1980s Australian comic writer/artist with Reverie Comics, author of "A Question of Theories" novel. Twitter volunteer Feb 2009 Victorian bushfires, Social Media volunteer Israel Mt Carmel fire Dec 2010, Queensland floods/Victorian floods Jan 2011. Exploring social media, video-blogging and blogging in general.
On the tenth anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers, some reflections.
I was up late on that fateful night, looking at something on the internet when a friend of mine rang and told me to turn on the TV. He also mentioned someone had attacked the Pentagon. I asked him if he were joking, but he assured me he wasn’t.
However, the sight that greeted me when I switched on my TV set was not of Washington, but New York. One plane already having hit one of the towers and if I remember, the second was also on fire.
Unlike most people in the West, I had come across terrorism on a two-year trip to Israel, in the form of a Hamas man who ran an Old City of Jerusalem hostel just in from Damascus Gate. Probably my worst experience for eighteen months of that same trip. One I survived, thankfully, even though being one of a couple of people that hostel manager didn’t like.
I’d often tried explaining the concept to friends when I came back to Australia. Most couldn’t relate to it at all, because it was something outside their experience. Yet, for Israelis, it was something they had to deal with every day.
On September 11, 2001 (actually the 12th in Australian time), one or two of the friends I’d talked of my experience to finally understood as they themselves watched what happened in New York and Washington.
On that day, nobody knew exactly what the next ten years would be like. All we knew was that the world had just changed as terrorism came to the West.
One thing from that time stands out to me, the sacrifice of the passengers of Flight 93. Because of my own experience with my pet problem on my Israel trip, these were the people I most related to. I understood their thoughts and their choice. All too intimately.
When you face terrorism, you can do one of two things. You can just sit there and let it do worse things…or you can take a stand. For some, that works and one survives. For others, it works only by a sacrifice like Flight 93’s, which prevented any further major losses of life.
Flight 93’s passengers prevented their hijackers from hitting any more buildings. They prevented any more deaths than the 3000+ that had already happened. The sacrifice took a couple of hundred lives, but saved probably a few thousand more.
Appeasing terrorists is unfortunately like appeasing the high school bully. Until you stand, and stand well, they’ll just keep walking all over you.
Perhaps that’s a lesson the Israelis understand more than the West does some days.
I read today of something deeply embedded in the Israeli Defence Force’s Code of Ethics, the idea that at all cost, harm to civilians should be minimized at all costs. If it can’t be avoided altogether, to be minized as much as humanly possible.
Terrorists don’t have such a code of ethics. They will always target civilians. As they did ten years ago.
Lest we forget, as we commemorate the loss of innocent life on that sad day ten years ago.
This past month has seen the arrival of OSX 10.7 Lion and Google’s social layer, Google+…enough to keep a die-hard tech fan amused.
Interestingly enough, I’m writing this post on a Parallels version of Windows 7 on my Macbook. It’s been quite a few months since I last used Windows and I had to reinstall it after the virtual drive screwed up. Yes, it happens even with virtual disks.
On the other hand, a couple of weeks ago I installed the latest OSX version to my Mac as an in-place install. Now there’s a different way of installing…
OSX 10.7 Lion was available in the Mac App Store and was a change from having to install from CD/DVD. I installed over my Snow Leopard and found my Macbook still working after it. I’m pleased to say I like the Lion.
Launchpad is something I haven’t used much, although it’s been nice organising my apps in a nearly-identical way to my iPad apps. I tend to use Mission Control more at the moment, with a simple multiple-fingered swipe up to activate it and see the desktops I’m using.
Since my Macbook has a trackpad built-in, I get the full Lion touch experience, though it took me a few hours to get used to swiping on the trackpad in the same way I did my iPad. Different…but nothing major to overcome.
Full page Mac apps? Well, full-page is a nice way to view Google+.
After some of Google’s other attempts at social, Google+ is the one that demonstrates how well Google has learnt from its previous social experiments. This is not Wave, this is not Buzz. What it is turns out to be something that takes a bit of Twitter with a bit of Facebook and makes something refreshingly different.
Google+ Circles enable you to post either to one circle of friends, multiple circle of friends, or just to one person in any one of them. As long as you’ve got all the people you know in the appropriate Circle, you can pretty much post different things to family, different things to friends and animated cat GIFs to just about anyone.
Yeah…those animated cat GIFs. They’ve found a new home on G+.
Then there’s the Sparks feature. You can pick a topic and have a list of articles for that subject show up in your Sparks. It’s not exactly the full Google search, but until Google’s private field test of G+ integrates more real search and Buzz posts or Google Reader shares, it’s workable. It still alllows you to have in-service access to the latest news on the web.
I tend to use Sparks for seeing what’s happening in the Batman and comics world…
What I’m really enjoying in Google+ is discussion in threads and the fact a post there doesn’t have a 140-character limit, or anything like Facebook’s 400 and a bit limit.
Will Google+ replace my blog here? Dunno yet. On the other hand, it’s now one of my top three main social media services, very quickly.
Twenty million other people in the same four-week period seem to agree.
