Blog

2012 has been a big year, equal good and bad, extremely busy moments and dull moments to. I've been to umpteen conferences, meetups and worked on about a dozen projects. Green renters stated the year really well, but dropped off massively after July, as did many other sustainability organisations and that was a hard hit for us. Because it's been such an intense year, I've learnt a lot about what is and isn't working for me mentally and physically, so for the first time in a wh...

Webform is a module that has equal parts lovers and haters... On one hand it makes creating complex forms with no technical knowledge extremely easy. On the other a lot of it's functionality is handled in a 'non-Drupal' way, although this has got somewhat better recently. A book covering just one module (and related) is always going to be a tough job, and Vernon Denny does a mixed job, covering a lot of theoretical form design and best practices that most would probably feel is out of place in...

<a href="https://www.packtpub.com/news/new-drupal-mini-books" target="_blank">Part of Packt publishing's new _Mini Drupal series_</a> Drupal's Multi sites functionality is one of those hidden little gems that few people know about, use or, to be blunt, need, but is fantastic never the less. I used it quite happily for many years blissfully unaware of how to use it completely properly, but loving the tidiness of having one codebase hosting several sites. Whilst it is a powerful and pitfall laden...

I know it's kind of tacky, but this flyer attracted my attention at <a href="https://www.ntenonline.org/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?webcode=NTCSessionsCurrent" target="_blank">NTC12</a> and I thought it was kind of clever... If a waist of dimes that I'm sure the homeless folks of San Francisco would have appreciated... <a href="https://www.mysamaris.com/" target="_blank">www.mysamaris.com</a>

As is usual from my blog posts, this may or may not grow as I remember things&hellip;<ul><li>The visual discrepancy between rich and poor in San Francisco is extremely stark<ul><li>Add to that, the gap between white/Asian and black/Latino is even more noticeable.</li></ul></li><li>A lot of the Not-For-Profit sector seems obsessed with money and how to make it.</li><li>The tipping culture is weird&hellip; In that people don&#39;t tip because they want to, but because they feel obliged to. Which...

Here's a quote/analogy I've been using for a while to overarchingly describe a strategy for engaging on social media that I've found helpful and descriptive. > If you walk into a bar and all you do is stand on the bar, screaming and shouting about yourself, would you expect anyone to engage with you? It's the same with social media… In follow up to that and the issue of privacy, here's another analogy. > If you then started telling everyone where your keys were, your movements for the day, w...

It's simple, updates regularly, synchronises between devices almost seamlessly and for the most part it's free! <a href="https://www.evernote.com" target="_blank">www.evernote.com</a>

With [Green Renters](https://greenrenters.org) we find the iCal feed from CiviEvent (part of [CiviCRM](https://civicrm.org)) invaluable to keep track of events and workshops we have coming up, generally we use the feed pulled into our personal iCal and Google calendars for internal organising, currently the feeds aren't available to anyone outside of staff. We also have a variety of views feeds on our website pulling CiviEvents into several places based on various parameters, basically we have several things that need to be confirmed before we...

I love living on the cutting edge, many times to my detriment, but it never ceases to dissuade me. So after a brief delay due to being away from home and nowhere near a backup drive (which, of course, is essential before a major system upgrade!) it was time to get my hands dirty. One of the major criticisms of <a href="https://www.apple.com/au/macosx/what-is/" target="_blank">Lion</a> has been the loss of control and the somewhat excessive wrapping in cotton wool of users. I personally have no...

At the time of writing this website isn't quite finished and maybe you can't quite tell that I love <a href="https://www.civicrm.org" target="_blank">civicrm</a>. I won't go into too much detail of why and what it is now, best you do a bit of searching and find that out for yourself. Sadly I couldn't really spare the money or time to go to londons <a href="https://london2011.drupal.org/" target="_blank">drupalcon</a>, despite being in town at the time, but fortunately, running along side was th_...

