Always Travelling

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My LC went out on Friday 17th March to celebrate two special occasions - Mel's birthday and seeing Woodsy off to APXLDS!

Here are the pics, click for larger versions.





We went out to a Mongolian restaurant in north Perth, it was expensive but eating the meal only came after putting it together - it was hilarious and everyone loved it. You'd pack it down to fit as much in your bowl as possible (the strips of meat were snap frozen) and then hand it to the cooks who spread it out on a big hotplate. A more detailed description will come on the Curtin LC blog but suffice to say that it was a great night!

The seven weeks I spent in Pakistan provided me with the pivotal development experience of my life thus far. When I reminisce, I think on the personal successes, the strong friendships, the immersion into Pakistani culture; I think on how it felt to be there. Pakistan will always hold a special place in my heart and I'm already working on a way to get back in the near future. Make no mistake, it wasn't all rosey - I was put outside of my comfort zone often, I was sick a number of times and I didn't accomplish as much as I had aimed to - but the learning experience I've gained from my time in Pakistan in invaluable, and even more so because there were challenges.

The decision to travel to Pakistan was made quickly. I was in contact with Tori Anderson through an initiative to connect with my region's alumni (Tori and I both originate from Perth, Western Australia), and on day Tori mentioned in conversation that it would be possible for me to work for AIESEC in Pakistan. Straight away I checked flight availabilities online and started figuring out much a trip would cost. To cut a long story short, my supportive parents agreed to loan me the required money and I arrived in Pakistan 3 weeks later!

My duties in Pakistan were as such:

• I was to work on the national committee for a period of seven weeks.
• I was to have three areas of focus. 1) National partnership meetings, 2) Further develop the information systems, in particular the website, 3) Assist in the implementation of people management systems.
• I was to receive a stipend of 7000 Pakistani rupees per month, and be provided accommodation at the national committee house as well as with members.
• In addition I was to be a member of the team of facilitators at the national strategic direction conference.

In essence, I was to gain working experience across a wide range of business functions, in a foreign culture, and be provided with a strong support network. To top it off I was also helping to establish AIESEC in Pakistan - a rare opportunity indeed!

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hmmmmmmmm I whipped that little piece up on the plane to Laverton (a post on Laverton is to come - I'm just collecting pics from my team). I need to finish the piece off with a little paragraph of no more than 100 words, to take it to 500 words in total. I was thinking about detailing one or two special memories to illustrate my experience. I think then the piece would flow okay - starting from how I felt about the trip, going onto my duties, and then finishing with a couple of special memories. What do you think of it so far? Should I scrap it and start over with a different tact?  Should I redo certain bits? This is just a first draft I've put together pretty quick so please feel free to pull it to bits.

And just before I leave for uni this morning, I've decided that I'm going to shave my head at the next shave for a cure day. Who's going to join me?? I reckon I can get together the whole LC to either colour or shave. hahaha

I'm leaving at noon today for Laverton, a remote aboriginal and mining community situated about 1100kms north east of Perth. I'm flying up there as part of a group of 6 volunteers, and I'll be working with the aboriginals kids and basically putting myself in a totally different socioeconomic situation - because travelling to other countries has made me realise just how little I know of Australia, and just how little I have experienced. It should be confrontational, and it should be eye opening. I don't approach this with the attitude that it'll be fun, but rather that it'll be a learning experience. I plan to take it as it comes - there is a plan to the weekend but plans can fly out the window easily. Pakistan taught me that.

Anyway I'll update with pics hopefully on Monday night, but I arrive back in Perth at Monday noon - so if you're wondering where I am, now you know :) My camera is broken so I'm hoping the others in the group will bring cameras and I'll get pics off them.

Also in the back of my mind is the fact that there are a lot of rural issues that have PBoX potential. So I'm scouting in that sense too. There are some interesting leads in that area.

Laverton map
http://www.walkabout.com.au/locations/WALaverton.shtml
http://www.gedc.wa.gov.au/laverton.php
http://www.abc.net.au/goldfields/stories/s957098.htm

Craic [krak] is a word in common usage in Ireland meaning fun, enjoyment, or good times, often in the context of drinking or music. It can also mean a person who is good company.

Got some feedback from Sai, it went something like this:

(inclusion of Aussie slang is simply to show how I received the message) Hmmm well I do like posting lots of images. So I've taken this feedback on board and changed two things. Firstly I've changed the settings to display the most recent 7 posts, rather than 10 days worth of posts. The second thing I've done is to enable lightbox so that I can post smaller pics on here and you guys can then click on the pics to bring up a larger version - this results in a faster load time initially. I've already posted on this a bit. Hope this makes the blog more accessible.

