Wireless broadband is a joke

Despite being the fastest growing internet access technology according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), I reckon mobile wireless broadband is a joke.

You can see here the meagre three kilobytes per second my service was providing this morning for around four hours. I don't think it's fair to call anything less than 100kb/sec broadband, a figure I've only seen my service with Vodafone achieve at odd hours in the early morning.

I'd try Telstra but they're too expensive.

Sharkboy

Occy seems to be getting a second set of teeth popping up behind his baby teeth.

I imagine this could be his mutant superpower, shark-like rows of teeth. He'll be known in the X-Men for his dazzling and potentially deadly smile.

And the hours spent in the bathroom each night brushing and flossing.

Flooded Murrumbidgee

Locals tell me it's been 20 years since the Murrumbidgee River last flooded like this.

In this pic you can see the boat ramp at Ski Beach and some of the road leading to it are underwater.

showcaseJase

Are you over it?

This is a photo I took for work. It celebrates a very clever campaign.

Always do your best friend

Get plastered with Barry

Sadly I missed the local builder with 'Get hammered with Harry' to go with these.

Twitter feed

Music makes life fun

Metropolis

I like what they've done here. I've been thinking of remixing Metropolis.

Fly and maggot

Kimchi recipe

Kimchi is a Korean food and probably my favourite pickle. Here's the recipe I use.

1. Cut up a cabbage (wombok is best but regular will do)
2. Add a couple of tablespoons of salt and seal in a container and put in the fridge.
3. After a day or so, drain the cabbage. I usually loosen the lid, turn it upside down and let it drain while sitting on the edge of the kitchen sink for 10 minutes.
4. Add 125ml rice wine vinegar, 125ml soy sauce, couple of teaspoons of chilli powder, couple of teaspoons of cayenne pepper, couple of cloves of grated garlic, a few centimetres of grated ginger knob, few tablespoons of sugar. Adjust the ratio of everything but the liquids to suit your preference or spice tolerance.
5. Reseal the container and put it in the fridge. It'll keep for four weeks but is ready to start eating within an hour or two.
   
6. Add cut up shallots when serving it up and you can drizzle a bit of sesame oil on too or sesame seeds. I often add the shallots to the kimchi in the container after a day or two when the cabbage has shrunk after absorbing the liquid.
   The process leaves you with about half the cabbage you started with, after it's lost water and broken down in the brine.
   

Red capsicum is the best thing to have with it. Kimchi is great stir fried with vegies and noodles or rice or you can add it to salad leaves. It's great with fried food like fish, bacon or calamari rings -- the vinegar cuts through the grease and it's good for digestion.



Here's my kimchi salad with capsicum, grated ham, mixed leaves and sesame oil.

Sock sentimentality

These are my favourite socks. They came from my grandfather and I'm told my great-grandmother knitted them for him, which seems like the sort of thing a mother-in-law might've done.

These knitted socks are remarkable for both their age and their comfort. I'm beginning to worry they'll wear out because I wear them at least twice a week.

If anyone knows someone who would knit me socks, I would happily pay a bounty for them as these socks have probably lasted more than one lifetime and make me feel amazingly snug in my boots.



I liked these socks while they lasted. They came to me when I subscribed or resubscribed to Crikey.com.au, an excellent alternative media.

It's important to support alternatives to the mainstream media in Australia because the newspaper market is dominated by Rupert Murdoch and Fairfax/Rural Press. Crikey appeared a bit over 10 years ago and I remember first reading Stephen Mayne's columns in Private Eye. He's since sold Crikey to the publishers of that magazine.



These socks were a rip-off. I bought them at the National Gallery of Australia's awesome Surrealism exhibition because they were one of the few things in the gift shop I could afford at the time. They wore out very quickly and I'm finally chucking them out.

Mashed Up

The line separating artists from their audience has always been a bit blurry. From that moment during the Renaissance when someone first decided that a painter was more than just a craftsman with an easel, the whole idea of the Artist-with-a-capital-A has required an entire mythology just to make it seem plausible.

The biggest myth of all is the Romantic notion that artists somehow create their work uniquely and from scratch, that paintings and sculptures and songs emerge fully-formed from their fertile minds like Athena sprang from Zeus. Running a close second is the myth that only a handful of us possess the raw talent – or the genius – to be an artist. According to this myth, the vast majority of us may be able to appreciate art to some degree, but we will never have what it takes to make it. The third myth is that an artist’s success (posthumous though it may be) is proof positive of his worthiness, that the marketplace for art and music functions as some kind of aesthetic meritocracy.

I think Aram Sinnreich makes a good point. The term artist always seems a bit precious to me, like their work needs the tag to make it legitimate or something.

Jared Diamond has a chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel about the myth of the creator because inventions rarely spring from one mind. More often one mind is remembered for having adapted the preceding ideas into a workable form.

This is true of art. Very rarely is an artist working in isolation when they develop their trademark. Yet we're marketed the line that their genius is unique.

It's why I like Creative Commons because it promotes the idea of adapting existing work.

Italian woodfired pizza Shapes

Just noticed we're down to our last pack of Shapes' Italian Woodfired Pizza flavour. These had been reduced and looked like the line wasn't being continued, sadly.



Their flavour was surprisingly complex for a savoury biscuit. They had some of the hyper tomato you taste in the Barbecue Shapes but also green parsley or oregano note in that spot between taste and smell. Then a smokey cheddar sort of finish.

Pie rats ahoy!

I bought some DVDs off the internet and I think they might be seaworthy.



