History Chef

Hardtacks - staple and enemy of civil war soldiers

Recently, our Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition held a contrived, plastic debate on live, Sunday night television. It marked the beginning of another federal election period with all the smear, puffery, deceit and staging one sadly has come to expect. What drew most coverage before the event was the fact that this excruciatingly tedious program was scheduled at the same time as the grand finale of yet another stale reality show, MasterChef. It was feared the masses would rather watch formulaic reality programming with cooking-show flavour than formulaic political debate with, well, no flavour.

It irks me that both television and our political landscape have descended from nutritious staples to artificially-flavoured poison. But that is for another article. What I have stumbled across is a website that ties politics and the culinary arts together in a much more appetising way – History Chef.

This delightful, albeit American, site is worth a meandering visit. Suzy Evans, who got her Ph.D in History, has woven a whimsical collection of food-based anecdotes involving US presidents and historical figures and their dietary preferences. Probably doesn’t sound that interesting at first, but I urge you to take a look. What I loved about this site was the way its stories gave is easily digestible tid bits of daily life. As you read and picture the people and the food they were consuming you really do feel like you have been transported back in time and given a truly authentic taste of life in another era. Some of my favourites include:

• The story of hardtack – biscuits mass produced during the US civil war by factories in the north for soldiers pressing south. By the time these simple biscuits made it to the front lines, they were hard and often full of weevils. Soliders called them “teeth dullers” and “worm castles”. The only ingredients were flour, water, fat and salt.
• Accounts of the fifth president, James Monroe and his wife Elizabeth. Back in the early 1800s they became known for holding rather stuffy formal dinners. One account on this site, written by the author of Last of the Mohicans, Elizabeth would leave the table promptly after dessert, James would allow the guests another glass or two and then usher in coffee, bid people good night, and all were gone by 9pm. Seems funny to think about such quirky behaviour now, long after they have passed. Makes me think about all the quirky things I do and reflect on just how important they really are against the backdrop of eternity, or even the space of 20 years for that matter! But I digress. We also learn that Elizabeth shared her recipe for Apple Charlotte with Martha Washington, who added it to her enormous recipe collection. Again, I am tempted to reflect on the energy we expend stockpiling things. This website can lead to a melancholy state!
• The creation of new laws for inspecting meat processors and food producers were enacted by Theodore Roosevelt at the beginning of the 1900s in response to exposes by so-called “muck rakers”. Muck rakers were writers who illuminated things that were wrong and the term was coined by Roosevelt himself (drawn from the novel, Pilgrim’s Progress). The laws came about because of allegations that “dead rats, putrid meat, and poisoned rat bait were routinely shoveled into sausage-grinding machines, how bribed inspectors turned a blind eye when diseased cows were slaughtered for beef, and how filth and guts were swept off the floor and then packaged as ‘potted ham’.”
• The events of Ulysses S. Grant’s second inaugural ball in 1873. Firstly, the menu included “10,000 fried oysters; 63 boned turkeys; 15 saddles of mutton; 200 dozen quails; 200 hams; 250 chickens; 400 partridges; 25 stuffed boar’s heads; 3,000 head cheese sandwiches; 2,000 ham sandwiches; 8,000 pickled oysters and 2,000 pounds of lobster.” But secondly, what makes this story so interesting is that the weather turned against the president. It was freezing, “and the temporary ballroom had no heat. Guests danced in their hats and overcoats, the food was cold, they ran out of coffee, and, worst of all, most of the decorative caged canaries (which were supposed to be sweetly singing) froze.

So please explore this wonderful site, research an Australian version if it takes your fancy, but be warned that you might get lost for hours reading about American history through its food.

Release the Murray Darling Report Now

Well, I discovered my inner-hippie and signed a petition. I am not confident it will achieve its goal but I do believe it was worth spending five minutes nailing my colours to the mast and demanding that the Murray Darling Basin Authority release its guide to the basin now – not shelve it until after the election. I did it because we are robbing ourselves of a timely chance to prolong our livelihoods if we don’t get this out in the open and force politicians to state on the record their responses to suggestions in the guide.

However, I lament that our cynical political party hacks have miraculously achieved a bipartisan position and decided that the last thing we want in this election is an actual life-or-death issue to be discussed. The stage-managed charade offering us a choice between Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum is all we will get because it is all our media really wants: simple, Punch and Judy stories for a manageable, compartmentalised roll out of election period twaddle. I know this. I have worked there before. Hideously unrealistic deadlines and bloated appetites for news when there is none has led to state of affairs.

And that is why I like the approach being taken by Come On. Come On describes itself as “an independent, grass-roots organisation that provides Australians a way to be heard on important public issues and hold politicians to account … ComeOn! does not support any particular party. We stand up for policies and initiatives that reward hard working Australians, not penalises them, encourages families to provide a better life for the next Generation and helps take Australia forward as a united, fair community with a strong and prosperous future.”

As I understand it, we are welcome to choose the issues we support within the Come On world. This is good because the Anti-Mining Tax campaign would not have my support. However, I have happily submitted my signature to the Murray Darling cause and hope that it goes a small way towards turning the tide.

Have a look at the petition (online as of August 2010) at the Come On website.