Both available from Curtin's Bookmark Cafe. Ordering this combination is becoming a daily ritual of mine. With Guild discount the cost of this little meal is $3.50 (which equals about 150ish Pakistani rupees I think). Not exactly healthy, but it fills me up :)

... near the University of Western Australia in Perth.

Zooomr, Writely, Irows, Thumbstacks

Zooomr can be compared to flickr - it's newer and has some slick features that flickr doesn't, like geotagging and voice annotation for instance. It was created in the most by a precocious 17 yr old over a three month period, and I'd say he's well on his way to being a millionaire. Here's the techcrunch writeup.

I have all my original photos offline and I only have a free account at flickr, so although I don't want split my photos between places, I still have all my pics on my harddrive anyway. The test pic below is hosted at my zooomr.com account.

One thing that flickr has though that comes with an established user community and making your API available to the developer community (definition of API; wikipedia article) is some wicked third party add-ons. This tangent is going to require a new paragraph ->

For instance, there is a greasemonkey script called Greased Lightbox that is designed to "enhance browsing on websites that link to images such as Google Image Search, Flickr, Gmail, and Facebook." In 3 screenshots below I'll illustrate one of the cool features this script enables.

(btw - greasemonkey (1, 2) is a firefox extension that allows you to run scripts within your browser to enable you to do things other than what the website or web application usually enables and/or intends. For instance, when gmail first opened for public use there was no delete button - however some clever chap created a script to run client-side within the browser creating a delete button. People who had installed the greasemonkey extension could then run that script themselves.)

But back to that demonstration of Greased Lightbox. In the first pic, I'm scrolling through pics in flickr. I find one I want to take a closer look at, so I click on it. With the Greased Lightbox script enabled, instead of going to a whole new page which I'll have to back out of later, I get a nice overlay in my window, with a loading sequence (pic 2). In pic 3, you can see the large version of the pic. To exit the overlay I just click anywhere inside the window.



(I've enabled lightbox on this blog, so if you click these pics you'll get exactly the same effect as what the Greased Lightbox script running within your own browser will enable on other websites).


Writely is an online word editor. I like it, and I've been using it for about 5 or 6 months. They just got bought by Google. It's the collaborative nature of these online tools which I love - let's say for example you have a meeting agenda that is open to inputs from everyone, you can start the document, invite all the relevant people through a special password, and they can edit the document with you concurrently in realtime, and the areas they are working on are highlighted so that you know what they've done. The document is stored online and anyone can view it via a unique url, and you don't have to worry about your usb.

Irows. What Writely is for Word, Irows is for Excel.

Thumbstacks. It's new but it's the online Powerpoint app. Again, you can do pretty cool things when you take a desktop application online - thumbstacks has a really simple yet powerful flickr integration function to import pics from flickr into your online powerpoint presentation. Your presentation is available via a url. Imagine walking into your tutorial class to do an assessed presentation and just loading up a url on which your ppt is. :)

It's interesting to note and compare the different stats for aiesec.org and nomadlife.org. You can play with the 'chartlet' below to change the time period and the statistic in question. Alexaholic is a new lightweight AJAX based front-end to access Alexa data. Nifty.

Update: seems like I can't insert javascript within posts so I'll just link to the page.

Okay, I've added some AJAX functionality. This'll be really handy for the future, and will mean my blog isn't pic bloated. I do love to post pics. Anyway, click on either of the photos or the hypertext link below them and a nice overlay on top of the blog page will come up, with a larger version of the pic, or in the case of the hypertext, the pic itself. It's really nice. Now that I've got the javascript and css all sorted, it's very simple to take it from post to post now - all that is needed to add this functionality to a link is to give it the attritute rel="lightbox". The function is called Lightbox and you can find a tutorial on how to implement it here.



Haris & I at SDC

Just saw this pic again. He got drenched with a big bowl of the filthiest crap you've ever seen. Very seedy. Yuck is all that comes to mind.

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update: I made the pics smaller, so they are 230 pixels and not 470 like the text above says.

What is Nida doing??? Any ideas??


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click the pic for a big version

A very uplifting piece by Adam on his blog, Hero of the Light (note, I've pasted 2 bits of his original post below, for the full blog post see here):

This one is for all the biology students out there. I don't study anything that requires me to fiddle with petri dishes, but these are very beautiful patterns nonetheless. Find more here. From the original source:

"Billions and billions of bacterial landscape architects pruning -- no less in environments poisoned with antibiotics -- other bacterial landscape architects, dead or alive, to form dazzling arabesque parterres. The self-organizing embroidery of organisms in constant Darwinian mode."


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