independence : inspiration : ideas : lifestyle : sustainability : humanity : well-being : fun

Weblog | Events | Features | Gallery | Links | Consultants directory | Zine | About | Contact Weblog> September 2003 030930: Tue NSW Knowledge Management Forum - on this coming Thursday! "Cost, Value and ROI for Knowledge Management in Law Firms" Speaker: Stuart Kay from Gilbert + Tobin Stuart Kay is the knowledge manager at Gilbert + Tobin. He has undertaken the challenging task of proposing a detailed hypothetical model from which a law firm could extrapolate to determine cost/value metrics for their KM program. Stuart will provide an overview of his recently published article on this topic. and "Framing a KM Strategy - what does it have to do with Huck Finn, Real Estate, Magnetic Telegraphs and Nike?" Speaker: Mark Andrews, Sydney Water How does the way you frame your KM strategy determine the role of KM in an organisation? Mark Andrews, Innovation & Knowledge Program Manager at Sydney Water, provides some personal insights into the process of KM strategy development. Drawing on reflections of his experience in developing an Innovation and KM Strategy for Sydney Water, Mark will share his thoughts on the role of framing in developing strategy and finding quick wins. Mark will also provide some insight into emerging Innovation and KM issues for Sydney Water. Details: When: Thursday 2nd October Where: Standards Australia, Level 6, 286 Sussex St, (Corner of Bathurst St) Time: Turn up by 5:30pm, talks start at 6pm. Finishes at 7:30pm, and then down the road for drinks and chats. If you arrive after 5:30pm, ring James Robertson on 0416 054 213, to arrange for someone to let you in. Cost: Free, no need to rsvp 030928: Sun Communication Arts Interactive Annual 9 The 39 winning projects from the Communication Arts Interactive Annual 9 competition are now listed on the Commuication Arts website. Categories are: Advertising, Business, Entertainment, InfoDesign, and Self Promo. I love the Flyguy site. The creator's comments for Flyguy can be found here. Cultivating Creativity This article titled 'Cultivating Creativity' by Wendy Richmond is also in the Communication Arts Interactive Annual 2003 issue. The part headed 'Quantity equals quality' is really interesting and should be a must read lesson for all students! She writes: "In the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (The Image Continuum Press), David Bayles and Ted Orland describe a ceramics teacher who, at the beginning of the semester, split the class in two. One half was told they would be graded on the quantity of work: the more a student produced, the higher the grade. The second group would be graded on quality; to get an “A,” a student only needed to produce one pot, but it had to be perfect. It turned out that at the end of the semester, the works of highest quality were all produced by the students in the “quantity” group. That group was constantly learning and improving, while the other group “sat theorizing about perfection” and did not progress in their actual work. Most artists I know produce a huge volume of work in order to have just a few pieces to show. Every new piece contains information about the direction they should take. Producing a lot is a way of reaching a destination." The world's best blogs David Stonehouse has compiled this list of the world's best blogs for an article in the SMH. Bread TV Bread is at TV series showing on Channel 10 on Sunday mornings at 11am about the experiences of people running small businesses in Australia. ESL Cafe's Job Information Journal For anyone who's considered teaching ESL anywhere in the world, the Job Information Journal section of the site is a must read. People post their ESL teaching experiences of various countries around the world to this site. Recycling features on the Ourhouse website The Ourhouse site has put a number of recycling related articles and fact sheets from their TV show online. Feastability - Newtown Food festival - on today! There's a Feastability - Food and Wine Festival on at the Newtown Performing Arts School today! 030925: Thu Adam Russell of VIM Design Have just added Adam Russell's interview to the Features section. Also added some examples of VIM Design's work to the Gallery section. Projects featured are: the Grand Icon, Dublin; Parramatta Rd Masterplan; Dream Home concept; Beyond East + West Competition, South Korea; and the Marrickville mixed-use apartments, Sydney. If you're checking out the VIM Design gallery area, once you click on a project name, scroll do the bottom of the main image and click on the 'Data' link for more information about the particular project. VIM Design have won awards in International Design Competitions. They've also worked on some interesting projects locally. If you want to view more of their work, check out their website also: http://www.vimdesign.com.au. They have