Founder’s Day 2007

On Sunday we celebrated Founder’s Day with the Iron Cove district scout groups. It was a very wet day, on and off, so the turnout wasn’t as big as we would have liked – nonetheless those who were there had a great time.

Here is an experimental set of photos from BubbleShare from the day :

This album is powered by BubbleShare – Add to my blog

Well I would have to call that a success – so BubbleShare away!

Founder’s Day celebrates the birthday of Lord Baden-Powell, whose writings inspired boys to start the Scouting movement 100 years ago this year.

Early reports of Autumn coming in

Here in Sydney we’re seeing the first signs of Autumn coming in. There is an edge to the morning now, it is no longer comfortable to sleep with the windows open and only be half-covered by a bedsheet.

Just a couple of days ago on my morning walk I was leaving footprints in the dew on the grass. That’s a sure sign that the seasons are turning here – time to rejoice in the coming colder weather :-)

Two Huge Queens in Sydney Harbour on Mardi Gras 2007

While the Queen Mary II (QM2) was in Sydney harbour for 16 hours on her maiden global circumnavigation, her sister the Queen Elizabeth II (QE2) also came into port.

A historic occasion since these (original) sister ships were last in Sydney in 1941 doing troop transport duty. It may be another 50 years before they are seen together in Sydney again!

A great many Sydneysiders came out for the spectacle, showing the two huge Queens a warm Sydney welcome. Somewhat interestingly, this was on the day known as Mardi Gras (Shrove or pancake Tuesday.) Sydney is known for a different Mardi Gras celebration that also features Queens. Hmm.

Perhaps my kids were a little over the event at the end – what do you think?
… See my Tabblo>

Can you shutdown for the day?

Since Saturday the 24th will be more like Sunday the 25th here in Australia, I think I probably could shutdown for a day … could you?

Shutdown Day

Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!

Hmm, words as accidental weapons.

The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids — New York Magazine

Can I think myself new teeth?

Wowsie wow wow wow. That’s all I can say about this line of research.

Possibities for self regeneration of teeth at File22.com

[…] Researchers from the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Helsinki and their collaborators from Berlin and Kyoto have now shown that continuous tooth generation can be induced in mammals […]

Actually I’m sure I could say quite a bit more … my inherited teeth are not of the best quality, so the possibility of growing fresh ones is very enticing for me. I’ve already lost a few teeth, with another couple in some need of repair.

There has been talk in hypnotherapy circles of helping people to grow new teeth – I would see this story as the first piece of concrete evidence that such a thing were possible.

Mashup Madness? More like Maniacal Melting Media Mining

Yahoo have come up with a very interesting new product (which is totally overwhelmed at the moment) they call pipes.

Pipes: Rewire the Web

Pipes is designed to allow the tinkerers among us to grab bits of information from around the web and bend, cut,  mangle, sort and otherwise process that information to produce a custom built data feed for our own nefarious ends.

Sounds amazing. Once the scale it up I’ll be very keen to start tinkering myself.

A quick look around shows that big blue is also in this space with an alpha(?) product called QEDWiki – ‘to enable rapid deployment, content aggregation, structured data and powerful extensibility.’ Which pretty much means the same as Yahoo’s pipes :-) I haven’t had a chance to play with this one yet, but it is up and running at least, so that excuse is gone…