Oh Life

Is your life whizzing by too quickly? One way to slow it down and chew it more is to keep a diary or journal. But who has the time? And how do you remember to write each day?

Along comes Oh Life. This new web service is as simple as simple can be.

Basically, it is a free, online diary service. It sends you an email every day at 8pm, asking you how you day has been and when you type a reply, it becomes your diary entry and is securely stored in your private online journal.

You can download your writings as text. You also get nostalgic quotes sent back to you in your nightly email, as a nice bit of reminiscence-fodder, chosen at random from your writings.

What I like about this is that it is simple and potentially very effective. I am also sure that many life coaches and therapists will rejoice in anything that helps people cultivate deeper attention on their daily actions because if we don’t there is little difference between us and mice in treadmills.

Answer the question, how did your day go?, at Oh Life. (Thanks Adrian).

Ozzy Jazz

I love this site. If you have a generous broadband connection and enjoy jazz, this site is a gem. Ozzy Jazz is a free portal for recordings of jazz performances in clubs and pubs around Adelaide and beyond.

This is so “grass roots” and edgy, it makes you feel like you are there. For example, I played Take 5 At The Sussex while doing some bookwork recently and it was sublime hearing good jazz, smiling at familiar accents, and being able to picture the venue because it is a local pub.

As part of mentioning this site, I want to draw your attention to its call for content. It says: “We want your live jazz recordings. Are you a jazz musician? Do you run a jazz venue? We’re keen to feature interesting live jazz recorded in interesting live venues around the world. If you’d like to know more email bob@ozzyjazz.com”. Go on.

Tap into Ozzy Jazz and get hip at home!

PS If any jazz musos in Adelaide could lend me a brass instrument for a photo shoot. I would be much obliged. It would not be played, just shot. It is part of some website renovations planned for this site. Mum’s the word. Email sd@stevedavis.com.au.

Pop Up Book

Voyage to the heart of matter - the big bang as pop up art

I think I have discovered the secret ingredient that will help modernise children’s  books and it comes from an unusual pop up book that has been produced in Switzerland.

The book is a pop up book that charts the Atlas Experiment, which is  described by the official website as “a particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider [and it will] search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS will learn about the basic forces that have shaped our Universe since the beginning of time and that will determine its fate.”

You will recall the talk of the end of the world when they first started running their machine last year.

Anyway, just how a group of boffins musters up enough arts-based creativity to come up with the novelty of a pop up book to explain very advanced science and experimentation is no mean feat in itself. In fact, it is so impressive it makes me wonder whether they have tapped some secret source of knowledge already!

What piqued my interest in relation to children’s books is the fact that a part of the pop up book actually covers the big bang. That’s right, the big bang, the beginning of life as we know it, all reduced down to coloured bits of card that pop up.

So here is a note for Mem Fox and all the other children’s book authors, instead of starting your stories with “once upon a time”, why not include a big bang pop up and have your characters emanate from there?

In other parts of the book, you can pull a tab to make particles collide and then you can build your own Atlas Experiment thanks to plenty of tabs and flaps.

This might not quite replace the lego set, but it has potential to excite the imagination.

Click here to pop up your daily fix of physics.

Fresh citrus from SA

I was running some small business marketing workshops in Loxton, South Australia, recently, and met a couple of fellas, Michael and Tim, who were talking about their first tentative steps into selling their fruit online. What I liked about their story was that they were seeing how badly growers get treated by the big supermarkets AND seeing how poor the fruit was that people get access to through these channels, that they decided to take the future into their own hands and offer online citrus sales.

What sums up their offering most is the group of four claims they make on their website, namely:

• their fruit is naturally coloured not gassed to enhance colour – and I thought the gassing was only done to ripen fruit
• hand picked rather than machine graded which can damage the fruit – who would have guessed?
• delivered straight to you and not stored for extensive periods – it is quite surprising to hear how long fruit can be stored (and yet we still imagine raw fruit and vegetables to be FRESH fruit and vegetables when we pop into the supermarket
• chemical free, which means no wax or fungicide treatment – this did unnerve me a little but I saw that in their boxes they recommend you keep your fruit in a very cool place or a fridge so it is not that hard to keep tabs on mould it seems.

One other thing that made me realise just how disconnected we are from the land when we live in our urban hideaways is that the note they put in their boxes of fruit says if you see one go bad or mouldy, just pick it out and throw it away quickly. Whereas, I would just imagine that “one bad, all bad” was the rule of thumb.

So if you want to help some fellow South Australians revive the pulse of life up there in the Riverland, you could do little better than to take a look at their site and explore whether getting fresh citrus direct is for you.

Tables galore

Have you ever used a table to organise your thoughts or an event? If so, a simple site has been created that enables you to create a table online, for the world to see, without signing in or identifying yourself. The owners of the site hope we use these free tables to organise our lives – business, personal and social. To this end, they have a few templates you can choose from for party planning, creation of to do lists, and dividing up the tasks for a “pot luck” (which takes some of the “pot luck” out of it, doesn’t it?).

Anyway, what makes this different from Google Docs and other free, online document creators, is that there is no identification and built in options for sharing your table among the people who need to know what’s going on via all the usual social channels.

If you want to play with one, I have created one on the things Sean Perry does during his show. Feel free to follow the link from our show notes tonight and add more of Sean’s quirks to the list. You can find the table here.

