www.nickhodge.com

My favour­ite Aus­tralian poem, “Said Han­ra­han”, by John O’Brian (aka Patrick Hartigan)

"...We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out."

This whole poem seems to epi­tom­ise the cur­rent weather con­di­tions, farm­ers and a fleet­ing glimpse of an old Aus­tralia, slowly disappearing.

When it rains, it pours.

Colin Thiele, a South Aus­tralian author of over 80 books died recently aged 85.

ABC News report his most fam­ous book, Storm Boy; set on the Coorong of South Aus­tralia. Another, later book made into a movie by the SA Film Cor­por­a­tion was Blue Fin. Set in Port Lin­coln (but filmed in Streaky Bay) — it detailed the rela­tion­ship between a tuna fish­ing father, and his son.

In fact, most of Colin’s books dealt with father-son rela­tion­ships set in South Aus­tralia. Fire in the Stone, Sun on the Stubble. Set set­tings were a unique view of farm­ing life; the wheat, sheep; Ger­man her­it­age and a time in the first half of the 20^th Century.

Even when I went to school, Colin’s books were a little “non-PC”, and as such they were not a part of the books cur­riculum. Both Colin and I are des­cend­ents of Ger­man immig­rants, and his books had a semi-autobiographical qual­ity — a shared perspective.

A good innings, and I am sure his writ­ings touched many.

Sky News Aus­tralia is report­ing that Steve Irwin, Australia’s world-famous Cro­codile Hunter, is repor­ted to have died at age 44.

The early reports are that he was fatally stung by a stin­gray. Mar­ine Medic web site reports that 2 people in Aus­tralia have died from strin­gray barbs. If I remem­ber my Cous­teau, the tail whips very quickly.

ABC News web site has more details. Accord­ing to reports, a stin­gray barb went through his chest as he was film­ing an under­wa­ter sequence near Port Douglas, North Queens­land. (edited from Cairns, 2:52pm)

No-one should die at work. Nor does the simple phrase “he died doing what he loved” ever repair the feel­ing of loss to those close to him.

A typ­ical Aus­sie: a lar­rikin, non-conformist and pas­sion­ate indi­vidual. The sort of Aus­tralian we Aus­trali­ans were quietly proud rep­res­en­ted our coun­try. Many may have thought of his over-the-top expres­sions, includ­ing the fam­ous “crikey” as too flip­pant and super­fi­cial: no-one can deny his love for animals.

A com­mon din­ner con­ver­sa­tion for Aus­trali­ans over­seas is about our deadly flora and fauna. Sadly, this myth only partly based on real­ity is now augmented.

Aus­tralia, the world, and our nat­ive anim­als will miss Steve.

Good on yer, mate. Your innings were over too soon.

Microsoft is on the cusp of ship­ping a whole forest of new products. Vista, .Net 3.0, Office 2007 and *.live.com stuff than you can poke a branch/stick at. All of which presents Microsoft with some tall chal­lenges. How does a single tree get noticed? How does the world find the sap­lings that are going to be the next Sequoi­aden­dron giganteum? Does the forest work together as a cohes­ive eco-system?

Today, thanks to Microsoft Australia’s, Frank Arrigo, I atten­ded the Blogger’s Brunch. Great of Microsoft to reach out to a sec­tion of the local tech­no­logy blog­ging com­munity. None of the attendees (except Angus Kid­man and Nic) are fam­ous in the blo­go­sphere, but on the inter­nets — noone knows you are an Australian.

Whilst hav­ing been a Microsoft cus­tomer since 1984 (Microsoft Basic 1.0 on a Macin­tosh 128K — and the box is in stor­age some­where), I am a rel­at­ive noob to “mar­ketec­tural” Microsoft. The speak is strangely famil­iar to my ears.

