TEDx Melbourne was Awesome

Saturday, 17 January was definitely “a day of TED” in Melbourne [1].

TEDx Melbourne

Over forty of us TED geeks got together at Monash University and spent the whole day watching our favourite TED talks, talking about those talks, and also watching a live talk on rebuilding faces (through engineering assisted surgery) given by Dr. Ninian Peckitt of ComputerGen Implants Limited. The video of Dr. Peckitt’s talk will be uploaded to the web some time soon.

What I loved most about the day, though, was meeting and talking to all the people who were there (search for #tedx or #mted on Twitter and you’ll find a whole bunch of them). In between the talks we managed to swap stories on how we got hooked onto TED, we talked about what each of us is doing personally and professionally – we’re a fun bunch doing a lot of fun things, by the way – and, of course, we talked about the talks themselves. [2]

So a million thanks to the organizers who did a wonderful job planning and then running TEDx Melbourne. I’m sure this event will becomes a regular feature from now on – maybe with groups of us taking turns to organize it each time – and I’ll keep you posted on this blog every time such an event does take place.

Meanwhile, Shawn Callahan has written about this on his blog as well so make sure you check that out. Also, keep an eye out for the post-event survey that Cheng is in the process of putting together.

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[1] This despite the fact that they didn’t include one of my all-time favourite TED talks: ‘Benjamin Zander: Classical music with shining eyes’. Oh well. Next time, perhaps :)

[2] My apologies but the over-use of the word “talk” in this blog post was inevitable!

TEDx Melbourne Schedule

The TEDx Melbourne schedule has been published:

Schedule

09:30 - Get checked off the list and get your name tags
10:00 - Introductions
10:30 - 'Do schools kill creativity?' - Ken Robinson (2006)
11:00 - 'Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?' - Dan Gilbert (2004)

11.30 – BREAK (30 minutes)

12:00 - 'My stroke of insight' - Jill Bolte Taylor (2008)
12:30 - 'How ordinary people become monsters ... or heroes' - Philip Zimbardo (2008)
Bonus video: 'A 3-minute story of mixed emoticons' – Rives

13:00 LUNCH (1 hour)

14:00 - 'Our priorities for saving the world' - Bjorn Lomborg (2005)
14:30 - 'The art of collecting stories' - Jonathan Harris

15:00 BREAK (30 minutes)

15:30 - 'Sliced bread and other marketing delights' - Seth Godin (2003)
16:00 - GUEST SPEAKER: Ninian Peckitt - 'Rebuilding the Face' + Q&A

16:30 BREAK (30 minutes)

17:00 - 'The mystery box' - J.J. Abrams (2007)
17:30 - 'Why we age and how we can avoid it' - Aubrey de Grey
18:00 - Wrap-up + Bonus video: 'How I built my family a windmill'- William Kamkwamba

Further details

More details on the TEDx Facebook Event page. Oh, and we’re up to 83 confirmed guests :)

Chay Magazine Issue 2

The second issue of Chay Magazine is now out. This seems to be a small edition – only five articles, all of which are listed on the front page – but that’s five more articles on this topic than would otherwise have been written. Good job, folks!

Meanwhile, they are now accepting submissions for Issue 3, which is on the topic of sexual diversity.

TEDx Melbourne Details

There are ten days to go to TEDx Melbourne marathon! Thanks to Monash University entry to the event is now free and there are already over sixty confirmed guests :)

Here are the basics:

Date: 17 January, 2008
Time: 10am to 7pm
Location: Lecture Theatre H1.25, Building H, Monash Caulfield campus

For more details visit:

There’s still time to nominate your favourite TED talk on the TED Facebook app (there’s a link on the Facebook group page) so make sure you do that soon.

See you there :)

Biases in Communities - Even the Scientific One

Awesome blog post by Lee Kottner on the Cocktail Party Physics blog on the “old guard” or “old boys’ club” attitude that tends to permeate through religious or specialist knowledge communities. In this case, of course, she’s writing about the scientific community:

…Richard Dawkins' selection of writers for the new Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is damned odd, if not downright insulting. For one thing, there's nary a mere science writer among them; they're almost all scientists…

…And, of course, there are too few women, three, to be precise…

Make sure you check it out.

Sexism in Advertising

If you, like me, felt that some of the ads you saw this year were particularly sexist – a few even disturbingly so – you weren’t wrong: Alex Leo lists the ‘Five Sexist Trends the Advertising World Just Can’t Shake’.

I guess not much real changed has occurred [1] since the Media Education Foundation produced Jean Kilbourne’s awesome ‘Killing us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women’ back in 1999. (You can watch all of it on Google Video, by the way.)

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[1] Except for a lot more awareness of the issue – thanks in particular to people, groups, and websites like Feministing and copyranter to name just two.

So…I Have Tonsillitis

After waiting three days with (increasingly) inflamed tonsils I finally went and saw a GP this morning and what I'd begun to suspect is now official: I have tonsillitis.