Morph Thing

The last site tonight is something light for the school holidays. It allows you to morph two faces into one. Two of the most popular uses of the site are morphing classic actresses together and the other is to morph your baby with your photo to see what they will grow up like.

As I said, this is some fun, so start morphing: you with family members, you with celebrities, family members with celebrities, the possibilities are infinite!

PS Right, you will find Michael Jackson and Britney Spears as one and, it actually produces an intriguing result. If only they had bonded in real life!!

carsales.com.au’s privacy policy

Privacy and Facebook has been in the news a lot (possibly because news corp owns MySpace, or is that being too cynical?) but I am concerned about privacy in relation to popular classified sites such as carsales.com.au. Here is why.

Yesterday I got an email from City Holden, completely out of the blue. This spam got up my nose more than usual for a few reasons:

• Firstly, I am NOT in the market for a car.
• Secondly, it was sent with a high priority notifier, which means it demanded attention that quite simply was not warranted. This is the equivalent of the little boy calling wolf.
• Thirdly, it was sent with an attachment, which is poor form for any mass mailing, let alone UNSOLICITED mailings. Adding salt to the wound, the email contained a message saying City Holden would not be responsible if the attachment, which I never asked for, contained a virus or damaged my computer.

What wonderfully warm communication, I think not. But this gets better. After emailing back to City Holden and asking to be removed, I was informed that it was sent via the carsales.com.au marketing database and the only way I could stop City Holden contacting me was for ME to contact carsales.com.au and remove myself from their mailing list. I queried this further and City Holden sent me more details and a link to the carsales.com.au privacy policy which does explain in a long, drawn-out page that indeed, if you do anything on the site they will both safeguard your privacy which is important to them but then either directly or through murky related bodies spam you for life unless YOU ask to be removed. And even then, it is not clear whether they wipe your details or just stop mailing you (and allowing third parties to do so). Does this sound like a flawed system to you?

Here is the great problem. Yes, carsales.com.au does give you a choice to OPT IN to their own newsletter when you submit an enquiry, but there is absolutely NOTHING on the enquiry form that says please allow the company I am contacting to send me newsletters and unwanted emails forever.

It is actually a convenient arrangement. I never asked for the carsales newsletter. But the car dealers I contacted for more information have somehow, through their relationship with carsales, been able to send me nuisance email, long after I had left the car market. Nobody wins from this – not carsales with falsely-bloated database, not the car dealer who now has their reputation reduced to that of a spam shop, and not me who must now go back to carsales and arrange removal from a list I NEVER signed up for KNOWINGLY. Even the wording of their privacy page, to me, seems ambiguous.

I agree that there is some mutual benefit in getting access to extra marketing during the purchase phase, but how long does that last? A month? There should be an agressive sunset clause to cleanse our details from the carsales.com.au system in a given number of weeks. To hold our details and message us after that is surely disingenuous. In my opinion, emails sent become SPAM if they are irrelevant to the receiver. That must be the fundamental test, with permission being the other. As I lecture in my workshops and to clients, TRICKING people into your database is a cheap, shoddy approach to marketing, one that should have ceased and/or been outlawed years ago. And it DOES NOT count that there is a long privacy policy explaining all this. A “marketing-based” or “customer-centric” business would not need long and wordy privacy policies.

Here is my suggestion to carsales.com.au. You have a service you should be proud of. You bring buyers and sellers together. It is an absolute blight on your name and reputation when you don’t take proactive measures to be reasonable with users’ personal data. So:

• firstly, make a full range of opt out choices available when a visitor first comes to your site (or be up front and not only have the OPT IN for carsales newsletter but also an OPT IN so that people can choose to allow individual dealers to spam them for the rest of their lives, that is only fair)
• secondly, use sunset clauses with permissions granted so that the user does not have to come back to your site to OPT OUT later. If you like, send an email at that point saying “Thank you for using carsales.com.au. We have taken the liberty of removing you from our mailing list at this time because you would likely have found your car by now. If you do wish to stay on our mailing list, please just reply to this email with the word “continue” (or some similar device)
• thirdly, let individual car dealers remove users from your system because right now, your system has led me to associate City Holden with Spam, all because they allegedly cannot stop themselves from emailing me through your system
• finally, you can actually win some good press and goodwill by claiming this new approach to fair and decent database marketing as your own idea and launch a new era to help clean up the stereotypically shady car/used car sector, and get mentioned in my marketing case studies and those developed by others for years to come. Are you game?

You can read the policy for yourself here.

Extreme ironing

OneInchPunch.net Extreme Ironing picture

Although this sport has been around since 1997, I have heard a little more chatter about it in my circles recently and have been pressed into covering it.

Extreme ironing is an extreme sport in which participants take an ironing board, iron and clothes to somewhere extreme and do their ironing.

There is not that much more to say about it other than to wonder whether this was created by frustrated parents trying to encourage teenage boys to take an interest in one of humankind’s most mundane chores. (In fact, it was created by someone bored with ironing inside on a nice day and deciding to go outdoors).

