...whilst it may seem from the cavernous silence that we have dropped off the bloggosphere, nothing could be further from the truth. We have been grinding our little designing fingers to the bone. Here are some of our newest endeavours and creations.

DIGITAL KULCHA INTERACTIVE
I have launched digitalKulcha interactive as a more thorough look at digital kulcha's work and other stuff. So visit and let us know what you think.

LATEST CLIENTS

Duke Street Community House :: Sunshine :: Melbourne :: Australia

Self Preservation :: Melbourne :: Australia

LATEST EXHIBITIONS

Riad Maizie :: Marrakech :: Morocco

Chilled Views :: Big Chill Music Festival :: England

The Battle of Wellington :: Big Chill Music Festival :: England

let us know what you think...
cheerio for now
toul@

A shameless life long unrequited love affair with Leonard Cohen has not left me shattered, torn or bruised but uplifted and enraptured. For all you young folk (and all you fellow besottees) here is the great man for your enjoyment. Thanks Megstar for the link!

I have long debated whether reading Alice in Wonderland at a very young age has been a hindrance or a haven. Life was never the same after Alice's psychedelic tumble down the that tunnel, a tumble in which she took at least one prisoner: moi.

I have circumnavigated the new age movement (partaking in all its maddening cornucopia of offerings) most of my conscious adulthood only to arrive at quantum physics/mechanics that from my limited understanding speaks a familiar language.

Reading long tracts of scientific treatises gives me nose bleeds but I recently came across a production that uses a language I can almost understand. My understanding is helped because it includes pictures. "What the Bleep" was first released in 2004 and went on to become one of the most popular documentaries of all time. It felt appropriate that this Easter weekend I should resurrect it. Watching it teleported me down the rabbit hole of refracted in-sight, just as Alice had done all those years ago.

If you can get your hands on the extended version I recommend it. If not here is a short video from YouTube where you can also find a myriad of clips from the documentary.



May dear, dear Alice and her Mad Hatter be with you.
toul@

finding something to say on a regular basis is the modus operandi of blogs and bloggers...however, my efforts run to the very, very, very occasional...so in the absence of anything interesting to say (it's too darn hot in melbourne to consider anything apart from lying quietly in a shady corner to listen to my scottish friend sheila's brilliant compilation) i offer up some photos i took in december 07...




i've always had a thing about rusty crusty man made stuff entwined with mama nature's magic...



a trip to the arthur's seat maze in dromana was a revelation...so often we hear of famous places and because of their popular and commercial nature somewhere you dismiss it as a place to visit...one sunny december day my family decided to take the kids (that were bouncing off the walls in a futile attempt to banish boredom) on a long drive to tire the terrors out and to give the big people a moment's peace...we ended up at the arthur's seat maze...i felt like the proverbial goose for ever having dismissed it as a place to spend my precious time...the entire experince was quite wonderus...wondr seems to have disappeared from out daliy lexicon but this maze offered it up in spades...if you visit melbourne, make the effort to go down and have a look...you wont be disappointed...we even managed to impress the fussiest critics: the kids...



restricting information and narrowing into a particular detail can elevate the ignored to the noticed...a walk in central melbourne unveils vingettes of big city splendour...



someone's rubbish is a photographer's pleasure...it poses questions...why did someone throw this out? what where they thinking at the time? what role did this now piece of trash play in the life of a family? was it a source of pain or pleasure? was it once an item of beauty?




it is a challenge for a walker to make their neighbourhood walks interesting and sustained but being accompanied by a camera forces you to frame the world differntly...the everyday and mundane are transformed into a mini-tale...a blade of grass is a story of color and shape and contrast and new wonder...

Doing it Better

The time has come for me to plug my friend and colleague’s project called “Doing it Better’. Whilst this conjures up some fanciful images it is actually an ambitious project he describes as follows:

“The Doing IT Better project is a 3-year social justice initiative of the Centre for Community Networking Research, Faculty of Information Technology Monash University, and the Victorian Council of Social Service, generously funded by a foundation.
The goal of the project is to enable community organisations to significantly improve both their organisational technological expertise and their ability to transmit that expertise to their clients—ultimately empowering both.

The project is lead by Dr Larry Stillman of the Centre for Community Networking Research at Monash, with Dean Lombard of VCOSS.”