also just submitted a scheme for another International Design Competition: a new tower building in Dublin's rejuvenating Dockland area which includes a recording studio for rock band U2 at the top. Marion van den Driesschen I've added Marion van den Driesschen's artwork to the Gallery section of Chaos Generation. Marion is an artist. She has held a number of solo exhibitions as well as being in selected mixed shows. She has also been a stylist and costume and props designer for drama productions. Her recent exhibition was 'Liquid'- an exhibition of paintings at Interstudio. The 'Liquid' series portrayed "aspects of flowing dynamic movements, colours spreading, metling and dissolving into each other... Like Liquid." So check out Marion's online gallery and read her profile now on Chaos Generation! 030921: Sun What is open source? - article If you want to get an introduction to what is meant by 'open source' then check out Mike McCormack's article titled 'What is Open Source?' in the features section of Chaos Generation! He writes about the benefits of open source software. He says: "The principle of Open Source is to encourage sharing of ideas, building upon the ideas of others and morphing those ideas into new ideas... The concept has been applied to other abstract forms, such as music, art, and writing with varying degrees of success..." He also references a number of interesting sites in the article such as the Creative Commons site. Creative Commons "Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain -- or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not be designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc." Kewlbox Kewlbox is a cool business idea. They offer free games for webmasters to put onto their websites that visitors to the site can play. Affiliates of Kewlbox get a commission for people who sign up for a premium membership which may mean access to more features to a game etc. They also design 'advergames' for companies and have licensing options for games as well. So here's a company that's designing games for a living! It's a good concept! Check out lots of games at the site including: Sketchy Snow Sledding! and Letter Rip. 030920: Sat Jet Li movie on TV tonight Jet Li's 'Once Upon a Time in China III' movie is on SBS tonight from 10.00-11.55pm. I haven't seen this one. Going to watch it. Just finished watching the film. Jet Li does some pretty awesome martial arts in this movie. It's action all the way. Baking a Banana cake Bought a kilo of bananas a few days ago for 99c. Thought I'd get through them but haven't even come close yet. So thought I'd make a banana cake. Went to the web for a recipe this time. Found Grandma Berg's banana cake with walnuts on the ABC website. The comment on the recipe said "This banana cake works - unlike banana cakes I've known, it doesn't go flat and have the texture of rubber thongs." So I decided to give it a go - I actually had all the ingredients at home already so I baked away! The cake was moist and soft and yummy and it was a normal sized loaf (and not flat) so I'll be keeping this recipe and will make it again. It's also nice with ice-cream as you can see from the photo I took before I ate it! The Recipe Index of the Riverland SA section on the ABC website also has links to other cool recipes like creme brulee and mashed potatoes and the world's easiest and quickest casserole. Fish and chips Felt like fish and chips for dinner last night. Tried a place on King St, close to St Peters end - they have a sign up that says 'NZ fish and chips'. Got a large battered Barramundi for $5.50 and chips for $2.50. The fish was pretty nice! 030918: Thu Binary Girl Zannah of the Voxmachina site put up this 'Binary Girl' experiment or test as she put it. Looks pretty cool. I like the pixel characters look. Kent Loset's Pixel Characters I wanted to find more examples of this type of pixel artwork and found a link to Kent Loset's Pixel Characters page! They look great! Check out pixel versions of Neo, Wolverine, Ozzy, Harry Potter, Exorsist Girl, Chewbacca, Dalai Lama and heaps more! You can even download a photoshop file with lots of layers of components that enable you make your own pixel characters. I also really liked looking at the Kent Loset's portfolio. It's pretty cool! Inspires me to maybe work on a web cartoon project my friend and I have been thinking about - maybe someday. Experimenting with pixels I did a bit of experimenting a few years ago where I liked zooming in on details of photos till you got to the pixel level. It looks really cool and the patterns still look logical and beautiful. It's kind of like a analysing things at the most basic level, the pixel level. It's like doing a digital visual analysis of something, kind of like a scientist looking at some natural object through a microscope to understand something at it's most basic, core level. You can click on the