In essence, the best way to succeed in extreme ironing are to:

• use a battery-powered iron
• go in pairs at least
• be fearless

Some more recent achievements have been:

• Henry Cookson ironing the Antarctic Pole of Inaccessibility
• Extreme ironing taking place under water – the record is 86 people ironing underwater at one time
• And a WII game is slated to include extreme ironing

Here is a video of the action.

You can find out more at Extreme Ironing headquarters.

Rig the charts unofficially

Chartfixer is no more

From what I hear, until now, only the big record companies could rig charts through smarmy PR people schmoozing with music directors and certain product dumping and buybacks to trigger sales figures. But now, a site called Chartfixer is on the scene to give all artists, even those not signed up with the big labels, a chance to break into the ARIA charts. Well, I should say “was” on the scene because it closed last Tuesday, June 8, 2010.

Here is how it worked. You pay Chartfixer a fee, say $6,000 and they arrange for members to buy 1,000 downloads which is apparently enough to get into the Top 80. For $30,000 they arrange enough sales to get into the Top 20. So the artist pays Chartfixer and Chartfixer pays their “army of downloaders” to legally pay for and download X number of copies of your song, getting paid as they go.

ARIA was a little upset and was doing all it could to stop the site while Chartfixer was busy looking for new stars to give birth too and new ways to pay its army of downloaders.

We’ve always known fame comes at a price, and thanks to Chartfixer we at least knew the exact price for a little while!

RIP Chartfixer. Read a story about it here.

Nutshell Mail

I have begun using a service called Nutshell Mail which is proving to be quite handy for keeping my social web activities nicely contained.

It works by summarising all your output and input via social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, into an email. You can elect for this free summary email to be sent throughout the day. I have mine at 8am, noon, and 8pm.

This  digest means you can check your social presence in the same way you check your email, helping to streamline your involvement.

What is more, you can react to comments all from within that email, making it easier still.

The best thing is that it is free.

The weakest part is that it is clumsy to read on my Blackberry due to formatting issues, but nice in my Outlook.

Try Nutshell Mail yourself.

Here is the link to Crowdsourcing our daughter’s name.

Can you improve your conversation skills? Certainly.

The Positivity Blog is quite a gold mine of timeless articles focussed on helping you tweak important areas of your life. The blog post I have focussed on for this show is one on common conversation mistakes.

It is a worthy read and I encourage you to look at it. Therefore, all I will do for this report is share some choice food for thought.

1 – Not listening. This is the most obvious conversation mistake and the post quotes Ernest Hemingway who once said: “I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.” The way to deal with this mistake is to check your ego at the door and actually not planning what you will say next but instead doing your utmost to be present and to get inside the story the other person is sharing.

2 – Asking too many questions. This is not as obvious but the point is that asking too many questions can feel like an interrogation. So their solution is to mix questions with statements. This means you actually invest in the conversation while keeping it going.

3 – Tightening up. One tip here is to never leave home without reading the paper or tuning in to the popular tv shows. I guess this is sound advice but it feels a little contrived if you are only doing it for conversation fodder. There must be a happy balance here somewhere. The other solution is to “assume rapport”. Just treat a stranger like a friend and assume you have spoken easily many times before – it is a neat trick if not overdone.

6 – Having to be right. I have a friend who is actually a counsellor but is also cursed with needing to be right every time on every single point. This article is spot on when it says “No one will be that impressed if you “win” every conversation. Instead just sit back, relax and help keep the good feelings going”. This is good advice because conversation is not really about right and wrong, it is most often about relationship building.

They are just some of the highlights. Read the full article on conversation mistakes and how to solve them for more details and some helpful examples. Perhaps the last word goes to Dale Carnegie’s quote in the article: “You can make more friends in two months by becoming really interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Which is just another way of saying that the way to make a friend is to be one.”

100 ways to spend quality time with your kids

Here is a South Australian initiative that it is hard not to like. The Uniting Church in SA has produced a simple resource called 100 ways to spend quality time with your kids. I think there would be very few people on this planet who would not agree that more quality time invested in our children today plants the seeds for a happier, healthier future for them and us. Of course, there would be very few among us who actually DO spend that quality time with our children.

And that is why I like this list so much. It is a thought-starter of free or very low cost ideas that children and parents can do together. Here are some highlights:

4. Cook a pizza – For a quick and fun meal together – make a pizza. Buy a base and choose your toppings or go to recipepizza.com for other ideas.

19. Spend time with a grandparent – Find something they enjoy doing and do it altogether – chess, scrabble, fishing, gardening, anything.

42. Visit a garage sale – Garage sales are a cheap and easy way to find new toys for your children and perhaps something for yourself. Why not make it a regular weekend outing?

73. Exercise together – Little kids may like something simple like a skipping rope or ball games like tunnel ball. Older kids might enjoy going to the gym or a dance class together.

92. Make a gift – Make a gift for an elderly neighbour or relative. Gifts like decorated candles or photo frames are a good idea

The best thing about this is that it gets your creative juices flowing. I am thinking that because Alexandra loves Thomas the Tank engine, one simple afternoon outing might be grabbing some cheap train tickets and going for a ride on a real train for an hour or so. What is mundane to us adults needs to be viewed through the lens of newness, bigness and wonder of little children. The world is a very different place from that perspective.

What will you do? Work your way through the list of activities here.