The fol­low­ing are some ran­dom thoughts and un-expressed ques­tions from this morning’s session:

• To the Microsoft PR people. Sorry it par­alleled Microsoft-Groove/Ray Ozzie his­tory with Apple-NeXT/Steve Jobs. To Frank Arrigo. Sorry I stated that the *.live.com people are hav­ing fun being com­pat­ible with all the ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer rather than imple­ment Fire­fox sup­port. Both of these were inten­ded as jokes, not memes.
• Today’s Aus­tralian Fin­an­cial Review’s IT sec­tion has quotes from vari­ous large Aus­tralian fin­an­cial organ­isa­tions stat­ing that they are tak­ing a wait-and-see approach to Win­dows Vista. Some are only now installing Win­dows XP. These organ­isa­tions state they will install Vista in 2–3 years. I find this quite inter­est­ing as it has taken them 4–5 years to install Win­dows XP. Per­son­ally, I am con­cerned if a large fin­an­cial organ­isa­tion is not run­ning a recent, up to date, tested and secure OS on all their desktop com­puters. I’d love to know what fea­tures in upcom­ing products are dir­ect feed­back from Aus­tralian cus­tom­ers. This would show that the soft­ware devel­op­ment pro­cess is a two-way street.
• Share­point should evolve into *.live.com server for the Enter­prise. If Vista has all the hooks, and the connected/disconnected world and new applic­a­tions are going to be mashed (lashed?) together with live stuff, this seems like a logical move. How­ever, large organ­iz­a­tions will be reluct­ant to put all their data into the world’s cloud for all to stumble upon. I am no expert on Share­point and all the pos­i­tion­ing stuff, but it seems there might be a little “ten­sion” (not a bad thing, mind you) between these two environments.*.live.com is gar­ner­ing the mind­share as it is new-ish; many of the APIs and licens­ing mod­els are to be determ­ined. Come to think about it, these are prob­ably the two reas­ons why they are still sep­ar­ate. Rev­enue and developer penetration.
• After hear­ing about the IT pro­fes­sion­als fawned over the cool­ness of Vista infra­struc­ture deploy­ment … I left the ses­sion (both men­tally and phys­ic­ally) ask­ing “what are Microsoft’s cus­tom­ers going to do with all these fine trees?“Customers doing mean­ing­ful stuff with Microsoft’s soft­ware so that they can impress their cus­tom­ers is where it is at. Mar­ket­ing people might call it Unlock­ing the value of the plat­form.
• Vir­tu­al­iz­a­tion on the desktop has been one of my “things” for a while, so it’s inter­est­ing to hear that Vir­tu­alPC is to be included in the Enter­prise ver­sion of Vista. Whilst listen­ing to the intric­a­cies of Vista vs XP deploy­ment, my mind was racing think­ing about the future of oper­at­ing systems.So here goes: why is the Enter­prise desktop so fat? Why not have a Singularity-based OS with .Net 3.0 Frame­work as the API. Win32 + other leg­acy apps could be vir­tu­al­ized to the desktop. As the world and work becomes more con­nec­ted, the smart cli­ent at the edge of the net­work will have a dif­fer­ent face.

In sum­mary, I groked that Microsoft groks (sorry, Hein­lein) the world as it exists today. Ensur­ing that no trees are felled in the rush to mar­ket is going to be an inter­est­ing challenge.

Just com­pleted the Aus­tralian 2006 Census. For some strange reason, Fire­fox 1.5 (kept error­ing “Con­nec­tion was Reset”) was not work­ing on MacOS X 10.4, but Safari worked like a treat.

It took 33% of the time to com­plete the form online. Thank you to the tubes of the internets!

Will the next Aus­tralian Census look like this?

Adobe related blogs in Australia:

Cre­at­ive Cow

Chaos Gen­er­a­tion

Design is Kinky

Michael Efford, Digital Designer

Wors­ley Blog

Cari Jansen: InDes­ign CS2 Snippets

Novem­ber 11^th. Remem­brance Day

“Six out of ten industry pro­fes­sion­als now use the Adobe product as their main lay­out pro­gram, accord­ing a Graphic Arts Ser­vice Asso­ci­ation of Aus­tralia (GASAA) sur­vey” InDes­ign cracks more than half the lay­out traffic in Aus­tralia in Print21 Online.

The data is from a GASAA sur­vey: Adobe InDes­ign Usage Sur­vey. Fol­lows from from an August 2004 release: 96% of Aus­tralian ser­vice pro­viders accept PDF files. Come to Aus­tralia to visit your lay­out, design and prepress future. It feels good to be a small part of this rad­ical industry shift.