I've sometimes been critical of drinking control ads in the past, generally wondering how effective they really are, but I really liked this one I found in a London toilet. Why do I like it? Well: - It's well designed and laid out - The pint of water imitates some beer brands and marketing - The main slogan is a good play on words that may hopefully attract the people the ad is aimed at - The secondary slogan is also slightly clever, even though it's been echoed before.

After two weeks with staying with family, we were pretty desperate to get to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwich">Norwich</a> and hang out with friends and kick back for a few days. Hence our enthusiasm on the journey there, punctuated by the discovery of a ridiculously cheap pub whilst transferring in Peterborough, that turned from a relaxing drink to a last minute mad dash to catch a train. Norwich and Norfolk generally has quite a reputation for eccentric characters and odd behav...

The <a href="https://www.skegnesspier.co.uk/windfarm.html" target="_blank">Skegness Wind farm</a> as you can see from the photos, they've located a wind farm in the sea, a great way to reduce NIMBYism.

I generally find that in the process of migrating a website to a new system or framework, importing and moving data is the most fraught, frustrating and troublesome part of the process. If you're moving content from a vanilla installation to another vanilla installation you might be in luck, but really, what are the chances of that? I long ago decided to merge a joomla 1.5 site I have into a new site I was setting up in drupal 7, the content that needed to come across was:<ul><li><a href="http...

It's amazing what you can find in the country with a little digging... We've been quite busy tucked away in this little corner on the English countryside known as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horncastle,_Lincolnshire" target="_blank">Horncastle</a>, which has a surprising amount of notable past residents, including <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks" target="_blank">Joseph Banks</a>, for all my Australian and scientific readers. Aside from catching up with a little free...

I kept noticing these silver scratch panels on some receipts in china and assumed they were just some form of official symbol but it turns out there actually a cunning behavioural change policy on behalf of the Chinese government. It turns out that a lot of Chinese businesses try to dodge paying tax as asking for receipts isn&#39;t common practise and then there is no record of what has been sold and thus no record of what tax should be paid. So the government added these scratch panels to r...

China is one crazy country. Even before we left Australia, <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CD0QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.airchina.com%2F&rct=j&q=air%20china&ei=Em8tTsH-H4fOhAfM2bmqCw&usg=AFQjCNGNWJqlHZ88hV2xYX6QjMI1QzFf1Q&cad=rja" target="_blank">air china</a> gave us a taste of the break neck speed 'efficiency' some of the Chinese like to operate on. On air china there seems little regard for people or their requirements, rather getting food service out the way...

Take a listen (or read) to a light hearted and 'cheesy' romantic (and slightly explicit) short story I recently wrote about Doug, who bored in his office cubicle, fantasies about Julie... <object height="81" width="100%"><param name="movie" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F7997281&amp;show_comments=false&amp;auto_play=false&amp;color=D7DBDA" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><embed allowscriptaccess="always" height="8...

Coffee is a very personal business. My own personal journey started fairly late in life, coffee culture in England (where I spent most of my adult life) being somewhat behind Australia's. Up until several years ago the main coffee I drank was some form of frothy monster from Starbucks, full of caramel, copious amounts of milk and very little coffee flavour. Then I spent some time in Italy and was introduced to a far more simple way of enjoying coffee, pure, plain and uncluttered. Just dark, ho...

According to a list I read some years ago, I regularly use several words in my lexicon that are considered 'old fashioned'. As that list was published nearly ten years ago and I'm still using most of those words, my language must be increasingly old fashioned. There is however, one old fashioned word that has fallen into disuse and out of favour that I feel really needs and begs for reintroduction. Especially in this social and over personality focussed modernity we inhabit, where fewer and fe...