image on the right to get a larger version of it. PIXELbros Simon Alderson has created pixel artwork. You can see his work by going to the PIXELbros site and then selecting 'Simon Alderson'. Eboy Also love what Eboy have done with pixel art.. Amazing Race Seems like the Amazing Race is getting a bit dangerous. One task was to retrieve a clue from a treasure chest in an aquarium with sharks swimming in it. It's great that nothing happened to the contestants, but it seemed a bit irresponsible to let untrained people do that type of task. In South Korea, a block of ice got cut out of freezing water, and then one of the team members had to go down the hole and swim under frozen ice and get out through another hole nearby. There was also the task between strong stomach and strong hands in South Korea. Reichen and Chip chose the strong stomach task and had to eat a plate of chopped up live octopus. That was hard to even watch. I think the next episode is the last one. 030917: Wed Homeless Gallery "Conceived and initiated in Poland, the Homeless Gallery is a celebration of photography it¹s many forms. The Homeless Gallery appears fleetingly wherever and whenever there is a need amongst photographers from all walks of life to exhibit their works to a larger audience. The Homeless Gallery operates without funds or restrictions as to who may exhibit or what they may exhibit, and at no cost to exhibitors. The Homeless Gallery finds a benefactor who will loan us a suitable space for a week. The word goes out - photographers bring their work and hang it - we have an opening party - the general public comes to view the work - we have a closing party .... and so the cycle continues." The next Homeless Gallery event is at the Melbourne Fringe 2003. Venue: Collingwood Housing Estate Underground Carpark Harmsworth Street, Collingwood, Victoria, Australia "Saturday October 4th 'Hanging Day' for participants from 8am to 5pm [absolutely no more registrations after 5pm] 'Versinage' opening party for participants and their guests from 6pm to 9pm Sunday October 5th to Sunday October 12th* Homeless Gallery open to the public daily, from 10am to 5pm. Admission is free. [*4pm closing on Sunday October 12th] Take down work from 4pm to 6pm, followed by 'Finisage' party for all Homeless Gallery and Melbourne Fringe participants." Fresh Inc Fresh Inc is the blog of Inc.com. It is also a magazine. It focusses on new business ideas etc. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge The Harvard Business School Working Knowledge site is another site that has articles on business, entrepreneurship, marketing and more. More of a corporate focus. Jeansnow.net I came across the Jeansnow.net website the other day. The tagline is: "Digital diaries from the Tokyo front". A guy going by Nej who's name is Jean Snow is behind this website. He's a resident of Tokyo and has married a Japanese woman. It's pretty cool! He must put so much time and effort into it to keep it so updated and comprehensive. He blogs from his mobile, as well as the usual blogging, has a photoblog, and publishes an online zine titled 'Geisha' which is a pretty cool looking online zine. Generation Rice Generation Rice is an online Asian and American Asian zine which interviews Asian artists, actors, entrepreneurs etc. It also features reviews of Asian films and books, photo essays. They launched their new website on September 15, 2003. There was an earlier feature in Generation Rice on Jenny Kwok who established the Cut + Paste website/store. It focusses on selling funky handcrafted clothes and accessories. The Cut + Paste site is in the process of an update but the last time I visited, it featured some cool things. 030916: Tue This Is Not Art. 2nd-6th Oct 2003, Newcastle, NSW "This Is Not Art is Australia's largest annual gathering of young media makers, musicians, artists, writers, and troublemakers. This Is Not Art is the umbrella term for 6 seperate media and digital arts festivals held over 5 days in October in Newcastle, NSW: + The National Young Writers Festival + Electrofringe (a festival of new media and digital arts) + The National Student Media Conference + Sound Summit + Radio Active (Independent Radio Conference) + Critical Animals: Postgraduates working in the new medias conference" Cornerfold - SBS website Cornerfold, launched in December 2002, is an SBS website featuring original zine writing and comic art, brought to life by new media design... The site includes a regular ezine (cornerfold magazine), two weblogs (pixelstories and like it is) and a forum (spit it out). Events page updated Have added a number of events to the events page. 030907: Sun BRW Young Rich issue The September 4, 2003 issue of BRW is the 'Young Rich' issue. You can still buy this issue at newsagents up until Thursday, then they'll be a new issue out. This issue lists the people who've made their fortunes by 40 or