Secret to old age nothing to do with lifestyle

This is from an Adelaide blog by the exercise physiologists at iNform Health and Fitness in Adelaide. Yes, this is where I am attempting to get my body back into shape but the mention on today’s show is purely because this blog post just grabbed me by both ears and forced my face into the computer screen.

To be fair, this is a rant but it is a pious rant.

Max Martin, who was the author of this blog was very angry with a story in The Advertiser on May 20 because the story about the Methuselah Gene led on page three with a line stating that “the secret to old age could have nothing to do with lifestyle and everything to do with genes.”

The story in question celebrates a woman turning 101 who has this gene present (named after the oldest living person in the Bible who lived to be 969 years old – but that is a story for another day).

Max’s main axe to grind is that the story is at best a lazy beat up and at worst a miserable case of dangerously inaccurate and misleading reportage.

Here is the crux of the story. The Methuselah Gene is found in 10 per cent of young people but 30 per cent of centenarians. So, of course, this Rhodes Scholar journalism therefore infers that living to 100 comes down to whether or not you have this gene. But, as any primary school student would know, that leaves seven out of every ten centenarians reaching 100 without this gene present. End result – this is a non-story. The journalist might well have said 30 per cent of centenarians are blonde so therefore you will only make 100 if you are blonde. What pure nonsense.

My angst over this story is about the bargain basement journalism but Max’s angst is about how many South Australians saw this on page three and just let themselves off the hook for trying to incorporate more movement into their day, better food, or less harmful substances like tobacco. This is actually one of those rare occasions when you might wish for it to be Old Testament times so that this harmful journalism could be punished in a very severe way. The crime being the sacrifice of the public good in the name of a cheap, sleazy headline. I know that media outlets are first and foremost businesses created to make a profit but their unique role in society should hold them accountable when they peddle such devolutionary twaddle!

You can read Max’s blog post here but I will leave you with a choice selection: Why is it that the highest concentration of centenarians occurs in non-developed Western countries/regions? Could it also be that Methuselah’s contemporaries (and she would have had a few!) got to live as long as they did because they weren’t exposed to the stresses of modern western environments, or the processed foods, or the degrees of sedentary behaviour our communities experience? Could it be that perhaps their lifestyle had something to do with it? Have we wondered why most (if not all) centenarians are thin? Maybe its because their overweight counterparts don’t get to live that long?? Or wait, maybe its just genetics that keep them thin!!” Bravo!

The 19 most hilariously failed attempts at sexy album covers

Music to massage your mate by

There is not much to say about this, other than to share the link and let you laugh out loud.

But as a tempter, here are some of the album titles (let your imagination do the rest):

• Music to Massage Your Mate By (just creepy)
• John Travolta – Can’t Let You Go (this is a dopey, Mills and Boon cover)
• Prince – Lovesexy (he looks more womanly nude than when wearing lace)
• Orleans – Waking and dreaming (five guys all nude huddling in close)
• Cher – Take me home (she is in golden, metallic lingerie with moose horns – dangerous from every angle)
• Ted Nugent – Love grenade (this is the most disturbing album cover I have ever seen)

There you are, enjoy the rest at the full list on cracked.com.

Privacy on social networks

Stories abound discussing the pros and cons of sharing information about yourself on the various social networks, specifically, Facebook.

On one hand, I have heard people argue that no matter what privacy protection is in place, if you want to keep things private, just don’t put them online. While others are more optimistic arguing that there is enough legal protection around to enable us to trust companies to live up to their privacy policies.

While my position lies somewhere in the middle, the Australian government has produced some online resources to give you a balanced overview. Questions include:

• Are there any privacy risks associated with using social networking sites?
• Do I have rights under the Privacy Act when I use social networking sites?
• What can I do to protect my privacy when using social networking sites?
• What can I do if someone posts information about me on a social networking site that I want removed?

I think one of the helpful summaries on this site, are these points made in the context of the question, are there privacy risks:

• Don’t be under any illusions – it’s not just your close friends listening in!
• Are you sure you want that information to be public?
• Remember that activities online affect your life offline
• Protected your own privacy? …what about your friends?
• Watch out for identity theft

From our point of view, in Australia, if the social networking site is based in another country, such as the USA, then you may not have privacy rights under Australian law when you use the site. If the site is based in Australia, and it’s not a small business (a small business is an organisation with an annual turnover of $3 million or less) then the Privacy Act may apply. But the Privacy Act doesn’t cover individuals acting in a personal capacity. So, individuals posting information on social networking sites would usually be exempt from the coverage of the Privacy Act (though their actions may be covered by other laws).

One final point is that if the information on your MySpace or Facebook page is publicly available, then anyone can look at it, including people in organisations.  This means potential employers could look at your MySpace or Facebook page and perhaps base their decisions on what they see there. But, if an organisation collects and stores information from your page to use for something, and that organisation is covered by the Privacy Act, then it must comply with the National Privacy Principles.

Find out more on the government’s privacy pages.

Social Media as a police tool

Inspector Clousseau - would he now use Facebook?

This article from the Fairfield Citizen makes a nice segue from the previous site because it highlights how the “lack” of privacy, or rather the public nature of social networking sites can actually benefit society.