'Concept albums' generally raise the heckles of most rock music reviewers, and an album that contains an 'artistic statement' emblazoned on it's inside front cover in two different languages even more so. It seems that Ember Swift travelled to China in 2007 and felt an unnerving feeling of having been there before, of deja vu and of an unusual one-ness and comfortable familiarity, thus creating the urge and need to write an album about her experiences. A lot of The New Project is horrendously...

The Thornbury Theatre is one of a growing number of old community centres and theatres around Melbourne that are being turned over from their traditional purpose into the hands of the youth to do what they will with, usually using their opulent interiors to host events that the original attendees would probably greatly object to. It's a perfect venue for Lightning Bolt to play, a venue so unsuited to them in size and decor it's almost perfect in it's imperfection. If you don't already know, th...

A lot is being said about the Diamond Sea around Melbourne and a lot is being whispered about them in front of the stage tonight. What's wrong with them? Is it the bad and overly loud mix, their seeming lack of acknowledgement of the audience or something else that is reducing their usually sparkling and lively show into a rather dull and listless experience with every song melding into the next with very little dynamics. 'Fire! Santa Rosa, Fire!' are part of a growing plethora of bands with a...

Some of the best musical dynamics are created by three-pieces, anyone with half an ounce of musical talent can add sound to the silences with a lot of overdriven noise. Creating a full and interesting sound with the amount of instruments a three piece can potentially play, now that's a real challenge, especially when you stick to pretty much one guitar sound and use overdubs sparingly.It's a talent that a lot of bands from Brisbane seem to possess and have formed into a sound that 'I heart Hiro...

Live albums are always a dangerous affair, many will question releasing one at all, why not a proper studio album, is it a stop gap, a lack of interest or commitment from band or label? Quite often it's more because live albums simply don't sound very good, the quality is shoddy, the playing lax and the whole atmosphere is lost when listening on your home stereo. Fortunately for a hardcore-punk / Metal-ish band like Mammal with an infamously high quality live show, they're usually so damn tight...

Somewhere along the way in the past few years of his rapid rise, Jamie T has transformed from a charming cheeky London chappy playing anywhere that would take him with only his trusty acoustic bass as company into a cockier (but still fairly charming) world travelling, eternally casual superstar. His past awkward and apologetic inter song banter replaced with the trusty How are you doing insert town name? and I'm going to need help on the next one, you guys ready?.His wordy chatty, monologue, c...

Noise! Noise! Noise! 'Does it Offend you, yeah?' lively blend of electro Indie rock bombards Billboard and the tightly packed boisterous Wednesday night crowd, not letting up for one minute or allowing a second of breathing space for the crowd or the band. The live 'Does it offend you, yeah?' experience varies slightly from their recorded output, which is crisp, clear and bouncy with well-defined beats and melodies. Whereas the live show is such a huge solid slab of cacophony that it's often...

Someone once said that the reason Melbourne produces so many dark, melancholic and moody bands is due to being 'stranded in a paradise at the end of the Earth, isolated from the rest of the world'. Which is possibly why so many musicians, the Spoils included, run off to seek fame and fortune elsewhere, but does gallivanting off in far-flung shores, acquiring fame and fortune change their music at all?The musicians, and they are real and proper skilful musicians capable of playing just about any...

What's going on in Sydney? Are there copious amounts of young men mating with drum machines, synthesizers and 80's dropouts? The city seems to be spawning a lot of electro bands recently that generally favour epic, fantastical sounding names and presentation. Los Valentinos have described their current release as 'Conquistadisco', which, frankly, is a brilliant if somewhat tongue-in-cheek sounding genre but sadly there's few discernable Latin overtones bar one Spanish song title (with English...

Unless listless inmates around the world have been ganging together and forming bands, 'Convict-Core' could only really come from Australia and it would be safe to assume that it would sound like something of a mish-mash of the influences upon Australia's history. With these assumptions in hand The Currency's mix of high octane Celtic folk blended with Anglo Punk will come as no surprise. The Currency's live shows are legendary, it takes very little time for crowds to be pulled into the melodic...