Why did I wait three days before visiting the GP? Because inflamed tonsils don’t necessarily mean tonsillitis, and since I didn’t have any of its usual sings and symptoms, it could have been a viral infection that I wouldn’t have been able to medicate anyway.

As it happens, I started developing some of the symptoms by yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, by then I’d already already made an appointment with Dr. Michal Lum at the Metropolitan Medical Centres Carlton so that was that.

Now I’m on a 12-day course of penicillin (specifically penicillin V) and am taking iboprufen for the inflammation. Here’s hoping things gets better quickly because this is turning out to be quite painful and I’m feeling rather miserable. Such is life.

Public Webcams: More Melbourne Cams

After writing about all those public webcams, I thought I'd look around for other Australian feeds and, sure enough, there are plenty more out there:

Also, I found a few other webcam lists that are worth checking out:

And finally, if you really want to geek out, NASA's Space Shuttle Endeavor (STS 126) is currently delivering equipment to the International Space Station (details here) and you can watch everything they're doing live on NASA TV :)

Public Webcams

I love public webcams that show you what's going on in the rest of the world in realtime. And while there are plenty of practical applications for such video streams -- like checking surfing conditions on remote beaches, keeping an eye on traffic, or general security and surveillance -- I particularly love the ones that are there either for tourism and marketing purposes or simply there for the heck of it. For example, I love the new Shiba Inu Puppy Cam that's been making the rounds of the websphere recently.

There are lots of public camera feeds (or streams, whatever you want to call them) availble on the Internet and one of the best places to find them is via the EarthCam website. Otherwise just search Google for, say, "live webcams" (remembering to ignore the adult ones) or download something like Webcam Saver that shows you a whole bunch of streams from around the world as your computer's screen saver (though this software is trialware so you have to pay for it if you want to keep on using it). If you want more specific user-created streams, check out Ustream.Tv and maybe Justin.tv as well.

Australian Webcams

There are a number of Australian webcams too, and though the live Melbourne skyline camera is currently inoperative, you can see awesome time lapse montages of the city -- showing an hour's worth of photos taken over the previous hour -- on OMNIConnect's Melbourne Webcam page.

For more practical stuff, you have the Port of Melbourne cameras that show you shipping traffic from the Shipping Management Centre in Melbourne and surf conditions from the Port Lonsdale Lighthouse at Point Lonsdale. You can also view the latest traffic conditions within Melbourne on the CityLink website: click on the 'CityLink Webcam' link at the bottom of the right column of the CityLink home page or view all the video streams on this page (which refreshes every ten seconds but doesn't have any labels on the photos).

Good stuff.

UPDATE: I wrote about some more webcams in a follow-up post.

TED Marathon in Melbourne

There's a TED Marathon being held in Melbourne on 13 December. Check out its Upcoming event profile for details but, basically, it'll be a "public screening of videos from the annual TED conferences held in Long Beach, California, with an opportunity for discussion between videos." The organizers also plan to launch a website where you can suggest specific talks for the screening. I'll let you know when they launch that.

I find TED talks hugely inspiring, thought provoking, moving, and informative and watch almost all the videos the TED people upload every week. I also hope to attend an actual conference some day...but who knows when (or if) that'll happen. For the time being, though, a local screening of TED videos is a pretty awesome idea and I hope everyone who reads this blog decides to attend.

This Sucks

This sucks.

Issues with Windows Live Writer

First, the awesome Windows Live Writer -- which I'd recently upgraded to the even more awesome Windows Live Writer Beta -- no longer works with my blogs. Every time I add a post using WLW, all the HTML angle brackets get stripped from the code so you get a lot of junk.

For example, if I was to post the following line of text using WLW:
Hello World! Google.com

What would appear on the blog would be:
pHello World! a href="http://google.com"Google.com/a/p

Which, in HTML, would have read:
<p>Hello World! <a href="http://google.com>Google.com</a></p>

So take the HTML version and strip off all the angle brackets that actually make the HTML tags what they are and you get what actually gets posted to the blog.

No one's quite sure why this is happening (though some people have found temporary workarounds) or whether it's a WLW, WordPress, or other technology (e.g. PHP) issue. However the issue itself has been documented on the Microsoft support forums. Here's hoping they find a fix soon because I much prefer WLW to writing blogs posts using WordPress's blog post writing interface.

Issues with WordPress and/or Fantastico

Second, while researching the WLW issue, I upgraded all three of the blogs hosted on the insanityworks.org domain to WordPress version 2.6.3. I do all my blogging platform upgrades through the Fantastico script library system that my web host provides for this purpose and I've never had issues in the past. This time, however, while both Nadia's blog and this blog got upgraded just fine, something went wrong as I was upgrading my professional blog so that's now out of commission. I've contacted my web host's support people for help and they're restoring it to its previous version but this does mean that my ACME blog will be down for at least a couple of days. Which sucks.

R.I.P. Michael Crichton

Michael Crichton, one my all-time favourite authors, passed away a few days ago.