younger. There's a few articles available for free on the web as well: Editor: New money, old values by Tony Featherstone Young, gifted and rich by Robert Skeffington Entrepreneurs: The right stuff by John Bailey The entrepreneur is back by Robert Skeffington You can access the other articles for a fee or take up a four week free trial of the BRW magazine online. Adam Russell + Ben Giles from VIM Design speak at UTS - FREE talk VIM Design are a young and creative architectural firm established by Adam Russell two years ago. They've already won competitions and have worked on some interesting projects. You can hear them speak at UTS. Details below. Also listed on the events page. + Sep 10: Sydney Adam Russell + Ben Giles of VIM Design Studio. What is VIM Design?, R322, Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building, UTS, Peter Johnson Building, Building 6, 702-730 Harris St, Ultimo. More info: James Doerfler, P: 02 9514 8047, F: 02 9514 8078, E: james.doerfler@uts.edu.au I did an interview with Adam Russell a couple of weeks ago which will go up on Chaos Generation soon, so watch out for that one too. It's a small world. Discovered that we were in the same class in way back in Primary School. Law firm goes green for clients, savings An article titled 'Law firm goes green for clients, savings' in the 'East Bay Business Times' in the States talks about a law firm - Wendel Rosen that have become a "green" business. The article says they've implemented changes such as "more use of electronic document transmission, switching completely to recycled paper, routine two-sided printing and use of soy-based inks will save more than 250 mature trees, 24,000 gallons of water, 40,000 pounds of greenhouse gases, and 31,400 kilowatt hours each year, said Donald Simon, the firm's sustainability expert." It's cool how this firm saves money and gets other "green" clients on board due to the firm's objectives in going green. Italian Film Festival If you want to catch some contemporary Italian films then check out the Italian Film Festival. Details can be found at: http://www.italianfilmfestival.com.au. Indian Film Festival - A Beginner's Guide to Bollywood - Sep 4-14 at the Cinema Paris, Fox Studios If you'd like to see some Indian films, then make sure you catch the Indian Film Festival at Cinema Paris, Fox Studios. Down and out with the flu Been battling the flu the last week or so. Seems like almost everyone in the office has got it. Got considerably worse over the weekend. So I've just been resting and resting. Threw all my going out plans out the window. Just hope I get over this real soon. MG Garage Went to MG Garage for lunch on Friday. Company outing. The office is now split in two - got a lot bigger due to one major project so it was good that we all got together for this event. Dark Angel On Thursday Channel 7 started showing the Dark Angel series again! I didn't see any promos for it beforehand. Almost missed it. They screened the very first 2hr episode again at 11.30pm or so. It's on again this coming Thursday night. Together Saw the Chinese film 'Together' at the Dendy, Newtown. Won tickets from the Sydney Asia-Pacific Film Festival who put the event on with Hopscotch films. It was a beautiful film about love and sacrifice - main storyline was about a 13 year old violinist and his father who make the journey to Beijing so that the boy can have the opportunity to make it as a successful violinist. Amelie Watched 'Amelie' on video. It's a nice sweet, love story. I loved the gnomes! I'd love to do that with my bears one day. 030902: Tue Comic book artists getting an audience online and making money online This article titled 'The rebirth of comics' in the SMH talks about comic book artists publishing their work online to an audience that may never have got to see their work otherwise, the micropayments idea where people pay a small amount/donation to view the comics, and comic book artists adding another level of interactivity and dimension to their work by using tools like Macromedia Flash. Hobby Heros - Student Event - 8 September, 2003 From the AGDA site: "Monster Children, Design is Kinky and Paris|Sydney|Tokyo give an insight into what it was like for them to walk away from jobs and take that leap of faith, while filling you in on where they've been and where they're heading." Starting 6.30pm, Monday, September 8, 2003 Billy Blue Auditorium, Northpoint, 100 Miller Street, North Sydney AGDA Student members: $10, Student Non members: $20 RSVP Robyn at secretariat@agda.com.au places are limited. I really like the Monster magazine. It's in quite a few newsagents these days. NSW Knowledge Management Forum FREE - Thursday 4 September 2003 Speaker 1: Stephen Wells, Computer Associates "Information In Action - A KM Initiative Case Study" What do you do when your organisation is spread around the world, has grown very rapidly, has a diverse