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Wow, what a year! 2011 has certainly speed past in a blur. When I started putting this post together, I never realised how much of a truly epic year it has been. There’s been lots of food, travel, conferences, adventures and did I mention food?! Continue reading →

It’s the last day of 2010 and it’s time to reflect on what a good year it has been. I’ve helped to organise BarCampCanberra and TEDxCanberra. I attended a number of excellent conferences (including UX Australia and TAMOz), meant lots of interesting people, and celebrated many special birthdays this year (including an 18th, 21st, 30th, 40th and 50th!). I’ve helped to judge the Australian Web Awards and the McFarlane Prize.

My love of robots have continued, with new additions to the robot family including another lawn mower robot, a robot dog from @lozz, and some very cool retro robots.

2010 definitely seem to be the year for babies in our social circle. Every time I opened facebook, it seemed like another friend was having a baby! There were also many engagements, hens nights and weddings.

Most importantly, my interest in skepticism has grown significantly over 2010. I learned about the importance of taking a critical thinking approach to all areas of my life. Attending TAMOz in November has really helped to reinforce my growing love of science and education. I’ve learned about citizen science and grassroots skepticism (take the Stop AVN cause as an example).

So what’s my new year resolutions for 2011?

• Want less
• Do good
• Keep taking a critical thinking and an evidence-based approach to life
• As 2010 has gone past in such a blur, I’m planning on taking the time to slow down so I can appreciate each moment.
• Address my vegetable phobia within the first half of 2011!

A happy new year to all of you!

Like any good information architect, I’ve been doing a bit of a content audit of my clothes and re-evaluating my existing clothes categories. What this has resulted in is a number of clothes that need to be given away. While there are a number of religious-base organisations that are happy to accept our donations through the charity bins or at their shop front, it’s much harder trying to find non-religious organisations.

Here’s a list of non-religious charitable organisations in Canberra that are happy to accept clothing, books and related items. Please feel free to suggest other Canberra based organisations.

• The National Brain Injury Foundation (NBIF) is one of our personal favourites. A shop front is located on Genge Street, in the Griffin Centre. You can support them by purchasing items from the shop front or dropping off a range of items in good condition (we’ve dropped off clothes and household bric-a-brac).
• Lifeline accepts books, magazines, DVD’s, Videos, CDs, computer software, and some Bric-a-Brac. They hold the very excellent Book Fair three times a year in Canberra. For more information about donating items, read Ways You Can Help or drop items off at 66 Heffernan St, Mitchell and all Video Ezy Stores.
• The Smith Family has various donation bins around Canberra. They accept clothing, footwear, blankets and linen only.

As always, please check with individual charities for up-to-date information. Please DO NOT DUMP items outside closed shop fronts or charity bins. It costs charities large amounts of money to clear items that get left out in the open plus it can be a fire hazard. It’s extremely frustrating to see items and even rubbish (including non-working electrical and computer items) dumped next to charity bins. If it’s broken and you don’t want it, neither does the charity!

Other resources:

• Giving unwanted goods to charity – list from the ACT government
• Yoink! – While Yoink! isn’t a charity, it’s a great way to recycle items that you don’t need. I’ve used it numerous times to get rid of unwanted (but functional) items. Plus, it’s been designed and developed here in Canberra!

PS: I wish the Red Cross, RSPCA and Koomarri had store fronts in Canberra!

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

This year, I’ve decided to write about someone who is relatively unknown in the broader web community but is very knowledgeable in the accessibility field. She would never blow her own horn, which means that only those of us who have had the pleasure of working with her knows how good she is. She’s a shy and quiet type, and is truly one of the nicest and most generous person I know. She has been working in the tech and user experience field for a while. She’s smart, passionate and she knows her accessibility stuff.

I want you to meet my friend and colleague, Kim Chatterjee. What I love about Kim is her willingness to share her knowledge and time to help everyone, even if it means very little sleep for her! She has a detailed understanding of accessibility and has spent quite a few years doing some cool accessibility work in Government. She’s also really great at communicating complex concepts through interesting and lovely visuals. She’s really humble about her achievements so if you do get to meet her, she won’t tell you how good she is but if you get to chat to her, you’ll soon realise the depth and breadth of her accessibility knowledge.

While others are out and about talking the talk, Kim is busy with the actual doing. She’s helped to inspire a number of people about accessibility, who have now gone on into other organisations either carrying a passion for accessibility or having an increased awareness of accessibility. Now that’s inspirational.