I loved his books and the way he wrote them: they were exciting, inspiring, and a whole lot of fun. Indeed, I've read all his fictional works though I've only read one of his non-fiction ones (must remedy that). I've also watched almost all of his films and remember being blown away by 'West World', 'Jurassic Park', and 'Twister'. Heck, I even remember the ending scene from 'The Andromeda Strain' which I watched on TV back in the mid-80s! I must now watch the three films that I've missed.

You can read more about Crichton here:

Rest in Peace, Michael.

Tetris!

I love Microsoft: The original Windows 3.x version of Tetris (the one made in 1990) runs just fine in Windows Vista :)  I've actually been carrying that version of Tetris -- all 76kB of it -- around with me since the mid 90s. Of course it requires quite a bit of window resizing to get it just right on a 22" wide screen!

Why do I and so many other people care so much about this game? The good folk at Graph Jam said it best:

Reasons to Play Tetris

A friend and I even organized regular Tetris tournaments at our undergraduate college during the late 90s which were hugely popular. Also, Tetris is the only game I've ever bought for my mobile phone. Yes, I am addicted.

Though, really, Tetris is less like a drug and more like a good cup of tea: it's perfect for any occasion. Whether you want to wake yourself up, relax before going to bed, keep your hands busy while talking on the phone or listening to a podcast, or do something when you have nothing else to do, Tetris is always the answer.

So thank you Microsoft and, more importantly, than you Alexey Pajitnov for creating such an awesome game.

New Desktop PC!

Back in April 2007 (in my third post on this blog, in fact) I wrote that my laptop had died and that I was stuck using my mother's ancient, somewhat-battered laptop. My plan was (and still is) to get a job and then buy myself a nice, high-end tablet PC.

However, over the last couple of months, my mother's laptop started acting up so I had no choice but to find a replacement for it. I didn't want to buy a tablet PC because I don't yet have a job so I'd rather not dip into our savings too much (and I'm not willing to buy anything but a high-end tablet PC). Instead, I bought a cheap desktop PC that I could work on in the interim and upgrade in the future. I was always going to buy a desktop for home use, I just hadn't planned on doing that right now. But as plans tend to do, this one changed so now I am the proud owner of an HP Pavilion desktop PC:

New Desktop PC

It's reasonably low-end as desktop PCs go: with a 2.4GHz Dual Core Intel Pentium Processor instead of a Core 2 Duo and, importantly, integrated graphics instead of a separate graphics card. Fortunately, this isn't much of a problem because I don't plan on getting into computer games, high-end graphics editing, or power intensive computing just yet. I do plan on recording and editing videos and doing some basic graphics editing but all that will work fine on this system. In fact, this setup runs the Windows Vista Aero interface without a hitch so it's not like I'm suffering here!

In other areas, it's a pretty kick-ass system: with 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 360GB 7,200RPM hard drive, a CD/DVD reader and writer, and the usual set of ports, card readers, and networking options. The best part: it came with a 22" wide screen LCD with a 1680x1050 native resolution :)  After using a 15" screen for a couple of years and then a 12.1" screen over the last year this big screen is fricking awesome!

In fact, the whole system is pretty awesome and I'm having a great time using it. Woo hoo! :)

James Nachtwey's story

In 2007, photographer James Nachtwey won the TED Prize which awarded him $100,000 and "one wish to change the world". His wish was:

I'm working on a story that the world needs to know about. I wish for you to help me break it in a way that provides spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age.

On 3 October, Nachtwey's story will break -- both online and around the world. Melburnians can view his story at Federation Square while the rest of you should check the TED Prize Event Location page to see if it's being shown at your location (it's on in 16 countries). If not, you can always view it online:

For more:

A Trip Down the Great Ocean Road

For my 32nd birthday, Nadia and I took a day tour down the Great Ocean Road, which is a "273km stretch of road along the South Eastern coast of Australia between the Victorian cities of Torquay and Warrnambool".

From Great Ocean Road


After some research, and a visit to the Melbourne Visitor Centre at Federation Square, we decided to go with AAT Kings's 'Great Ocean Road with Helicopter Ride' tour. This 12-hour tour leaves from Melbourne at 8am; stops at Bells Beach, Torquay, Apollo Bay, Port Campbell, The Twelve Apostles, and a few other places in between; and gets back to Melbourne a little before 8pm. It includes a lunch stop at Apollo Bay and a Helicopter Ride around the Twelve Apostles.

From Great Ocean Road


The day started out slightly overcast and, by the time we got to Apollo Bay, it was windy and it had started to rain. That wasn't a major problem -- though it made taking pictures a little more complicated! -- and we had a great time nonetheless.

The scenery were brilliant -- though we're told it's better in summer -- and the helicopter ride was spectacular. I took a video of the chopper ride and will post it up here once I've edited it.

From Great Ocean Road


What made the trip particularly enjoyable was our driver, Les, who gave an excellent tour commentary and joked and chatted with us at our rest and photo stops. Overall, I was most impressed with AAT Kings and would recommend them to anyone else who wants to go on a tour around Australia.

I've uploaded some photos from this trip to my Picasa Web Albums page. Take a look and let us know what you think.

[Also see: Official Great Ocean Road website]