range of business cultures and you want to get at the knowledge that will drive you business forward? The "Information In Action" program, created by the Quality Assurance team at Computer Associates led not only to the world wide deployment of this knowledge initiative but also its commercialisation as a company offering. This presentation by Stephen Wells, Business Technologists, CA, looks at the drivers, technology, measures and assessment of this KM initiative. Speaker 2: Gidley McCullaugh, Catalyst Communication and Training "Capturing, Structuring and Disseminating Knowledge - An e-learning paradigm" This session looks at the role of the e-learning approach in capturing, packaging and disseminating knowledge in organisation settings. The session will be led by Gidley McCullaugh, principal of Catalyst Communication and Training. In this sesion Gidley will look at the way in which content management and instructional design technologies can be brought together to support knowledge management initiatives. Of particular focus will be the capture of tacit knowledge and its transformation into learning content. When: Thursday 4th September Turn up by 5:30pm, talks start at 6pm. Finishes at 7:30pm, and then down the road for drinks and chats. If you arrive after 5:30pm, ring James Robertson on 0416 054 213, to arrange for someone to let you in. Where: Standards Australia, Level 6, 286 Sussex St, (Corner of Bathurst St) Cost: Absolutely free, no need to RSVP. James Robertson Step Two Designs Pty Ltd 030901: Mon Last few days On Wednesday morning, I went to the Sir Hermann Black Gallery at Sydney Uni to see an exhibition of the winners of the 2003 Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists. Winners were: Lucas Ihlein (NSW), Tim Silver (NSW), David Griggs (NSW) and Renee So (VIC). Then spent the rest of the day helping with final preparations for the Francis Greenway Society/ Architecture Show - Green Building Conference 2003 that was on all day Thursday. There was an interesting line-up of speakers for the event and even though I was running around taking digital photos of the speakers and making sure things ran smoothly, I did get to listen in on bits of the talks. Then there was an Awards party that night. There was lots of food throughout the day so wasn't hungry at dinner time so just shared some fish and chips then went home and went to sleep in an instant. Went out with a group of uni friends on Friday night. Ended up going on a bit of a pub crawl. Started off at the Occidental then went onto the Forbes then onto the 3 Monkeys. Had to queue to get into the 3 Monkeys as they had a live band playing. Someone poured a beer down my back so I figured it was time to leave the 3 Monkeys Bar for the night. Got home after 1am sometime. I used to work around Wynard and so I guess the area was my old stomping ground. Kind of interesting that I bumped into 3 old workmates through the night. Found that 2 of them had also left that workplace. On Saturday morning, I went to the Sydney Affordable Art Show. The idea is that lots of galleries set up a space and sell artists' work that is priced under $5k. It was a great event in that the public could go to the event and see a very diverse range of artwork being sold. It's not nearly as intimidating as walking into a gallery, and by setting that price limit, it makes the spaces more approachable somehow. It seemed like the public were quite happy to look at the artworks up close and to talk to the gallery representatives and the artists. I'd seen Warwick Orme's photography work at the Eca Bar in Darlinghurst before and really like his work. Well, he had a space at the show so I got to meet the artist as well! His work can be seen online at: http://www.floranova.com.au. I particularly love the photographic artwork titled 'Honesty'. Up close it looks even better! There was a panel discussion of 6 emerging artists and the panel was chaired by John McDonald from the New Contemporaries Gallery. He asked them how they got into art, what art school was like, what they do, what inspires them, and where they see themselves headed. I found the whole session really interesting to listen to and really inspiring. At the very least, it's made me want to just take my digital camera everywhere and just take lots of photos of anything that catches my eye - and then all I have to do is just download it to my computer. It'd be great practice, great fun and will provide me with a digital photographic diary. Also, I don't have to worry about the expense associated with developing rolls of film. Was going to spend about an hour there but ended up staying well over 4 hours. Had heaps of fun! Had some Japanese food for dinner that night. Then on Sunday morning. Got up and met up with family and extended family from NZ for yum cha at 11am at the New Marigold. Yum. 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