reception and that’s why you feel strangely unemotional and robotic as you leave the plane and walk into baggage claim and customs. And then the excess oxytocin washes over you right as you walk out into the crowded arrivals hall to find… nobody waiting for you again… where’s the taxi queue? [sob!]
I’m away to Byron Bay for the remainder of 2009. The house, dog and chooks are all to be minded by friends and family, the car is packed, and once I’ve finished this blog post, I’m done for the year.
While I’ll have a laptop, iPhone and camera with me on the North Coast, I don’t expect to be blogging much, so this is probably it for 2009.
So I’ll take this opportunity to thank you for stopping by Doing Words this year. Whether you were avidly reading every post as it was published or just following a search result for “funny status messages“, I’d like to wish you all the best for this, the next, and every subsequent festive season.
If you have a God or Goddess, I hope he, she, it or they bring you everything you were hoping for. If your God is Santa and you haven’t been naughty, I’d say your chances are pretty good. If you’re a banker, I think your chances are even better, even though you’ve been very naughty indeed.
What would I really like? I would like an agreement on an enforceable, meaningful, non-greenwashed reduction in worldwide carbon emissions in 2010, nothing more. I were ever the optimist. I would like us not to kill the Earth to death. And no, I’m not a communist or a rabid greenie. I just don’t have a lot of faith in the ability of unrestrained Capitalism to respect the needs of the environment.
While being festive, please be careful on the roads, around the Christmas tree, and especially in the bathroom (more people suffer serious head injuries in the bathroom than any part of the house, including falling off the roof). Most of all, be peaceful, and good-willing towards all men (and women and ecosystems).
For as long as I can remember, I’ve ignored the spell-checker used by most word processing apps in OS X because I haven’t been able to get them to switch from US English (if you can call that “English”) to AU English (”strine, mate”).
Today, it finally drove me batty enough to find a solution. It was difficult to describe in a blog post so I’ve knocked together this quick little screencast. It’s really a tiny little tip, but hey, if it helps just one person, it’s enough, right?
So sit back, put your feet up, steal the super-sized bucket of popcorn from the person next to you, and be entertained while you learn…
Wow, i do not photograph well But I won this very nice tee shirt in a random draw after completing a user survey on Perkler.com. Yay for me! And I thought it was the right thing to do to thank the Perkler guys with a quick post.
Full disclosure: Perkler is a Pollenizer client and I do some work through Pollenizer. I haven’t personally worked on Perkler. So while I’m conflicted to a certain extent, I’m still going to recommend you check out Perkler.
If you are a member of one or more Australian loyalty programs and always feel like you’re not getting the maximum benefit of the scheme, Perkler is for you. If you’d like to compare loyalty programs against each other, this is for you.
And if you’d like to someday maybe score a natty blue tee in return for helping build a better product, then Perkler is for you.
Bonus: you’ll almost certainly look better in it than I do.
UPDATE: there’s now an ebook and a printed book (AUD$44.95) available through Blurb. The following contribution didn’t make the book but that’s because the stories in the book are even better. Go buy it now (and by “now” I mean as soon as you’ve read the following…
They’re calling for submissions, so here’s mine…
I’ve been in manhood training all my life, though I was never really conscious of it until my wife gave birth to our son, who remains our only child.
When my son was born, I was no longer just the son of my father. I was now a point on a line that ran from my son, through me, through my dad, and on, in a chain of fathers and sons stretching back into time. A lot of important stuff had travelled down that line to me — stuff about how to be a good son, a good man, a good father, a good friend and a good partner. Such an incredible legacy, and I’d just been dabbling in it, never really thinking about how important it had been, how it had broadened and moulded me and influenced the life I lead.
It was my weighty responsibility to pass on as much of this as I could, so my son could grow to be a good and happy man. I also felt the need to make sure these skills survived a few more generations intact. (more…)
I get my highly-developed sense of adventure from my parents. They can smell a new adventure a hundred miles away, like a shark can sense a wounded fish or a Cliff Swallow the way back to San Juan Capistrano.
My parents are nomads, grey ghosts, semi-retirees on the road. My dad works locum gigs for other chiropractors and he and my mum get to see a lot of the countryside, getting from town-to -town in a hard-working Subaru Forester with a camper-trailer on the back.
If it’s an East Coast gig, sometimes they’ll travel and live in their yacht, a well-known old ex-Sydney-to-Hobart racer ‘Bacardi‘, almost as old as I am, and now retrofitted with bookshelves, curtains, and framed photos of my brothers and I when we were kids.
I bought dad a GPS for his 70th and they do use it, usually as a third vote to break a tie. They tell me they find it very useful in an unfamiliar part of town or in a big highway interchange.
But mum, Navigator In Chief, is still an analog girl at heart, and keeps most of her important directional information stuck to the glovebox in note form. Unlike the TomTom GPS, my mother’s Granny Positioning System doesn’t require electrical power, isn’t affected by a loss of satellite signal, is easily readable in bright sunlight, is immune to extremes of temperature, most mild forms of impact and can even tolerate minor immersions.
Mum is generally in the passenger seat if both my parents are in the car. She has always had trouble telling right from left when she’s under pressure, and will often refer to a scar on her hand. Under pressure, sometimes she can’t remember which hand is scarred and will suddenly raise both hands. If she’s at the wheel, that can be scary.
In this case, "GPS" stands for Granny Positioning System
The last few weeks I’ve been off the matrix, in Tonga, with my wife Mel and son Alec as Scott from www.swimmingwithgentlegiants.com has taken us up close and underwater with humpback whales and their young calves.
It’s been a wonderful experience but two weeks with no internet access means I now have a lot of backlog to process …and I still have whalesong in my head…
Every Friday morning I take my turn walking a bunch of neighbourhood kids to school (as well Maggie the Labrador and Jemby the Golden Retriever). It’s great to get out in the morning air, get some exercise, save some car miles, and observe kids in their natural element (Dads usually only get to observe them on a sporting field or at a birthday party.)
This Friday I’ll be doing Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney — 100km of rough bush tracks, which will hopefully take me and the team about 24-26 hours.
…the kids will be walking to school with another parent.
But check this out — they sent home this card for me, complete with band-aids, and signed by every one of them.
I’m so touched! How can I not do well with this kind of support and motivation?
Thanks kids, and thanks mums too (I’m sure you had something to do with it!)
Update: follow my personal and team progress throughout the event near-live from 7am Friday 28th AEST here on the cool Oxfam Trailwalker Team Tracker for Team 158. And ping your responses back to @bigyahu on Twitter or SMS on +61414987069. Cheers!
But I won this very nice tee shirt in a random draw after completing a user survey on 
