During the last few weeks Shao Ping and I have been re-organising our home. Following that downpour in December we decided that it was not such a good idea to have so much stuff downstairs. Our neighbour Dale who helped us to quickly move a lot of stuff upstairs agreed. We had created a rather nice study downstairs where we had our books, records, CDs and files. It was a nice place to escape. There was a sofa and a good desk.

But when that water started flowing in and we had to start shifting all the stuff closest to the floor upstairs it was essentially a pain. Now, we really do not want to go through that again so the books are coming upstairs. Maybe that downpour will not happen again. Maybe it will. Given climate change I am not willing to take that risk. I am yet to sort out the records. I am going to sell some on eBay. Many of them are bootlegs by David Bowie.

Yesterday I went through boxes of old files. I even found stuff going back to my days in the ANZ bank as a young bloke. My training assignments, notebooks and guides were all there. I ended up in the audit department and that was quite enjoyable as I was able to travel far and wide as myself and other auditors inspected groups of branches in diverse regions. I would find myself in one horse towns that normally I would not get the chance to visit.

I thought I had cleared out most of that material before our move to Singapore years ago but there it was. I spent all of yesterday going through the files and most of them went into our paper recycling bin. Even old assignments from university, and paper work from my time at the Interactive Multimedia Learning Laboratory at the University of Wollongong. Time to let go. I kept a few files that were either typical or special but that was it. About 6 packing boxes of stuff was reduced to a small box. The rest will be recycled. I still have two more filing cabinets to go. Some of the old newspapers and historical documents I will take to school.

At one stage I was employed by the university to train at least two teachers from every school in the region how to use the Internet. The trained teachers would be the Internet Contact Persons for that school. Every Tuesday and Thursday a group of teachers would come to the university and I would teach them how to use Netscape, Alta Vista, gopher searches, etc and the various ways one could go ‘back’.

Now, you may find this difficult to believe but I always carried a back up of the Internet with me on a number of floppy discs when my training took me to sites other than the university. I had used the software WebWhacker to completely download some web sites including Volcano World, The Nine Planets and a couple of others. I copied the folders to a set of floppy discs. Of course I could not do that today as these web sites have increased dramatically in size. Back in 1996 and 1997 it was possible.

I was conducting a training session at the University of Wollongong’s Shoalhaven campus at Berry on the south coast of NSW. We were using some Windows PCs running Windows 3.1 if I remember correctly. Might have been Windows 95 but I doubt it. There was a great storm and a lightning strike broke our connection with the Internet.

We decided to have a tea break and I placed the contents of the floppy discs on the server. The participants copied those folders to the computers and they simply clicked on the index.htm file for each web site’s folder to explore that web site. As a result they could learn how to use the Netscape browser. They could learn all of the buttons and most of the menu items. They could still learn how to download images and text. Just about the only thing they could not do was conduct a search.

Later that day the connection to the Internet was restored and the participants could learn about searching the Internet using Alta Vista, WebCrawler, Infoseek and others. I always enjoyed showing the teachers how to filter and refine the Internet searches. Another neat trick was showing them the power of exploring directories by altering the url of a site. The workshops were always enjoyable. The only time I was reasonably distracted was when one participant insisted on using the mouse “upside down”. When they rolled the mouse towards themselves the cursor went up the screen and vice versa.

I found some old publications from back then. Later today I will scan a couple of them online and write a quick blog. I hope you will be amused, enlightened and perhaps a little intrigued.

I would love to read some of your stories from the early days of the Internet. Ten years ago is really not that distant but in terms of the Internet it seems to be ages ago.

This afternoon, my sister’s husband Kieran will be coming around to help us shift the bookcases upstairs. Then we shall all retire to the pool in our backyard and later a barbecue. Isn’t life good?

Shao Ping and I have spent the last few days shifting furniture and preparing the home for repairs. The carpet on the first floor was ripped up yesterday and the old pine floors were sanded. We were intrigued to see that the original pine floorboards had once been polished. They were quite a different colour to the pine floorboards in the rear of our house. We thought given the shifting of furniture and everything else that has been happening we might as well use this opportunity to go back to the original pine floors on the upper floor of our home.

They hammered the nails down with a hammer and punch and filled each hole and crack with putty. The sanding then begun and later that afternoon that was followed with the first application of tung oil.

My wife and I have been staying in the spare room at our neighbour’s home. Tomorrow the floor specialists will apply another coat of tung oil. We will not be able to walk on the floors till Friday.

I will probably not be able to make a decent post till this weekend. Following this work I will clean up some more out the back of our property. Part of the garden in the top part of our yard was washed down to  the southern boundary and made quite a mess and with all the rains new weeds have sprung up. We lost two trees and a stormwater pipe was broken in our backyard.

With the drought for so long we were really in need of rain but to get nearly three inches of rain in one hour was probably too generous. That was back in December and now that we are on holidays we can really get stuck into tidying things up around the garden and in the garage.