The article says that police in parts of the US now hit their computers rather than the beat when an investigation starts. Although they still need to participate in old-fashioned policing and investigation, they look for clues on social media sites such as:

• conduct background searches on suspects
• verify alibis
• obtain location information
• disseminate or verify information with the public

The article refers to a case in Brooklyn, NY, where a man charged with a robbery was able to show his twitter activity which suggested he was making pancakes at the time of the robbery, providing him with an alibi.

The article does highlight the obvious risk: once people cotton on to this they can manufacture social networking update to cover their tracks.

So what do we learn from this? Tweet frequently and detail your movements to an acutely mundane level of detail because you never know when that cover may come in handy!

Read the article at the Fairfield Citizen.

Fake AP Style Book

This is one of the funniest but most insightful Twitter accounts I have ever found. It is compiled by a coalition of various journalists, editors and designers in the US and it is spot on when it critiques mass media.

The AP Style Book is a reference book written by The Associated Priss as a guideline for their journalists and editors on grammar and style choices.

The “fake” style book is being written one tweet at a time and I just need to share some with you to give you a taste – the first one relates directly to our topics discussed thus far:

• It is no longer necessary to write new stories about Facebook privacy issues; just change the dates.
• balance – Allowing some dimwit to yap very briefly about his incorrect position.
• “Pop Tarts” is a trademark and should not be used to describe generic products such as Taylor Swift or Miley Cyrus.
• All mentions of David Schwimmer should include a reference to FRIENDS because, really, what else is there?
• infrastructure – To be used for to public works projects and government property if no one knows what they’re talking about.
• When covering comic book conventions, be sure to walk past 400 normal people to interview the fat guy dressed like Aquaman.
• When reporting on broken box office records, pretend that ticket prices have remained unchanged since 1943.

Enjoy more by reading their Twitter timeline.

Video dominoes

Tea Tree Gully Library has officially said goodbye to VHS videos and to celebrate staff came in one weekend and put what looked like at least 1,000 videos through a domino toppling track.

Staff filmed the giant domino train which spread throughout the library space as a fitting homage to their service – which is now being prpvided by DVDs.

It is not the most polished domino train you will ever see but is novel Watch for some of the edits where the librarians didn’t quite get the physics right and had to restart the toppling manually. That said, there are some neat innoivations such as the jumping videos and a few branch lines.

As they say,” May the videos now rest in peace. Long live the VHS!”

See the video on YouTube here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2Qup0kA6kw&feature=autof, or just watch below.

Fairtrade fortnight

Fair Trade Fortnight launched this weekend. The movement has been going many years now and the dividends are starting to come through.

As some of you might know, I have a coffee label, Baristador Coffee, and we launched a Fairtrade espresso blend this weekend and a special deal to help coffee lovers share Fair Trade coffee with their friends.

I have also put together a small page about Fair Trade Fortnight which contains the official video with its call to Make a Swap this year – from non-fair-trade coffee, chocolate, cotton, bananas, etc, to fair trade alternatives. See the video below:

This has come about because most of us in the West do pretty well while the people who produce our luxury commodities are often just in survival mode. In fact, 2 billion people on this planet survive on less than 2 dollars a day.

Fair Trade is about paying a fair price for goods to ensure labour is safe, producers are sustainable, and producing communities survive – that is in everyone’s interest!!

Find out more at www.baristador.com/fair-trade-fortnight-2010.

And if I can be cheeky just once, here is the link to my Fairtrade Espresso Blend.

Naomi Simson

Saw a new program on Fox News this week called The Nation and was mightily impressed by one of the speakers, the owner of Red Balloon Day, Naomi Simson.

Now I must have been living on another planet because it says on her bio that she is a speaker of some renown but had escaped my radar until now.

What I loved most, during a debate on the Henry Tax Reform, she pulled some ripper observations out of the bag that made her panel of stale old males look uninspiring and beholden to well worn, go-nowhere arguments and positions. I loved her rally against payroll tax which, she revealed, was a punitive tax brought in during a war, WW2 from memory, to dissuade employers from hiring people or paying them to much to bolster our stocks of service men and women to go to the front!

Anyway, I have now discovered her blog and one of the most recent entries at the time of writing is about what a mother crossing against the lights was teaching her toddler. She argues that this toddler now knows that it is okay to flout authority and the parent will have no right to complain when their child is a teenager in trouble with the law. What do you think?

Read Naomi’s interesting blog here.

Seven lessons from Iceland’s volcano

Eric Weiner is a writer/blogger who has shared an interesting reflection on what the shutdown of the airline industry has taught us.

There are seven lessons in all but a couple are particularly worth discussing.

One is that we are really living in a global village which isn’t perfect. In this point he is arguing that while we benefit from our shrunken, interconnected world, we pay the price when one part of it goes down, in this case, European air space. Hence, volcanic ash in Iceland led to no available hotel rooms in LA or Hong Kong!

The other observation of note is mother nature still gets the last word. In a very minor way, this was brought home to me during our mini Adelaide earthquake a few weeks ago. There I was, sitting snugly in my lounge at 11.30 on a Friday night, and next thing my house rocked as if a train just rocked into it to couple up. I then thought to myself, despite all the foundations and insurance we wrap around ourselves, nature still has cards up its sleeves.

