The best Festivus ever...

What makes a good Festivus you ask?

Well...Frank Costanza would have us believe that all it requires is to tell your family and friends all the ways they disappointed you over the year. But I'll let you in on a little secret, all the ways my friends have disappointed me this year is the exact reason I love them. So with a delayed plan to visit Harbour Islands as the brief, with one friend finally taking a day off work (she's promised for a while) and the other reining in her need to always argue...(loving her very George-like moment of realisation!)....a most awesome day was had yesterday out on Sydney Harbour.

There's a ferry that runs from Wharf 6 at Circular Quay (and Darling Harbour) that drops off at places like Fort Denison and Shark Island in Sydney Harbour. Lesson for yesterday was if you get the first ferry of the day and it's a quiet-ish weekday no one will be on Shark Island except you until the next ferry arrives 1 and 1/2 hours later!

Imagine a whole harbour island with stunning views back towards the city and Harbour Bridge/Opera House all to yourself. We also had some Sydney to Hobart yachts out in the harbour sailing past doing last minute training. Add a gourmet picnic and best of the best friends a girl could ever have = the best Festivus ever!

Happy Festivus.

No clean feed

Internet filtering...censorship gone mad perhaps? What ever happened to old fashion taking responsibility for your actions (and if you are a parent instilling that in your children) and making your own choices?

A nice response here from Google and links to other commentators. A world gone mad me thinks.

Future trends and pearls of widsom

Jim Richardson is at it again and what a splendid reading material it makes.

First up...Google Earthquake hits Museum marketing

So...a lesson for today, what is said about you any where is just as important as what you say.

A how-to guide for creating social media plans

Easy to read and very relevant...how does your social media strategy compare?

#bbfuture or Realising Our Broadband Future

Hmmmm not so sure about the logo design above, but the wrap up is beginning on the two day Federal Government forum hosted by UNSW (and supported by numerous twitter and wiki inputs) to gather thoughts and strategies for (drum roll) 'Realising Our Broadband Future' (said with an eerie space is the final frontier type voice over...well at least in my head it was).

Again here is another example of what happens when even big brother is not sure of how to move forward digitally. But is anyone else seeing the pattern? All this online contribution to source a way forward is actually paving the path? Webcasts, twitter streams, wiki use...

Conroy: #bbfuture has more than 60,000 people on the wikis, generated over 3,300 Tweets & over 25,000 hits to the video live stream

Perhaps joram10 says it best...

@joram10 #bbfuture What a top experience - sitting in my office on the Sunshine Coast but participating as if I were there - sign of things to come.

See the Government site here where you can watch webcasts or listen on demand or perhaps browse the compiled wiki here or if you are on twitter search for #bbfuture

Geek in Residence

Are you an arts organisation looking for a digital helper? OzCo under the Arts Digital Era program is running a 'Geek in Residence' scheme during 2010.

Geek in Residence | artsdigitalera

The Geek in Residence pilot program connects ‘geeks’ (by which we mean technically confident artists and creatively confident technicians) with arts organisations through a temporary subsidised secondment scheme.

The purpose of this fund is for the Australia Council to enable digital artists and technicians to share their skills and experiences with arts workers. Geeks will be able to share their passion for solving unknown technological problems in creative situations, and arts workers will feel better equipped to work in digital spaces.

Are you a Geek? Are you working at an arts organisation in need of a digital innovation (ohhh look at all the hands!) Yes? Well sign up...NOW! The deadline is now 18th December...tick tock.

Zen and the Art of Chucking…

The last few weeks of my life, post holiday hiatus in the sun, have consisted of catching up on precious sleep (well trying to get back into a normal sleep pattern) and my new found calling…Zen and the Art of Chucking. Well don’t be under any illusions I have found nirvana…but I did find all my Nirvana albums if that will suffice?

Really, the last few weeks have been a time of sorting things into ‘recycle’, ‘donate’, ‘re-gift’, ‘chuck’, and er, ‘return to rightful owner’ and I should apologise in advance to Nicole for keeping her brother’s Ricky Martin album since 1996, though I’m not sure he’d want it back.