My suspicions were aroused by this typo but who knows, maybe the Los Angeles Times did say "stull dark abd dekucuius"? I could almost believe it because sub-editing has been cut back at other newspapers.



However, I became a mad man myself when Mad Men wouldn't play some episodes.

Deeply offensive

I find this letter to the editor of Wagga's Daily Advertiser newspaper deeply offensive.

The idea that men rape because they're horny portrays men as animals, no better than dogs. It's sexist bullshit in the extreme.

Jim Toomey at TED

Digital capacity

The following is a presentation I gave to the Local Government Web Network Conference in Sydney last week.

Increasing Digital Capacity speech

View more documents from showcasejase

I’m Jason Richardson, Corporate Communications Manager at Leeton Shire Council. Leeton Shire is located in the NSW Riverina region between Wagga Wagga and Griffith.

I’d been in my role for a bit over a month when I attended this conference last year and I found it fascinating to meet a variety of people who maintain Council websites, from IT to public relations to administrative staff with a bit of management too.

Quick show of hands, who identifies as being IT staff? PR? Admin? Manager?

From these varying roles and perspectives we’re united by being at the forefront of communications technology and I think we all know how daunting this can be.

There are more options available to us than we can hope to utilise.

Quick poll, whose council has a YouTube channel? Who has a Twitter feed? Who has a Facebook page that they have established?

It’s funny but these names all feel familiar and a bit old yet we’ve been using them for less than four years. I don’t think I’m alone in saying it sometimes hurts my head a bit to think about it.

So maybe you can imagine how it must feel for people who don’t have email.

Lily Allen used the term “neo-luddite” when she embraced a move away from online technology but I propose we use a less pejorative term that recognises the spectrum of technological know-how in our communities: digital capacity.

Capacity refers to capability. The notion of environmental capacity has been around for decades and informs discussions of sustainability.

Specifically I’m using the definition of capacity as the ability to hold, receive or absorb; or a measure of such ability.

Population demographics pose a challenge to digital capacity in Leeton Shire. Like many country towns there are above average numbers of young and older people but less than average numbers of people between 20-40 years.

It is quite literally a generation gap and one quite obvious in the usage of a new medium like Twitter. Here’s a record of tweets in Leeton last Friday.

The issue of digital capacity became obvious to me when I developed a new tourism website last year. Analytics show the most popular page is for accommodation where only a third of the businesses listed have a website and one does not have email.

For many events the Tourism website is their only online presence, aside from what gets reported on the local newspaper’s website. There are nine annual events listed on the site and of these only two have a website.

The tourism coordinator Brent and I talked about this and also with our managers and an idea developed to hold a workshop to show tourism operators all the online tools available for them and to try and whet their appetites for getting their businesses online.

I wrote workshop notes identifying useful sites and applications, particularly services offered by Google, as well as making the argument that advertising in the Yellow Pages isn’t enough to be sure of reaching an audience these days.

The media release I wrote to promote the workshop discussed how, back in 1995, Bill Gates wrote a book on how the ‘information superhighway’ was going to change our lives and that new business opportunities would appear like those when automobiles became widely used.

The motel, or motor hotel, is one example of such a business and tourism operators should know many visitors currently plan their travel through online research and that it’s important to reach them on the web.

On the day of the first workshop I pulled up the Analytics data to show that people were visiting the Tourism site to find contact details for businesses and it was educational for me to hear their questions, including one about Google business listings.

I was lucky that Bern’s blog post on managing business listings came my way. That’s the one reprinted in Stories this year.

At the Workshop I talked about Google a lot: setting up an email address with Gmail, putting up a website cheaply on Google Sites, writing a website with a view to search engine optimisation, recording traffic with Analytics, advertising with Adwords, monitoring reputation with Alerts, embedding YouTube – all the good stuff.

At the end we asked what we could do to help and the attendees were keen for a presentation by people who build websites.

We held a second workshop and invited two businesses to discuss their services and prices. They also covered a lot of the ground we’d previously gone over on why they needed to be online and the way to ensure you can be found.

Then we crossed our fingers and hoped that the designers and tourism operators would go away and make websites together.

To be honest I don’t think a single website has appeared as a result of these two workshops and, when only two people showed up for the third workshop...

Well, I thought the exercise might be ready to be written off.

However, given my background in PR, when you’re not getting the results you planned it doesn’t mean you’re not getting results. You just need to recalibrate your expectations and find a way to spin the result as a win.

While the results we’d hoped for haven’t appeared, there were a number of positive outcomes for Council.

The two people who showed up at that third workshop went on to become finalists at the recent Inland Tourism Awards and one topped their category.

Also, at the last Council meeting the Mayor congratulated these finalists and the minutes record the “enormous benefit” they said they had gained from the Tourism Operator Workshops.

And the workshops were successful as a way of building and improving relationships with members of our community. This has been invaluable.

So while the workshops didn’t lead to more businesses setting up websites it was successful as a public relations exercise and hopefully that those attended learned something, thus increasing digital capacity in Leeton Shire.

Another good outcome has been our tourism coordinator Brent has established a Twitter account, set up Google Alerts and has been digging deeper into Analytics.

We know these resources are good and, while it’s not core business for councils, sharing this knowledge can empower people and can benefit our communities.

Leeton Shire Council plans to run the web workshops again next year and will open them up to all local businesses. We hope it will engage this sector of our community with as much success in strengthening relationships and improving digital capacity.

I encourage you to consider how your councils can improve digital capacity in your own communities.

After watching Inception

After watching Inception, read this Donald Duck comic.

It's amazing how many key concepts the two share and the deja vu enhances the film.

I'm a bit late to this. Thanks to Andrew.