...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.

When you are over 40 (or admit to being so) and you’ve worked in the non-profit community sector for more years than you care to remember, you’ve been to more talk fests than you have had hot dinners. Most talk fests evaporate into the hazy ether. Despite all the goodwill and warm fuzzy feelings you may have generated at a well lubricated conference or a well catered for seminar, much of the ‘grande plan’ momentum is soon buried in the daily reality of our centres or offices. At a recent conference I heard something that really summed up the way in which we work in the non-profit community sector. The speaker said that we are so busy handling urgent matters that we have little time to do the important things. Touche!!

Today at the Department of Victorian Communities sponsored ‘In the Community’ seminar in Brimbank, over 100 people and Brimbank organisations gathered to talk with DVC to discuss ways in which this relatively new government department and initiative could best work with Victorian communities. Whilst there was lots to indicate it was a talkfest, the spirit of the day left me somewhat hopeful. Oft times I walk away seething that my time was wasted and that I could have been better off filing my nails rather than absorbing more bureaucratic ‘nothing speak’.

“The suits” (sorry “suits”) for the first time in a long time came to us, walked among us and even shared the same air as we did. But hark, not only that, they sat at small tables and looked like they were genuinely listening. They took copious notes as we (the non-suited ‘community’) spoke and at the end of proceedings made some commitment to continuing this dialogue. In fact what is more impressive is that DVC has committed itself to conducting these community consultations right across our fair but parched state. I commend them. My hardened, cynical brow has softened a tad but shall remain furrowed till we (da people, da mob in common parlance) see some action in our trenches.

This promises to be interesting. Stay tuned!

Back from the 3 day Connecting Up Conference in Adelaide. Its purpose (in the organisiser’s words):

The Goals of the conference are:

• To provide a platform for innovative communities, businesses and governments around Australia to share their experiences, successes and lessons learned from programs and projects designed to change their ’world’, whether it be a neighbourhood or a nation.
• To promote the social and economic benefits for disadvantaged and isolated communities of access to affordable technology.
• To provide opportunities for like-minded not-for-profits, communities, governments and businesses to build networks and develop programs and projects.
• To create momentum towards a national approach to ensuring that the technology capacity of community and not-for-profit organisations allows them to effectively operate in the digital world.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

After a lifetime working in the non-profit sector and having attended more conferences than Methuselah, my interest lies less in the workshops than in the yabba yabba done between the margins. I want to know who these crazy, brilliant odd bod souls are; these people who could be making a mega-packet in the corporate sector; these people who actually choose to work in largely under funded, under recognised workplaces; these people who seem to be so driven by principle that they dedicate their lives to righting the wrongs of the less powerful in our communities. I don’t believe we should collectively be put up as candidates for beatification but I do think that this sector of principle has an approach to life, equity, access and social justice other sectors motivated only by economic imperatives could learn from.

This conference did not disappoint. Odd, quirky bods abounded but these odd, quirky bods had plenty to say 'n share that was important, challenging and above all hopeful. A refreshing contribution to the body politic.

My camera as always came along with me. (click here to view)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

When I first embarked on this blog journey I did it for two reasons:

1. To experiment with the form and to see if it was something I could get in to
2. To keep up with the "Technoratti's" (formerly known as "The Jones's")

Enthusiasm, naivety & grande plans leads us down some colorful paths. This path has been littered with good intentions. But where lofty literary aims were crafted only the baubles of mortal flesh remain. I failed as a virile virtual correspondent. I failed even as an occasional commentator. Limp & mute is moi!

Perhaps this is the medium for the young or young at heart. Perhaps it the realm of the frustrated and/or misunderstood journalist. Although I have kept a personal journal since the age of fourteen the blog (I’m afraid to admit) has not grabbed my short & curlies nor has it captured a latent ADHD communication strain.

I will however persist and shimmy down a new path. Perhaps rather than employing the word I will adopt the image as my preferred mode of virtual communication. I am proud to say that my first publicly exhibited pictures will be showing at the Queen Victoria Women's Centre for the next week or so. It will be launched on Saturday 17th February 2007 by Kate Durham (wonderful Melbourne artist and refugee activist http://www.katedurham.com/). I am chuffed that my first public photographs are part of the exhibition “In It Together” which involved 350 Victorians, from 10 to 90 years old, talking about the rights & responsibilities important to them.

I close this current blog with a link to some photos I took on Xmas Day 2006. As of today great intentions return. I intend to add more photographs. This is the plan. But the reality may not match this plan so well made.

http://www.digitalkulcha.org/family/xmasWalk06/index.html

yours in ‘fine intentionedness”

toul@

Last Thursday I was helping my precious nephew research the history of AFL (Australian Football League). Nothing unusual about that but the homework was for “Greek School”. A warm, fuzzy, multicultural glow buzzed. A few pointers on the inner workings of Google and he was out of the stalls and racing into research mania. Content discernment is not yet part of my nephew’s intellectual repertoire, so we discussed the relative merits of some of the sites he found. We finally decided on a piece. We ctrl+ceed, opened a word document and then closed the loop with ctrl+v.