Anyhow, amid the dust I have been having a rather cathartic experience. It’s almost like the art of sorting and ordering ones’ external life assists with getting the internal one back on track. As if the ‘chucking’ out of bits of your past literally purges the emotions and cares invested in all this stuff.

Now I should say I’m not really a pack rat. It’s the sorting out of the last of my grandfather’s things that are still in the old terrace house and turning the spare room into a proper study/guest room. Oh and getting rid of the accumulation of about 5 years of bits of paper from my Masters. The secret of higher education I have learned is how many bits of paper you have in your house. I have so many bits of paper we would be putting them out for paper recycling for months so tomorrow we are off to the Visy Recycling Depot with a car load. And that’s not the only place getting my custom. I’m making friends with the local Salvation Army depot, and tomorrow’s car load marks my second trip. Trust me, there will be more.

For me as I sort out all these photocopied articles on everything from multiple regression through to how to construct statements of significance and piles of reading on art and life in the Italian states from 1200 – 1600 (yep, those exiting years!) I have realised just how much I have forgotten…most of the time I can barely remember studying or reading on these topics. So what remains? Ask me again when I’m not this tired. Hot bath and a good lie down here I come.

And Zen you ask? ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

...and the winner is?

Moi. My unit of study results are in and for my last subject with a score of 93% (that's another High Distinction) officially comes the end my friend, of the Masters forever.

New V&A Galleries

Accompanying recent Guardian articles about the opening of the new V&A gallery spaces is a great time lapse video containing interviews with key gallery staff. A great idea and such a easy way to invite visitors into the space and let them explore it...even if they are thousands of miles away...anyone up for a V&A trip?

Mentionmaps for Twitter

Now this is awesome...and the way it moves...if only all interrelated maps and web and social media metrics were so easy to display. So who's on your mention map?

Navigating Facebook’s New Contest Rules

Ahhh one of those 'need to read' things...for anyone contemplating (or already) running competitions on Facebook, here is a round up of the new contest rules. Might be worth a look back into the the Twitter ones too. Play by the rules kids!

Creativity Routines

Back to reality and another push from the Twitter realm, found through via @artsdigitalera RT @joanne_faulkner...and what was inspiring...well?

3 core processes essential for creative professionals

Most of us don't like to think about the labor involved in creativity. It takes away the glamour and the magic. But real creators know different. They know that creative work isn't particularly glamorous. It requires discipline, routine, and a nitpicky attention to detail. But they also know that none of that takes away the magic.

We often talk about “the creative process,” but it's really several interlocking processes. The magic happens at the point where they intersect.

Coasting-it...

Hello dear readers,

I've just returned from a week's respite up on the Central Coast of NSW. This former haven of relaxed beachside living has seen some dramatic changes over the many years my family has holidayed in the area...and most of them aren't that great but here's a collection of thoughts, random of course, but they seemed important at the time, so indulge me...

I miss being 16 but there is no way I would go back

On my numerous beach days I was subjected to the inner most thoughts of the 16-18 year old psyche as numerous groups landed on the beaches around me...ahhh to have a life once more where the controversy of the day was what happened at the formal after party and where one would go for schoolies. As I watch their awkward interactions I realised how most of us deep down are still 16 at heart but also feeling a world away from their cares and worries.

They paved paradise and put up parking lot OR my version of the multinational that swallowed the little guy

This is the story of a local shopping strip, an IGA and the car park that now sits on its site. I won't go into a chorus of 'paving paradise to put up a parking lot' and I will admit, I did enjoy being able to buy my usual yoghurt brand...but surely when Coles moves into your holiday area...it's no longer a small out of the way destination. It's serious urban (coastal?) sprawl. And I'm not sure I like it. I mean, for the people who live there it's probably most convenient to have a Coles open to midnight where you can pick up your Jalna...but will the awful Coles bakery kill the local bakehouse where if you get there after 11am all the sticky buns have been sold but pies are only $2 after 2pm?

What is it with the smiling at people?

Everybody smiles and says hello as you pass them...I'm not complaining, only I think I spoke to more people in the past week than I have in the previous 3 weeks in Sydney. And actually wished them well. Good morning to the man whose campervan blocked the access to my accommodation. Hello pregnant lady with toddler at the ocean pool...hello man fishing on bridge as I ran past you...(you probably thought I was crazy running the lake circuit)...