It’s been two weeks since Christchurch experienced its second 6+ magnitude quake this year. For the second time in less than six months a big quake has unsettled routine. This time with only one fatality and no one missing.
I was looking at the #eqnz hashtag moments before it hit, having just retweeted news of the two aftershocks prior to it. To watch the stream in real-time as it happened was a different experience, since most emergencies this year I’ve only heard about hours later.
On my Springpad collation notebooks it rated a separate notebook from the situation earlier this year and quickly filled with news items, videos and photos in addition to resources links. However, after the first week I tweeted less of links to the photos and videos and more to the resources.
The Kiwis are pretty much over the whole thing, even as they sit through the mess and still crack jokes. It’s tiring. Exhausting. So there comes a point where it’s not good to continually emphasise what they already see every day when they walk past streets still filled with liquefaction, or past demolished or damaged buildings.
Late this past week, the NZ Government finally announced what they’ll be doing to help their Christchurch citizens. The best description of that is here.
Mid-week, though, we had a debate on Twitter about how that affected those without insurance in the worst-affected zones. It was kind of sad to see people with insurance not particularly being concerned that those unable to insure might come out worse off, even after all the Christchurchers are almost equally affected by the quake damage.
By end of week, though, reports came in via Twitter that a number of insurance companies in NZ are finding loopholes in their policies to avoid paying out much, if any.
If that’s the case, then even the insured now find themselves almost as bad of as uninsured homeowners.
It’s for the New Zealand people, especially the Christchurch people to now work out amongst themselves and with their government.
I think there’ll still be some debate over it in the months to come.
One week Microsoft announces Windows 8, the next week Apple announces things that will appear a lot quicker than the Microsoft products…
In the next 24 hours, Melbourne Time, we’ll hear the word from Steve Jobs at WWDC and what’s coming up for iCloud and iOS 5. We’ll probably also hear that famous “…and one more thing…”
There’s also probably going to be word on OS X 10.7 Lion. So much to look forward to.
The good news is, whatever is announced will be reality within a short time. When Steve Jobs announces something, it’s definitely not vapourware.
On the other hand, earlier this past week Microsoft announced Windows 8…well, something code-named Windows 8. Yes, it was tile-based, like Windows Phone 7; yes, it was touch-based with the ability to also use a mouse. The thing is, we don’t exactly know when this mythical beast will actually be appearing.
Will the new Microsoft OS for computers and tablets also be for phones? And if it is, what does that mean for Windows Phone 7 right now?
This is where the equation gets tricky. Too much time to market and Apple and Android will leap further ahead. Too soon, it will affect the sales of any Windows Phone 7 product as people wait for the improved Windows 8 experience.
Steve Balmer is not exactly a Steve Jobs. I can remember seeing Steve Balmer holding a Windows tablet a while ago, yet I’m not sure the darn thing even made it to market. Whatever the heck it was, it probably changed between then and now anyhow, while Steve Jobs’ products are pretty much ready before he even utters the famous “and one more thing.” Or was it one of the HP tablets that became vapour-ware when HP bought Palm and used WebOS instead?
It’s been interesting reading how enterprise and business are thinking about Balmer at the moment. While Microsoft has had some successes during his tenure, there’s also been a lot of lost ground, too. Small wonder the Windows 8 project has had to try to out-Apple Apple.
Still, it’s good to see Balmer and Microsoft make an effort. If they’d left things the same, they’d have lost badly in what’s now a post-PC world.
With a quieter period on other matters, it’s time to get back to tech topics, especially now Ubuntu 11.04 is out.
The beta for 11.04 Natty Narwhal had a few little bugs, but the final release and final form of the Unity interface is a joy to work with.
The panel app icons are easily adjusted in size, move out of the way when not needed and greatly help the amount of screen real estate you need on a netbook. In this case, a HP Mini-110.
I tried out Unity and Gnome 3, but I don’t think Gnome 3 is quite up to par. Most likely this will improve by the next couple of iterations, but at the moment, Unity is ahead on points.
My only complaint is the search doesn’t really help for particular files, only for apps. But that’s solved by using it to bring up the original search app.
If that’s my only complaint, I really don’t have much to complain about.
This version of Unity will no doubt be improved on, but it’s off to a flying start so far.
After months of natural disasters around Australia and the world, it was good last night to actually pay attention to something a bit better…a Royal Wedding.
Will and Kate.
Whether you were a republican or a monarchist, last night you were probably watching the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. From the looks of Twitter last night (Australian time), everyone was glued to their televisions and commenting in some way or another.
Even in my household. My partner and I were debating Kate Middleton’s wedding dress.
Call me a dumb male, but I actually liked the elegant simplicity of it. It wasn’t overdone, it didn’t flaunt pomp or privelege in anyone’s face, even had a certain humility to it. My missus? She thought it was too simple.
And yes, I suppose everyone was waiting for the big smootchie on the balcony. We got to see Willie plant TWO of them on Kate.
Considering how the two previous Royal weddings turned out as marriages, I guess this is the one we all want to see actually succeed. The Royal Family is long overdue for one successful marriage amongst the younger generations of royals.