What we had copied and pasted was written in English but we needed it in English. There in lay the rub. I let him ponder the tenacity of his formative Greek. As a teacher, my training taught me to give others the space to learn and that a little pain is always experienced when learning is about to appear. So when ‘that’ face of angst appeared I let him sit in it for awhile till he said, ‘Do you think we can translate it online?” Good question, beloved nephew. We then www-you-ed ourselves to babelfish.com. I gave him a brief tour of the site and how to use the tools. Easy (well as easy as the thorny road of online translations go).

Then I asked him if he knew the story of Babel. He didn’t, so I told him my version of it. 1. A one languaged humanity built a tower to reach the sky because in their hearts they felt that they were like God. 2. God thought this a humanly arrogance and smote them down by confusing their language and making everybody speak a different language. Since then my imaginings have been full of biblical stories. An odd preoccupation for a cynical and lapsed Greek Orthodox.

My nephew is of Greek and Assyrian decent. He currently has an aunt and uncle ‘holidaying’ in Lebanon. Images of desperate, bewildered fleeing people smear our screens in relentless ‘news updates’. I ring my sister often for news and it is the same “they are still there” and we wonder if they know of the severity of the crisis.

In a hall of emotional mirrors where I see everything and nothing at the same time, helplessness moves in and settles in the bones. It sucks greedily on the marrow till it threatens to vaporize my already fragile equilibrium. As an antidote I take a Google pill and look up the meaning of the word.

Helplessness: powerlessness revealed by an inability to act; the state of needing help from something; feeling of being unable to manage. Then I look up the tangential suggestion “learned helplessness”.

Learned helplessness: A tendency to be a passive learner who depends on others for decisions and guidance; A condition in which a person attempts to establish and maintain contact with another by adopting a helpless, powerless stance; with repeated exposure to inescapable aversive events, the person or animal learns that escape is impossible. In subsequent circumstances where escape or avoidance is possible, no attempt is made. The principle has been applied to understanding the origins of depression; a term initially used in experimental psychology, is a description of the effect of inescapable negative reinforcement (such as electrical shock) on animal (and by extension, human) behavior.

As a lay linguist I believe we can unravel many psychological quandaries by etymological explorations. I also believe in describing and addressing a malaise of my psyche and soul, I need to mesh, mash, meld as many definitions of a term as I can in order to get as close as is humanly possible to the essence of an essentially wordless state.

As a young feisty Greek-Australian-Feminist woman I had the passion, stamina and chutzpah (naivety?) to be intimately involved in what I saw as my part in changing the world. I was man-handled by the constabulary (and subsequently thrown back in the crowd like a minnow, I have the picture that appeared in London’s Newsweek to prove it), made my Greek immigrant relatives despair at my ‘dangerous’ & ‘useless’ antics (did they know something I didn’t know?). Today at the age of 45 I look back at that young woman and wonder where she got the courage, the passion and the sheer energy to stand up to seemingly omnipotent power-moguls. Although I still turn up to march on the streets, I turn up less and less. Is this a problem of middle-age or of world malaise? Has the bloodlust of the world cast babel-like shards of anarchy? Is this world cannibalism necessary to anoint a future peace with the blood of innocents?

“You have to be the change you want to see” said Mahatma Ghandi. If this is so, Gods of all persuasion please help us all to find “?????insert nameless something here????”.

Finally back on Australian terra firma. Apologies to those who expected eye witness, hot off the press news about my travels and travails but alas twas not to be. In Sweden things where frenetic with the Stockholm Challenge and then in Greece a shortage of access prevented me quite successfully from posting to the blog.

Needless to say, I am in serious denial about being back. My body has rebelled in sympathy and become riddled with some flu-ey type thing that has sufficiently impeded any acceptance that I am back and that I will soon have to grapple with the everyday reality of making a living and having a life. I must give Melbourne credit though. Although it is winter, Melbourne is still capable of turning up the sun dial even though temperatures are on the icy end of the scale.

From my vantage point I look out over my neighbour’s leafless fig tree. It still holds fruit. In the distance and over the fence a lemon and orange tree are doing a fine job of simultaneously soaking up the sun’s morning rays while reflecting back impossibly saturated orange and yellows. It seems we can only find romance in foreign places but I look at this country, my country and feel blessed to have such bounty and beauty just at the edge of my vision.