The highly anticipated BarCampCanberra event happened yesterday, with a large gathering of smart and passionate folks from around Canberra, Yass, Wollongong and Sydney discussing interesting topics such as Government 2.0, social innovation, collaboration, typography, hackerspaces and more.

For those unfamiliar with the BarCamp concept:

BarCampCanberra is a free-to-attend community-run conference where anyone can come and watch, participate or present on anything they are passionate about – either something interesting they’ve been working on, an idea they’d like to present or to brainstorm the solution to a problem with a bunch of like-minded smart people

We had over 150 people registered for the event, 46 pizzas consumed, 72 bottles of water drunk (plus the additional cups and water containers) and 39 sessions including a series of 5 minute lighting talks (I love the 5 minute lighting talk format).

The event was tweeted, flickred, livestreamed and Googled waved. We were even covered in the Canberra Times (page 8 of the Sunday 7th February newspaper).

Some of my favourite quotes about BarCampCanberra comes from @dekrazee1:

Brain is still abuzz from #bcc2010. BarCamp is the techy equivalent of a day spa. Energising and invigorating. #I<3BarCamp

@ozdj:

@RazChorev Yep. Sound ROI. That $50 of fuel (and ~8hrs of travel time) got me about $500 worth of education today. #bcc2010

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A night of comedy, spandex, black lace and wicked satire – that describes the current show at Dracula’s Cabaret Restaurant in Melbourne. I’ve been to the Dracula’s Cabaret Restaurant in the Gold Coast twice and have loved every minute of the dinner and show combination. The food is great (sourced locally) and the cocktails are just stunning.

My hubby and I will be visiting Melbourne next week as I will be getting laser eye surgery. To celebrate, we are attending Dracula’s on Saturday. We have also ended up with two spare tickets which Dracula’s will not refund.

Do you know anyone who might be interested in buying these two tickets?

The details of the dinner show are as follows:

• Date: Saturday 6th of June
• Time: 6.45pm until late
• Location: 100 Victoria Street, Carlton Victoria 3053
• Price: We paid $72/head but I’m more than happy to negotiate a really good price as I need to move these tickets – please make an offer!

The ticket price includes a 3 course meal, show and a ghost train ride.

Please contact me if you’re interested.

It’s Ada Lovelace Day – an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

From the Ada Lovelace Day pledge site:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

I have many female friends who are doing wonderful work in the technology industry – too many to name but here’s a few Aussie females that I’ll like to sing out about.

• Donna – she is a great information architect, the Queen of Card Sorting and contributes much of her time to the web community. She’s always happy to share her knowledge and experience.
• Caronne – I love her passion for the work we do. She’s an extremely supportive person and manages to balance work, life, web community stuff and life with two teens. She does amazing stuff with advocating great user experiences in Government agencies that many people don’t hear about!
• Susan – one of the many challenging things of being a women is the ability to juggle multiple stressful components of our life. Susan is amazing – she loves the work she does and some how, manages to balance work, family, photography, blogging and web stuff!
• Viv – a special person I used to work with who is passionate about accessibility and user experience. She’s a solid rock for any team that she’s on and is always quietly working away in the background getting stuff done. It’s people like Viv who work so hard and never seem to get recognition for the hard work they do – so here’s my shout out to you Viv!
• Lisa – is amazing. She knows a lot of things about accessibility, usability and user experience. We have a very similiar approach to the work we do. She’s a very calming influence and I admire her passion for the work we do.

There are many other females out there who also doing great work (I’m looking at you Teresa, Amie, Suze, Lana!).

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

My friend Ben tagged me for the cool My Way Home meme. I’m a curious person by nature and I, like Ben, wonder what fascinating scenes do all my friends see and experience on their ways home.

The rules are simple:

• Use a simple camera, the simpler the better
• Upload them to flickr or whatever your preference is, but as long as they can be seen through the web
• Tag them if you can with “onmywayhomeme”
• Blog it and tell the story
• Tag your mates.

I tag (I know a few of the people have been tagged already):

• Donna
• Vicki
• Nick Cowie
• Lisa Herrod
• Andrew Boyd
• Nathanael Boehm
• Robert(Gurdonark)

So here’s my story…

It’s about ten past five on Friday. I’m leaving work early as I promised to meet a friend for coffee on the way home. I’m already running late…I dash out of the client’s building but have a few traffic lights to content with. I entertain myself my grabbing a shot of the interesting red sculpture near the intersection (it doesn’t look very red here as the sun was setting fast).

The light is still red…so I tried a different angle of the same sculpture.

I love textures and colours. This abstract wall sculpture on the Commonwealth Bank building catches my eye every time.

I like the look of Canberra Centre at dusk.

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