The smell

And I don't mean a bad one...rather there is something so quintessentially holiday- smelling for me when you get paper-bark mingled with a soft breeze coming over the lake front mixed with the slightly dense humidity when you are just over a row of bushland to the ocean...

Miles of beachfront...no one there...bliss.

On being 'done'

My mother has an oft-repeated statement that annoys me more than anything. It surrounds her notion of being 'done'...for her this is usually surrounded by a pleading stream of things that have to be 'done' household chores, ironing at 6am on Sunday mornings, cooking tea early on a Sunday evening...(I'm sure the last two are somehow related). I have often joked that on her eventual demise I will make some salacious speech about her finally 'being done'...(I am a nice daughter, I promise)...but today I can finally declare that 'I'm done'. Five years ago I decided I needed to do a Masters, five years before that I had this silly notion of going off to get myself a university education. Ten years later and the tax department should list me as a Gold Sponsor with the amount of HECs I will be paying back over the rest of my life. But you know what? I'm done.

I am done feeling guilty when I know I should be studying/reading/writting instead of well, having a life

I am done trying to do ridiculous all-nighters or the trick (that never works and I have Lisa to back me up on this) of the little nap...20 minutes at 3am does not make you a better proof reader...and I have proof

I am done with MLA, APA, Harvard in-text and the acronym Ibid.

I am done with economic multipliers, frescoes, oils, works on paper and movable cultural heritage, the 4 P's, the 7P's, narratology, semiology, communication theory and models, proposals, plans, reports, essays, critiques and the worse of all, the dreaded multiple choice!

I am done with using phrases such 'as Lord argues' and 'as Falk and Dierking outline'

I am done with reading others thoughts, summarising them, comparing, contrasting, arguing against them, reapplying their thinking to other disciplines and trying to make something original out of what is, lets face it, a crap essay question to begin with

I am done trying to out do everybody else to see if I can squeeze in another reference

I am done with the anti-climatic moment of handing things in

I am done trying to work out why although I get good marks no one has ever really offered any constructive criticism...yes I agree with you, that was a well written essay...but what happened to those other 5 marks? (oh, you lost them on your bell curve?)

I am done listing things I am done with.

Ahhhhhhh....now that's out of the way and the list of things I can now catch up on is in front of me...let's see, watching soap opera, sleeping in, gardening, sailing...well really leisure time in general, a social life, ironing at 6am on Sunday mornings, cleaning the oven...partying like it's 1999 (ahhh those ten years!)

...and now I'm done with this post.

On ruralising 'River Cottage' style

I've got it bad. All this work at home by myself has me dipping into other obsessions, namely kitchen gardens. I'm currently planning away when I can next attack the very small yard out the back of the terrace and put in my summer/autumn plantings, a task spurred on by too much watching of River Cottage and The Wild Gourmets, both on the ABC and then streaming some episodes online as er, a reward and much needed study breaks.

I do have a history of kitchen gardens in the family, my mother's father was a keen gardener with a small plot in their inner city backyard as she grew up. His father and mother up near Mudgee in the northern part of the Central West (makes sense oui?) also had kitchen gardens, with orchards on neighbour's property over the hill. What I long for is one of those glorious French or English kitchen gardens, with rolling hills and pastures in the background...(kind of Central West but more green, less bush!). Lush woodlands, forest foraging, otters (yes I'll stop now!)...ahhh yes too much River Cottage for me.

On meetings...

I miss meetings. But maybe as Alain de Botton (oh how I love to roll that name over my tongue!) reveals...it's the biscuits and the blather I miss most. Alain de Botton, another hero!

On Meetings: A Note On Dreaded Corporate Etiquette

When we look back on our working lives and wonder where the time has gone, the answer is, of course, meetings. The meeting is to modern office work what the hunt was to our primeval ancestors. Beneath the surface, civility is where money is made and survival is ensured — while an intriguing variety of biscuits sits untouched and brightly lit in the center of the wood-effect table.