And a bonus third lesson was purely and simply the miracle of air transport. Big, steel birds weighing hundreds of tonnes hoist themselves into the air and arrive on time in a distant destination with unheard of frequency and accuracy. Hats off to humankind!

Read the seven lessons on Eric’s post.

Earth from Mars

Earth from Mars

The last site tonight is actually a sight! Just a simple image of Earth as a star in the night sky from Mars. And it’s old – goes back to 2004 and was taken by the Mars Rover.

In light of the last site and its reference to Mother Nature having the last say, it follows that seeing ourselves in a cosmic context helps put things into perspective. That’s it, just a simple image to meditate on.

How often have you looked at Venus or Mars in the night sky, or stars for that matter, and thought nothing of them. Here, a Martian could easily look at us with the same nonchalance.

See the picture on the Boing Boing website.

Real

It is really easy to bash out an angry email or shoot off a vitriolic tweet and that is why this one, simple blog post deserves a mention tonight. It is simply called “a real person, a lot like you” by Derek Sivers.

This has haunted me all week because I did send off a frustrated tweet this week due to an oversight in the new traffic light signals along the Port Road tram extension. Whereas once, the peak hour traffic turning right into Phillips Street at the Southwark Hotel corner, was able to amble across after the red turning arrow turned off, now the red arrow stays on so that ghostly, absent trams can pass through the intersection, causing congestion amid citybound traffic. But I digress.

This post by Sivers captures the essence of being human – when we bash out an email or letter, we do not deeply comprehend that another living soul will actually read it. We think we are raging against a machine and that some automaton without feelings will simply file it. But often, that is not the case. Some poor soul has to absorb our body blow and deal with the emotional load that we just dumped in their lap. You must read the post to read the lead story that captures this truth. In short, it involves a woman running a solo businesss getting a blisteringly angry, insulting and threatening letter from a client. Unfortunately, she took it personally, fell into depression, and when she gathered the strength to make peace with this client, the client was puzzled, vaguely remembering the piece she had written to let off steam.

Not only is this an important and refreshing story in the blogosphere, it is also the tip of the iceberg of Sivers’ own website which contains a number of gems, laced with that centred, lightly-held assurance in the Zen tradition. I especially want to draw the fable called “horses” to your attention. If you find yourself frequently swung from highs to lows in life, this story will bring a gentle perspective back for you. And the icing on the cake? SIvers has written and recorded a song based on the fable and you can listen to it on the same age as the story itself.

Looking for some inspiration? Derek Sivers has created a small, online oasis of writings and material to help us all keep it real.

Reputations

This link is about reputations and how to protect them. In many ways, this should be the most unnecessary link I have ever shared but people keep putting information online that is too personal and too loaded with future heartbreak to let this video slip by.

If ever you have been tempted to post a shot of your cleavage or drunkenness or worse, the message is to think again. People seem to forget that once an image is uploaded online and archived by a search engine, it is as good as being permanently entered into the public library!

It is this short-sightedness that the people at Common Craft have responded to with this simple, two and a half minute video on the basic premise of keeping your online reputation clean – think before posting. It outlines that when you share personal info, even among friends, you are trusting them with your current and future reputation. The major point is that something funny now might look dangerously or embarrassingly out of place 5, 10, or 20  years down the track.

Might be useful to share this Common Craft video with young people you know to educate them now so they form wise sharing habits.

The shape of a mother

Funny how some sites get shared. One of my sisters suggested over Facebook that people google for “the shape of a mother” so curiosity got the better of me and I found this intriguing treasure trove of personal milestones.

The idea behind the site is that dominant image of females we see in society is those air-brushed super models. There has been a revival in seeking more natural images in recent years, led, perhaps, by the Dove campaign but this website is very grassroots and focussed primarily on women’s bodies AFTER they have carried out or attempted to carry their biological purpose of creating and nurturing new life.

Basically, mums anywhere can join and upload photos or stories about their bodies post-birth, or even during pregnancy.

I should warn you though that this is not a timid, delightful or dainty website. This contains nudity and very honest stories (some of which are not for the squeamish). But that is the point. The whole birth process is gritty and disruptive and this site is one of the clearest views of this aspect of life that we get access to. Here is a typical quote, this one from the “belly” section:

I love this website! I have spent three months looking at pictures posted here; some bellies are far better than mine, others far worse than mine. What I have not been able to find, however, is a belly on par with mine. Does anyone else have this issue with their belly? I have seen stretch marks, rolls, and sagging skin, but not like mine! I am a bit envious that everyone else on this website has a visible belly button. Perhaps not the one they are familiar with, but it is there!

I have never been worried about the way I look before; I was always the funny girl that was just one of the guys. But I can safely say that I had a pretty rockin’ body! Now even that one thing I could be proud of is gone. Dust in the wind, baby. I guess I didn’t know what I had till it was gone!

So visit to discover the shape of a mother.

Add letters

Bart Simpson says 'listen to Steve Davis'

What do Bart Simpson and Steve Davis have in common? Nothing, until Add Letters came along. This is one of those quick, quirky sites that does something relatively simple and fleetingly amusing.

In essence, it takes whatever short line of text you want and recreates it on Bart’s blackboard.