In one way it’s harder being royalty and conducting a happy marriage, because they’re so much in the public eye and under so much scrutiny. And that’s before we even mention paparazzi.
Imagine it now in the age of Twitter and Facebook.
Of course, some of the best jokes on Twitter about the wedding had to do with social media. One that caught my eye was about Kate ousting Prince Harry as mayor of the cathedral on Foursquare…
Unfortunately, some of the other jokes on Twitter were about the hats Prince Andrew’s daughters wore. One of those hats actually looked like a squid.
Yeah, it makes a pleasant change from all the disaster.
After a busy start to the year emergency-wise, April has been natural disaster-free…
Well, apart from some rain and a bit of flash flooding up in Queensland the past week, but compared to earlier in the year, it didn’t exactly make the #qldfloods hashtag trend.
Tropical Cyclone Errol finally became a reality after some near-misses in previous months, but was only category 1 and blew up to Indonesia. Haven’t heard much of it since.
Unfortunately, it’s too early to expect jokes from Japan, as they’re still dealing with the aftermath of earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima situation is dragging on almost ad infinitum. The nuclear power plant situation is an ongoing problem as is whatever radiation still seeps from there.
It has been nice, however, to have a month off from emergencies.
In the meantime, the latest updates on both Japan and New Zealand can be found below:
I got my start as a social media volunteer during my state’s bushfires in February 2009, when it was a bit more personal and a niece of mine was in one of the endangered towns that first, Black Saturday of the Victorian bushfires.
That was just one situation spread over a six week period.
Afterwards I at least got a rest and was able to then Tweet and blog about tech topics.
Not so this time. The rest has been minimal at best.
My last blog post here was on February 11, when there was at least some preparation time for the tropical cyclone of that moment and some spare time to write. However, neither the Christchurch quake nor the Japan one were expected and the horror of both situations was perhaps greater.
Preparation time allows for less loss of life.
As we’ve seen, though, even the best preparation can be ineffective when a disaster goes beyond what you’ve prepared for.
Japan is probably the best example of that.
They had sea walls. The Fukushima nuclear power plant was at least rated for any quake around a 7.0 magnitude and a certain amount of tsunami height.
A 9.0 magnitude quake, a tsunami higher than the sea walls were built to handle, threw all the best preparation out the window.
Having to watch TV footage of a massive tsunami taking every house, car and any other object in its path up to five kilometres inland is not fun. Not if you realize how many people were also in that wave’s path.
No fictional disaster movie even prepares you for it.
Then there’s the Fukushima situation.
I’ve sat back reading everything since that situation began, the TEPCO and Japanese Government press releases, the views of outside experts, the diagrams of reactors, etc. It hasn’t taken too long to realize that the situation has been far from solved.
Nor did it take too long to realize that the reactors where explosions occurred blew the very places where spent fuel rods were stored, making it a more dangerous mess than it already was.
Sadly, while people are still trying to deal with the effects of the quake and tsunami, this one mess has distracted greatly from relief efforts elsewhere in Japan. However, the effects of the nuclear power plant situation may linger far longer than that of the other two disasters there.
What a year it’s been so far.
Let’s hope it’s actually a LOT quieter on the disaster/emergency front for the rest of the year.
Springpad Notebooks of collated web links, news items and resources:
A look at one tool for collating information, news and resources in emergencies…Springpad
January and February 2011 will go down as one of the busies times for Australian natural disasters and emergencies. Queensland floods (#qldfloods), Victorian floods (#vicfloods, vicrains), Tropical Cylones Anthony and Yasi (#tcanthony, #tcyasi), another lot of Victorian floods and even bushfires over in Western Australia (#perthfires).
Those of us who do social media volunteering in such times (there’s a new name, voluntweeters, for us now) often relay as much important information as we can and try to pump through as many resource links as we can. However, our web browsers’ bookmarking function tends to be a bit limited for keeping track of all the resources. In a season like this one, where there are multiple emergencies, then we need a better way to do this.
During the second Victorian floods, I came across Springpad, a note-taking service with a web interface and iOS/Android apps. Once I set up the web-clipping function in my Chrome browser, I saw just how versative this service was. I was able to set up a “notebook” for a specific topic, then web-clip the resources as I came across them. In my case, since I was retweeting information to do with Tropical Cyclone Yasi, Victorian floods Mark II and the Perth fires, I set up notebooks on Springpad for each of these topics.
The Victorian floods notebook filled up with bookmarks the quickest and at last count was containing over 80 bookmarks of news items, twitpics and resource links.
Each of these notebooks can be shared on the net, as can individual, non-notebooked items themselves.
Tags make for even easier sorting of information. You can even set an item as flagged for importance and you can even have an item in more than one notebook.
I’m going to have to experiment a bit more, because I want to see if I can create notebooks within notebooks, for greater categorization, but I’m not too fussed if I can’t. This has helped immensely to give me an easier way of finding a specific news item or resource page for a specific emergency and even allows for keeping track of the historical side of an emergency event.
Springpad has helped the collating and curating side of voluntweeting a lot more easier.