Though there is always much to talk about and an agenda to get through, the protocol of meetings dictates that they cannot begin too abruptly. There must be at least seven (but never more) minutes of chat, a piece of dialogue entirely unrelated to the real reason why one has left one's desk — and which meanders painfully around insincere considerations of the weather, the children and a recent sporting event. It is embarrassment that causes the chat.

In a democratic egalitarian society, the person who has called the meeting hesitates before too clearly revealing its purpose to the subordinate or supplicant party seated across the biscuits. Just as manners were invented to disguise the brutishness of our appetites, so, too, the chat conceals the shame at the ruthless drives that pulsate beneath the politeness of office civilization. We may be itching to scold, order, bark, hire or fire, but, as if we essentially had nothing on our minds, we remark on the unusual chilliness of the season.

Yet it is a recklessly naive employee who inadvertently continues the chat for even a fraction of a minute longer than the time subtly allotted to it by the most powerful person in the room. We all know the naive, touching Don Quixotes who sally forth on an over-long anecdote just after the chairperson has mumbled the customary "Right, then."

What blatherers we humans are. If only we could communicate with the abbreviated accuracy of algebraic equations, and yet it is cheering that big decisions about the future of pipelines and data storage centers can be reached within a slurry of "To be honests" and "It could be argued thats".

There is often a moment in the meeting when something external happens which brings an element of self-consciousness to proceedings: an ambulance, hammering from upstairs, a fat fly obsessively buzzing around one participant. One can't ignore the issue — though one has to be relatively senior or cocky to draw attention to it: "This fly is clearly interested in tax deferment ..."

What immediate comedy and horror would result if a machine were plugged into our brains, beaming up on a PowerPoint screen all the thoughts we were having as we navigated the agenda; it would show our sexual fantasies, longings and despair while a little more sand trickled from the upper chamber of life's hourglass until we finally reached point 9.8 on the agenda.

Alain de Botton is the author of the book How Proust Can Change Your Life. He lives in London.

'City' ideas versus 'Natural' ideas

Found via the blog Something Changed

"Millions of dollars are spent each year at conferences that people attend to be inspired, to learn the latest memes and speak the latest jargon. They stand around in hotel lobbies, drinking bottled water and swapping business cards. They look at what everyone else is doing, and try to figure out how to apply what they see to their own particular endeavor. These conferences lead to what I call “city ideas”. City ideas have to do with a particular moment in time, a scene, a movement, other people’s work, what critics say, or what’s happening in the zeitgeist. City ideas tend to be slick, sexy, smart, and savvy, like the people who live in cities. City ideas are often incremental improvements—small steps forward, usually in response to what your neighbor is doing or what you just read in the paper. City ideas, like cities, are fashionable. But fashions change quickly, so city ideas live and die on short cycles. The opposite of city ideas are “natural ideas”, which account for the big leaps forward and often appear to come from nowhere. These ideas come from nature, solitude, and meditation. They’re less concerned with how the world is, and more with how the world could and should be."

— Jonathan Harris, “Ideas,” World Building in a Crazy World

Why the Australia Council doesn’t get digital culture...

Just had to share...following on from Marcus Westbury's article in The Age...here's an even better one Marcus pointed the way to. Ben Eltham...you are my new hero.

Was the Australia Concil’s abolition of the New Media Arts Board the single worst decision by an Australian cultural agency of the last decade? It’s certainly beginning to look that way.

Re-rite or how to make the most of your orchestra...

I haven't had a chance to really have a look at the 'Re-rite' program, but it had me at the clever pun, and a post by Stephen Smoliar

re-rite is a new experiment by the British Philharmonia Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. It tries to confront the problem that most concert-goers not only are passive but also lack any sense of how they can actively engage through listening. re-rite tries to solve this problem by turning a recorded performance into an activity space.

Here's a bit more...

re-rite, the Philharmonia Orchestra's Digital Residency, will allow members of the public to conduct, play and step inside the Philharmonia Orchestra with Esa-Pekka Salonen through audio and video projections of musicians performing Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.