Our backyard looked like a little creek during the storm and when the water came up around the piers and the main slab on which the ground floor was built and then entered the ground floor of our home from within the structure it was all a little too much there for a while. Given that the ground floor was tiled and there was concrete in the garage no damage was sustained although four holes were drilled in the southern brick wall of our garage with a masonry drill to assist with the run-off of the water.

We have to get an engineer to have a look at the place to make sure that there was no hidden erosion beneath the property. I have no idea how that will be verified. Cracks have appeared in the concrete floor of our garage. The water came up through tiny gaps between the walls and floor in the laundry and around the edges of the tiled floors of the study as well as the walls of the garage. It was a strange sight. The water bubbled up like small water fountains. Perhaps the clay on which the houses in our street were built is not that deep and we are in fact just above solid sandstone and the water table just rose to the surface as the huge amounts of water could not get away quick enough.

The study where I kept my books and LP records is no longer and that will be shifted upstairs to our living room once the flooring is finished. Not too sure how to use the free space downstairs now. We quickly moved all of the threatened books, CDs and records upstairs as the water rose during the deluge. Two neighbours came into help. That day one neighbour brought in lunch for us and that evening three separate neighbours brought my wife and I some dinner. We have an excellent neighbourhood. Priceless neighbours.

Some furniture including bookshelves, filing cabinets and a desk got wet but that was dried out. One old cupboard will have to go. How we use this downstairs space will have to change. Who knows when the next time a rain event like this will happen?

The bureau of meteorology said the storm was an one in twenty year event but given our peculiar weather of recent years and the impact of global warming on the climate I am not sure about that figure. We had a major storm in 1998. I will never forget. 17th August. Two low depressions settled above the Illawarra and it rained non-stop for almost 24 hours. They called that a storm an one in three hundred year weather event. We ripped up the carpet downstairs, sealed the floors and tiled everything after that. A new stormwater drainage system keeps the water out. It worked fine this time but what do you do when the water finds its way in via your construction piers underneath the upper floor of your home home and from beneath the concrete slab of your garage? We are built on a slight slope.

 So during the next few days the blog will be a little quiet. As I mentioned we are staying with our neighbours during the work on our home as we wait for the tung oil to dry and do ist wonder with the pine flooring. Tonight we are having dinner with my sister and her family so I thought I would jump on their computer and write this note.

School finished up two weeks ago. Shao Ping has been posting stories to her blog during this time and I thought I would take a moment to link to some of her posts and pictures. [piclens-lite-link]

Merry Christmas. Shao Ping and I celebrated Christmas with my sister Clair and her family… husband Kieran and children David, Elizabeth and Lucy. Our cat Sootie got a look-in as well. Shao Ping and I celebrated Christmas with my sister Clair and her family… husband Kieran and children David, Elizabeth and Lucy.

Boxing Day Get Together. We spent the day after Christmas with John Daley and his wife Pauline. We had a great barbecue with a number of friends. The weather was excellent, the wine was fine and a jolly good time was had by all.

Happy New Year! This year we celebrated New Year’s Eve with our friends at Wollongong Golf Club. I don’t play golf but the venue is quite good. It is by the ocean and there was cooling sea breeze that counteracted the humidity of the evening. I have been knocking about with some of these friends for 33 years or more now. My sister Clair and her husband Kieran came along as well. The night got into top gear when Kieran and I led the dancing during Dancing Queen by ABBA, YMCA by the Village People, Jump by The Pointer Sisters and a few other disco ‘gems’ of the 1970s.

Aya and her hair extensions. Our Japanese home-stay student, Aya, traveled by train up to Sydney today to have her hair done so that she could have hair extensions added. She looked quite fashionable upon her return so I donned my dreadlocks and Shao Ping took some photographs.

Just read an interesting article in the New York Times by Janet Rae-Dupree regarding innovative thinking and the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge “means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it is hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated.” Perhaps it is the curse of knowledge that creates the barrier when education technologists are endeavouring to share their ideas with other educators not so well versed in the art of instructional technology.  We need to tap into the skills of “zero gravity thinkers” to tackle this issue so that the message can be adequately communicated and new ideas can be generated.

Recently many of us have witnessed some exciting developments in human computer interface design. Jeff Han’s Ted Talk on a multi-touch screen interface design as well as the brilliant demo on the web site for his company, Perceptive Pixel, are inspiring. There is also Anand Agarawala’s demo of the BumpTop interface also on Ted Talks. And today, Gwen, pointed me towards Microsoft’s Surface project. This looks quite exciting. I now wonder what does Apple have up its sleeve? Could it be this?

Perceptive Pixel

Perceptive Pixel

Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Surface

BumpTop

The near future of computing… it is not longer computing in the strict sense of the term. They are interfaces, tools, places and things to do. Not just computers.