Monthly Archive for December, 2006

At home we have cable broadband access with wireless to distribute it round the house. Love it. Unfortunately Australian broadband prices, and speeds, are high and low respectively, and the plan I’m on limits me to 1Gig a month before it gets choked back. As long as I don’t update podcasts and the like this is usually fine, since I do most of the bandwidth heavy things from work. But it’s Christmas. Kids been online (everyone seems to think that broadband is popular in families since they use it for education, what nonsense, it’s all about games, gaming, myspace and so on and so forth, it’s used just as TV before it as the new babysitter dash thing that the kids enjoy that keeps them entertained) playing various games, so the gig is up. I’m not even game to check my email since there should be, by now, over a 1000 messages (75% spam) and without the broadband it will just take a crazy amount of time to get ‘em.

This is one of the reasons why I continue to insist to students that bandwidth matters. Not being able to compress video properly, spam, overly long podcasts, poorly compressed images. It is all bandwidth pollution and represents perhaps the major hindrance to digital equity in terms of access. It really isn’t about hardware, not the computers, or the phones, it is about the bandwidth, that’s the heart of the matter. (And why telcos are desperately trying to invent ways to make us use more of it.)

This is L, the most senior person in my immediate workgroup. Didn’t realise she was also an elf.

Today in Melbourne it is 41° with one of our wicked Northerlies. There are enormous fires in the north east, and the city (well, a lot of the state) is hung with a pall of smoke from these fires. In February 1985 we had the Ash Wednesday fires, everyone is worried that these fires will be a repeat. People learnt a lot from 1985. If you live in these areas (which come very very close to the city) you will have a ‘fire plan’, there is constant information broadcast via state radio, and we now know that staying in your home is very safe, as long as you are prepared and don’t panic (try and leave too late). Then you have a very good chance of dying. Dunno what it is, just sort of impressed with the efforts that go into days like this. Volunteer fire brigades, state and federal resources, local communities and people realising that to live in the most fire prone place on the planet it is no longer a case of avoidance but of preparation.

From Josephine (an Australian in Amsterdam) I see that I missed an exhibition by Nick Ervinck while I was in Amsterdam. The work looks interesting, and I would have loved the opportunity to see some contemporary visual arts while in town. My theory about the Netherlands is that they have a long history of being mercantile traders, and so welcome travellers and traffic into the country – it is their bread and butter. This extends across the entire culture (for example Dutch hotel staff always ask me where I’m from and actually have conversations about it), and this is why they are such a hub for innovation around ideas. It is traffic and flows. Anyway, missed what looks like an interesting show, and the chance to begin to feel the contemporary flavour of a city steeped in culture as culture and not Culture as Museum Exhibit.