The Gene
rator is a news service that started life as a radio show in Byron Bay, northern NSW in 2005. The Generator News was broadcast via the Community Radio Network to 40 stations around the country from 2007 until 2010. Most recently it was broadcast on 4ZZZfm Brisbane at midday on Monday and Wednesday. The website, thegenerator.news. continues to provide a valuable historical record of environmental news from 2005 until the current day.
This book was commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald based on the radio work I was doing with the Generator. It combined a directory of services, tips and hints for living sustainably with useful research into the relative impact of various activities on climate change. The foreword, written by Professor Ian Lowe, reminds us that “the future is something we are creating, not somewhere we are going.”
This project by Steve Falk at Birrarung Marr near the MCG on the banks of the Yarra in Melbourne is an inspiration to the ongoing CHIME project.
Cry Me A River is the account of one man’s journey to the heart ofAustralia’s water crisis. A lifetime engineer in the water industry and successful businessman, Steve Posselt put everything on the line to paddle or drag a kayak from Brisbane to Adelaide down the full length of the Darling and lower Murray so he could see, first hand, what is happening to Australia’s rivers.
Along the way he talked to school children, farmers and local councils about climate change, water management and sustainability, eliciting their visions for the future. He started out a water engineer with an open mind and some concerns. He ended up alarmed, ashamed and determined to change.
Accompany Steve every step of this 3,000 kilometre journey. Weigh up what he saw with what he was told. Experience the adventure with him; the highs, the lows and the occasional confusion. Enjoy the father and son relationship. Make up your own mind about the state of the rivers.
Steve Posselt calls himself a civil engineer who, he says, happens to be able to read the writing on the wall, telling us that our rivers are dying. And after his extraordinary journey paddling and walking thousands of kilometres along the Murray Darling river system which he so entertainingly chronicles here, he speaks with authority. While his journey is exhilarating as he sweeps us along in his personable style, the way he describes the beauty of our landscape and its devastation, becomes a wake up call to everyone in Australia.
We simply cannot continue as we have been – burning fossil fuels, putting in infrastructure to sell our resources to other countries, having questionable irrigation practices and simply taking and taking without heeding the laws of nature. Steve explains how wetlands serve a purpose, how our rivers are the arteries of our landscape and how we must share water wisely – with each other, the wildlife and the landscape and that long term management of the natural systems is a necessary condition of our survival.
Steve’s journey, his knowledge and experiences, are a beacon, a warning and, hopefully, the start of a solution. Join him on his travels through the pages of this book and learn, as I did, how close we are to midnight when our rivers will perish. Steve does not preach, but he is an acute and interesting observer who concludes. . .
“We all want build a way of life that benefits our children and our grandchildren. If what we build is not sustainable, then we have robbed them of their inheritance. From my observations that is exactly what we have done.
Our river systems are precious. If they die, we die. And they are dying.”
“Thank you, Steve – I hear you cry and I cry too”
Di Morrissey February 14 2009
“ This is a ‘must read’ for those interested in discovering how rivers really are the arteries of our country. Steve has chronicled his discovery of the current state of one of our greatest rivers and challenges us all to be a part of the remediation and protection of all rivers. It is a challenge that he has taken on with amazing courage.”
Mark Pascoe, CEO, International Water Centre
“One man’s amazing and selfless journey to highlight the plight of our major inlands river systems.
Queensland Canoeing wholly congratulates this effort to sustain the waterways for future users.”
Mark Priestley, Executive Officer, Queensland Canoeing Incorporated
“Steve Posselt is one of those amazing people that will risk all for an issue. He doesn’t just talk about the problems facing the planet, he goes and sells his business, gets out there amongst it, and draws attention to the crises that we face. In this easy to read camp fireside chat, Steve vividly highlights the dreadful damage that we have done to, and continue to inflict on our rivers. Highly recommended for anyone concerned about our environment.”
David A Hood, FIEAust CP Eng
Chairman of Australia’s College of Environmental Engineers
Chairman, Australian Green Infrastructure Council
One of the founding principles of UNIX was that Text is the universal interface.
While there has been much debate about that concept, we still assume that text is the key to everything from scripting languages to voice recognition.
Need that be the case?
What if music was the way that we interacted with the computer?
Here is a video, pdf and soundtrack exploring the concept.
Coincidentally, Radio National ran an interesting discussion on Artificial Intelligence and text the day this project was posted.
The video mimes a worker discovering that his golf ball typewriter has suddenly become musical.
The PDF provides the theoretical background to that concept
And the sound file provides an audio reflection on the concept.
As Google and Facebook provide more robust services and better tools for developers to access them, the range of solutions available to small businesses increase significantly.
We have recently supported small companies (5 employees or less) build sophisticated calendar applications that handle bookings and payments across timezones, and link the website to the inhouse desktop productivity tools.
This is a powerful solution for small businesses that deliver services. If you would like to know more, comment below or contact me through the contact page.
By Patrick Stafford
After weeks of speculation, travel publishing group Lonely Planet has finally confirmed it has been sold to a media group owned by reclusive Kentucky oil and land billionaire Brad Kelley.
The move comes several years after the company’s original founders, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, sold the former Melbourne-based business to BBC Worldwide, and left the day-to-day operations entirely.
Ebono Institute was hired to pull together a 45 second ad for the 2013 conference based on the title Looking back – Looking forward and making use of the footage from previous conferences.
A review of the previous footage revealed few compelling images and so a script was developed based on the notion of looking back – looking forward. We found some fantastic archival footage that fitted the concept and selected a key 10 seconds of that to build the advertisement around.
To save the client money, the development was staged with the board having approval at script, storyboard and first cut stage. Thefirst cut went for final treatment at a professional studio at a fraction of the price that a full studio would have charged for development from scratch.
Footage was sourced from a range of places including:-
123RF Stock Photos and archive.org
Clare Novak was running out of work as a management trainer. Then a business contact tipped her to a job in Pakistan; she jumped at the chance.
IT’S a baby boomer’s nightmare. One moment you’re 40-ish and moving up, the next you’re 50-plus and suddenly, shockingly, moving out — jobless in a tough economy.