Opening to the public at the Bargehouse on London’s South Bank on Tuesday 3 November, the project will show every section of the Orchestra performing The Rite of Spring simultaneously ‘as live’ throughout a four-storey warehouse building. The public will able to sit amongst the horn players, perform in the percussion section and take up the baton and control sections of the Orchestra as they play.

Stephen does a great job of summarising it and linking through to other articles...all I'm going to add is when can we do this with the AOBO?

Image source: http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/re-rite/

National Cultural Policy

Also up today, the Minister for the Arts (and crazy dancing in 1980's video clips) Mr Peter Garrett launched the national cultural policy. The words 'national cultural policy' make me shudder a bit...too much reading of dystopia (or was it anti-utopia?) at uni I suspect (I'm always waiting for big brother to step up and declare what 'culture' is and what is not and then hand me my matching outfit that we all wear...but I digress).

The Australian Government wants your feedback about the future of cultural policy in this nation. We haven't had a real policy since the Keating days...and I'm not sure anyone really gave us the chance to have a say about it before (does this mean they might actually listen?)...so what are you waiting for?

Is this the start of a utopia? Or another publicity stunt? Either way have your say, come on...I need some light entertainment to fill my days.

http://nationalculturalpolicy.com.au/

Revealing the Arts - Day 2

Well the sessions appeared to sizzle today, we at least from the outside. There were a few flames that caught my fancy along the way.

Bag out the major institutions...

There were a few taunts from the twitter stream about 'us' well funded major performing arts companies and 'our' emergence from the dark ages...speaking the truth?

socialinterior I find this event very focused on the major performing arts and the issues they are having catching up on where everyone else is at #rtarts

A wonderful profound comment from one user about the resistance to open up to new media had me hoping to use a new favourite phrase...

artsdigitalera RT @The_Art_Life: New media world collides with old world art politics of entitlement.#RTArts

Ahhhh the 'politics of entitlement' that would make a wonderful PhD chapter I'm sure.

Whose Right is it anyway?

It seems rights management was a huge issue...I won't pull out some of the quotable quotes but again, here is us (them?) squabbling about who owns and who profits when all audiences want to do is engage? Surely everyone can see that?

Lessons Learned?

But the big fun of the day was some of the er, comments that heated up the Twitterverse when the Aussie Cosi presentation began. A summary of the presentation can be found here.

Snarky comments...there were a few...

socialinterior The Australian Opera discovers social networks#rtarts

commuter_dirge @aussiecosi has 88 following, 54 followers, and 91 tweets. Hardly a roaring success...#RTArts

commuter_dirge twitalyzer score for @aussiecosi:http://tr.im/Db2n: "0.3 influence" "0.0% generosity" "0.7% clout" (now I'm just being mean) #RTArts

unsungsongs . @commuter_dirge and 66 facebook firends. That's a #fail surely?#RTArts

commuter_dirge @fireinthesouth well, that's you're brand, just as@AussieCosi is a branded account. It's really not a great case study. #RTArts

unsungsongs I am extremely curious about whether those involved in Aussie Cosi see it as a success and how they judge that?#rtarts

mattriviera @aussiecosi What did you learn thru social media feedback you couldn't have gotten thru a survey? Best use of social media? #RTArts

mattriviera @aussiecosi Wouldn't a good way for fan community to engage with the work be for them to appropriate it? To re-interpret it? #RTArts

shoes_off @elliottbledsoe @commuter_dirge true, but showcasing a more active community than cosi would have displayed the scalability of SM #rtarts

commuter_dirge @bimyou_bimyou I'm not talking monetising twitter in and of itself. but you need to show some proof of it working & a correllation #RTArts

dziga @aussiecosi doesn't seem to have a lot of followers #rtarts

revealingarts Katrina Sedgwick: "Messing", "playing", "getting in there", these are the kind of mind frame to approach digital, not "sell tickets" #RTArts

Snarky yes... but justifiably snarky...I leave that to you dear readers. What struck me about the response to the session and the overall experience of watching this conference unfold online was a clear realisation that you can't wait and then be forced into a situation where you have to play catch up. There is nothing wrong with experimentation...and sometimes, that in itself is the way forward until strategy catches up..."Messing", "playing", "getting in there"... I can't wait.