But that’s not all – there are other quirky generators too, such as generators for:

• Street signs
• Highway signs
• Restaurant signs
• Theatre signs
• Hiking trail signs
• Even one for Disneyland.

The thing I like most about this site is you can save the image to your computer for use on invitations, websites, etc. All from adding letters.

Topsy

A new search engine has been unveiled that really espouses the general push towards “real time” search (I call it Twitter Fever) which has gripped Google and the other search engines. You see, since Twitter broke through to the mainstream, Facebook and Google and Yahoo have all wanted a piece of the “real time web”. But while those big three all scramble to match the transience of Twitter’s live stream, developers at Topsy have been honing their search engine to bring search results from Twitter, weighted by how fresh each Tweet is, how many times it has been reTweeted by other users, and the influential status of the person Tweeting the message in the first place.

At first glance, Topsy looks quite interesting as quirky glance into the mind of the geek-chattering class. It has its mixture of the completely inane, air-headed dribble from the twitterati (celebs who spew nonsense to satiate their fawning followers) and the intriguing mix of insights and links to what’s new in the world (especially the world of technology).For this latter seam of internet nuggets, Topsy is well worth including in your mix of search engines. Furthermore, there is also the quaint mix of novel things, for example, in running a search on “easter” on Saturday night, I got a link to the Muppet Easter clip (embedded on this page). I would never have known this clip existed (and I am not sure my life would have been impoverished had I missed it) were it not for Topsy. What I like about this service, and about Twitter, is this very serendipity – much like when you turn a page in a newspaper or listen in to talkback radio – you never know what you might learn next.

Some of the other discoveries on a simple easter search were:

• A collection of Easter wallpapers
• A piece on what the Easter Bunny has to do with Easter
• Colourful Easter Egg patterns
• And someone using Easter to rally people to buy Charity Water

Do a search yourself and mine the popular collective mind for a Topsy take on search!

Creepy Bunny

Happy Easter my lovlies

For Easter, here is a collection of the 65 creepiest, sketchiest, Easter Bunny pictures you are ever likely to see.

What fascinates me most about this collection is the look of sheer terror on the faces of some of the children sitting on or near the Easter Bunny. There just seems to be something about EB that seems more sinister than Santa, for example. Now, I know some kids get spooked by Santa too, but EB seems to have a worse track record. Even Saturday in a hardware store I saw a number of chlldren freak out when they saw EB wandering around the shop giving out eggs.

Other pics of interest are:

• A beaver wearing Easter Bunny ears – just weird
• Strange, zombie-looking faces on most of the EB costumes
• One has such large black holes for eyes it looks distinctly demonic (pictured)
• And my favourite has long eyelashes – I call that one Drag Bunny

So grab a drink and scroll through the pics, I assure you, you will feel like you have taken LSD by the time you make it to picture number 65 of these strange Easter Bunnies.

Butch Bakery

In New York, there is now a bakery that deals in manly, men-like, bakers business or, to be more precise, they make cupcakes with attitude.

And the catalyst for this venture was the owner seething after reading in a magazine article that cupcakes were a combination of everything “pink, sweet, cute, and magical”.

It seems like a fairly novel mission in life, to restore masculine balance to that delightful and dainty of baked goods, but Butch Bakery certainly goes full throttle.

Instead of just using blue icing instead of pink, and replacing pictures of flowers in the icing with golf clubs, this bakery mixes things up, a lot! For example:

• The rum and coke – The pause that refreshes – this rum-soaked madagascar vanilla cake with cola bavarian cream filling is a knockout.
• The home run – This peanut butter cake with banana bavarian cream & crumbled bacon is more fun than getting to third base.
• The beer run – Butch meets buttercream in our chocolate beer cake with beer-infused buttercream topped with crushed pretzels.

I must say that none, other than their chocolate version, do anything for me – I draw the line with bacon staying in the kitchen for breakfast, not adoring my occasional sweet treat. But where there’s testosterone there’s a way and Butch Bakery looks set to be the dessert of choice for bachelor parties for years to come.

Fake store fronts

Anyone for a deli?

Most of us are relieved the so-called Global Financial Crisis is over, or waning, but it has left some empty spaces in the main streets of towns and cities everywhere. In England, one local council has come up with a novel solution to keep their district’s high streets from becoming ghost towns – they are installing fake shop fronts.

This story from Web Urbanist is thought provoking on a number of levels. Firstly, is this, as the story headline suggests, advertising misinformation? The answer must be no because the installations clearly promote possibilities rather than deceive, at least after first glance. For example, one shop has a potential layout for an upmarket deli with “Delicatessen?” emblazoned across its shopfront – not hard to understand.

The article explains the rationale:

The picture helps passers-by to imagine what the shop might look like if it actually were a delicatessen. The council hopes this bit of imagination-boost will help potential tenants to envision the possibilities of the space. It’s a powerful image that would certainly inspire business owners more than an empty, desolate retail space ever could. The council plans to put up more fake shopfronts to support commercial areas in several towns. At around £1500 per shop, it’s a quick, inexpensive and completely reversible way to spruce up a deserted-looking shopping center.

What do you think of the idea? Is this similar to the dappled colour seats in sports stadiums so that even when crowds are small, telecasts still give the impression that a large crowd has turned out?

You can find out more by reading the Web Urbanist article.