The story of my journey will now be told through pictures that I will gradually put up (emphasis on the gradual). I have learnt something the Greek’s place a high value on and that is pacing: the slower the pace the more you see. I hope I can harness that wisdom in this frenetic-obsessed culture.

delirious jet lagged greetings to all..…I have had trouble emailing, so bear with me dear ones while I sort it out (thanks Stacey for your emails and yes Yvette I have received your posts and emails)…I have established a new email address which you can email me at while I’m away… toulakarayannis@yahoo.com so give that a go and maybe we can have more luck and then I can tell you the one on one sordid details of this journey!!!

despite my pre-departure trepidation of the flight, it was (dare I say it) pleasant…one thing about being a born again pessimist-stroke-grumpy-old woman, is that when good things happen they feel like manor from heaven…on the first leg of the journey to Kuala Lumpur I sat next to a woman who traveled to certain places in the world praying for world peace and healing…great workI think but she lost me when she started to talk about how we were all born with original sin…she moved to another seat very soon after... I think she realized that I wasn’t going to buy it readily…her move meant that I got 2 seats to myself…now that was mighty Christian of her…

from KL to Amsterdam I sat next to a man who lived in Canberra and was traveling to Geneva to work for the United Nations…I asked him what he did at the United Nations and said that he was trying to save the world…I told him he wasn’t doing a very good job and that he should try harder…despite my comment he, unlike my earlier companion did not move seats…we chatted for hours and it dawned on me that I have not been that still just talking leisurely with someone for what seemed like years…I loved it…I loved the company, I loved the challenge of the content which ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, I loved the generosity and openness of spirit but most of all I loved the kindness of a stranger…it only occurred to us that we hadn’t even exchanged names till we were disembarking…it left me strangely full and peaceful…

I arrived in Stockholm to the sunny greetings of my friends and Stockholm Challenge organizers Ulla and Earl…what a luxury to be picked up at an airport after an infinite flight…one thing Ulla and Earl are not is shy and retiring, so a marathon yabba-yabba fest ensued…from a quite pyjama clad existence in a sedate Eastern suburb of Melbourne to a manic Swedish trialogue (no dialogue, just three very fiery talkers)…they managed to engage me long enough to go to bed at the same time as the Swedish natives, at which I was rather cocky about, only to find myself awake several hours later in a brightly lit room…it was 5am in the morning and then remembered that Sweden is now moving towards it summer midnight sun phase where there are more light hours than dark…odd phenomenon for this Grecian antipodean…

...today I accompanied Ulla and Earl to their day long round of meetings with a Swedish events management company, students working on the Stockholm Challenge, organizers from the City of Stockholm and then a visit to an entrepreneur colleague of Ulla’s…we are now home and all catching up with some form of computer work…we’re a happening, hip and wired lot up here…but now the real effects of jet lag settle over me like a surreal veil…I zoom in and out of reality…(mind you those who know me would say that has nothing to do with jet lag!)…so now this tired and grumpy old gal will weave her way to a vacant bed and slumber till I can slumber no more…

Remember to use my new traveling email address if you want to email…toulakarayannis@yahoo.com ...can I also encourage the technically more adventurers amongst you to register with Skype, so we can chat directly for free!!!! You can register at http://www.skype.com/helloagain.html I just called my mother on her landline (this costs little) and she sounded incredibly clear…so please try it and see if we can talk directly to each other…like I said Skype to Skype calls are free…now that’s a great price…when you register let me now and I’ll add you to my contacts list and you vice-versa…

So for now my lovelies I bid you adieu till next we meet/speak…

god love your reading bits
xxxtoul@

'Tis the eve of my departure and the mind numbing details of travel trivia overwhelm me. My beloved friend Yvette, kindly visited this afternoon to make tea and supervise the mini makeover sessions that are part of every girl's pre-departure ritual. Now I enter my usual obsessive compulsive disorder period where I check, re-ckeck and check that I've re-cheked all items that need to be checked. Can't wait for the time when we can insert a software program into our ears to take care of this maddness.

Am I getting too old for all this international travel? Staying home and becoming a grumpy old woman sounds so much more enticing. ...and to think I'm about to leave just when Big Brother starts. Anyone feel like taping 5 weeks worth please???

"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." Oscar Wilde

Welcome...

I am about to head of to the stunning climes of Stockholm to participate as a juror in the Stockholm Challenge Conference and awards ceremony (click here to visit the site and click here to see my profile) .

The pre-journey pandemonium of packing is in full flight. Anticipation and adrenalin charges every waking and sleeping moment but the thought of glorious Sweden tempers the panic. I harbour the wish of most travellers which is 'just get me there'. But I am also aware that to wish time away is to wish life away, so I pull my head in and return to this glorious sunny Melbourne moment.