Despite becoming very selective about what I get involved with these days (old age and cynicism?) I have put my hand up to be on the working group for this project and I have done so because:

• The project is actually funded for three years…in the community sector anything funded beyond a year is a supreme rarity
• It has the ICT needs of the community sector as central to its mission
• The working group is drawn from a very broad range of community organisations (from the Victorian University of Technology, Engineers Without Borders, The Good Shepherd, InfoExchange, community consultants, small business with a community focus)
• It works creatively about identifying and addressing what community organisations need and will need in the future if ICT is not to become the albatross around their organizational necks)
• It has an action research focus

Last week a working group meeting was held in the fabulous computer lab at Duke St Community House (Sunshine, Melbourne, Australi ). About 10 people attended and had a free flowing discussion that touched on Drupal, other CMS software, the capacity and willingness of community organisations to problem solve a range of ICT issues in their organisations, the romance and reality of ICT and its future in community organisations.

For more information about this worthwhile project visit: Doing it Better Project

In the past few weeks both my laptop and PC decided to commit electronic hari kiri almost at exactly the same time! How is it that inanimate (yeah right!), electronic gizmos seem to know when you need them most? Although there is an age gap of about 3 years between my laptop and PC they both died within days of each other. Was this a planned, calculated digital suicide pact designed to instill terror of Blair Witch proportions? I have Toy Story visions of my loose lipped laptop propositioning papa PC and talking it into all manner of unspeakable acts. But why this synchronized suicide? Was I a little too rough with my keyboards? Did I demand too much of my motherboards? Did I expect performances of such intricate maneuvers that they both expired from over exhaustion? I will now, never know. I will forever walk the virtual corridors wondering what was and what could have been.

Dear LP and PC
wherever you may be
or wherever you may roam
remember your mama
loved you
and wish you would come home

Does anything rhyme with Drupal? In my Drupal inspired sleeplessness of late, this is what obsesses me, given that I couldn’t work out anything else about this so called miracle CMS. You can’t think of one can you?? It’s like the word ‘purple’ or ‘orange’. It stands alone in the wilderness of the English lexicon and as far as I’m concerned deserves its linguistic isolation. As a non-programming savvy designer, Drupal has managed to do what people have not: reduced me to a teary, GIBBERING SHELL OF MY FORMER SELF.

I first heard of Drupal at a recent conference where Daniel Ben-Horin, of CompuMento and Techsoup spoke about its alleged capabilities. Then the word seemed to be everywhere. Drupal here Drupal there. It made bold and luscious claims.

Given my obsessive and infinite search for the holy grail of software to solve our community’s multimedia woes I foolishly began trying (…and trying and trying and trying…) to understand and learn it. I tried to read the impenetrable mountain of stuff written about it online, I badgered colleagues to help this lame and clueless designer. I even resorted to seeking out strangers who had actually slayed the Drupal dragon. But alas no matter how much or how hard I tried I got nowhere fast. After the wonderfully visual interface of Dreamweaver, Drupal looked like a spaghetti of text that had nothing intuitive to redeem it.

Is it a girl thing? or is it just a me thing? There is nothing quite like the inability to master a software program that renders grown hitherto intelligent, capable adults into blubbering, shuddering foetal messes. But in my favour (?) I have inherited my sheep herding Greek father’s legendary obstinacy (I’d like to think it’s tenacity) which manifests in an inability to let go of something till I can master (defeat!!!!) any dragon that dares to flare its flame at moi!!

This however has entailed many, many nights of mad mouse clicking and hitting the enter key like I was throwing balls at a fairground pile of tin cans. Blind, clueless shots yielding equally clueless results, results that had no resemblance to anything logical or predictable. Nodes? Indecipherable paths, theme intractability, image placement impossibility, modules????? If a god exists why did it not extend a loving arm in my hour of needy futility???

However, in the wee small hours of yesterday, on the threshold of admitting defeat, something akin to a Lourdes miracle began to materialise. Not because of any understanding based on logic but on sheer Pavlovian repetition. I had found that when I selected and clicked certain elements in the program in a particular sequence something resembling a page began to emerge from the quagmire of the Drupal swamp. Armed with this glimmer of hope I repeated these sequences, time and time again hoping to engrave these behaviours as deeply and as permanently into the grooves of my very, very exhausted grey mass as possible.

Today, I still claim that Drupal is a nightmare for the non-programming savvy beginner to understand but I am prepared to tread lightly into its murky terrain because intuition tells me that this is a mistress that is playing hard to get but might be worth the chase.