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)

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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????”.