Wordcamp Australia 2010

It looks like we might finally get another WordPress WordCamp in Australia later this year.

From the Australian WordCamp Association web site:

We’re in preliminary planning for WordCamp Australia 2010. If you’re interested in helping out, please get in touch with me (Anthony Cole – me [at] anthony [dot] geek.nz ) or Dan Milward (dan [at] instinct [dot] co.nz ). We’d love to hear from you.

It looks like the event will happen in Melbourne in the first weeks of December. Nothing is official yet, and we’re looking for space for the event in addition to sponsorship and what have you, so if you’re keen, we are too.

And for those who don’t know (from WordCamp.info):

WordCamp, n.

WordCamp is a 1 or 2 day conference for WordPress users and developers. The focus is on how to be a better blogger, on the development and future of WordPress, and other topics of interest.

Bruce Clay Search Engine Optimisation training

I’m in Sydney at the moment doing a 3-day Search Engine Optimisation course with Bruce Clay.

It’s a great course, and I’m meeting some fascinating, web-savvy people as well as learning all sorts of groovy little tips and tricks for getting web sites to the top of the list on Google. We are also given access to Bruce’s SEO Toolset which gives some awesome data about where your site is listed for various keyword searches and why, and it also compares your ranking to that of your competitors. There is a new version of the SEO Toolset coming in a few weeks, and it sounds like it will provide even more great data.

I can’t wait to get home and try some of his ideas to see how they work…

Do you do any SEO on your website?

Benihana Teppanyaki

So much wonderful food… I think I ate to excess during the AUC meeting at the Surfers Paradise Marriott… Buffet Breakfast, Buffet Lunch & Benihana Teppanyaki for Dinner… Perhaps I need to go and have a bit of a lie down…

Apple University Consortium General Meeting 2010

As the Apple University Consortium Development Fund representative at the University of New England I get to hand out a bunch of scholarships each year, and I am currently attending the AUC General Meeting at the Marriott Surfers Paradise Resort & Spa.

Apple and the AUC always treat us very well at these events, and the food and accommodation are usually excellent. Dinner tonight is teppanyaki at Benihana’s Japanese Steakhouse… yum…

A pair of Mesh Potato Beta units

Over the weekend, I unboxed a pair of Mesh Potato Beta units (MP01) that I recently received from David Rowe and the Village Telco initiative.

From David’s site:

The Mesh Potato is a 802.11bg mesh router with a single FXS port. Adjacent mesh potatoes automatically form a peer-peer network, relaying telephone calls without land lines or cell phone towers. The Mesh Potato is designed using open hardware and software and is part of the Village Telco project.

Unfortunately, one of the units seems to have a firmware bug, and as such I was unable to create a mesh network with them, but I did get the working one hooked up and giving a dial-tone.  I’ve received a few helpful hints and tips from David and Elektra on how to access the internals and re-flash the firmware  via the village-telco-dev mailing list, and sometime soon I’ll try again.

I also created a Flickr set of photos of my Mesh Potato Beta experiments so far.

I’ll keep you posted regarding how the Beta testing goes…

UPDATE @23:32: I just made my first Mesh Potato phone call to Elektra in Germany… it worked very well… one minor, temporary breakup, possibly related to the FreiFunk mesh at the other end… audio quality was generally very clear and good with only minor compression artifacts (Dalek style) occasionally…

I spent the first three days of this week as acting manager of the UNElink Video Conferencing Studio while Hans Schaefer was in Brisbane chairing a meeting with AARNET on desktop video communications .

UNElink Video Conferencing Manager's Office

This mostly involved taking bookings and liaising with other Video Conferencing venues around the world to facilitate the process for the end users. There is also some support required for the many users who have Tandberg desktop or portable video conferencing (VCF) units in their offices as well as the regular lectures delivered jointly by the University of Newcastle and the University of New England  as part of the Rural Medicine/Joint Medical Program (JMP).

UNElink Studio 1

The University of New England (UNE) currently has top quality, world-class video conferencing facilities, as it is much more economical to spend money on VCF than it is to fly people around the world from our little town in the middle of New South Wales, Australia.

Have you ever been involved in a video conference?

You can connect to the little Tandberg 150 MXP on the desk in my office by dialing 129.180.10.2 if you want to chat.

The last couple of days this week involved catching up on the web and CMS support tasks that are my usual bread and butter job at UNE as Web Editor, as well as starting off my first project management task, looking into creating an Access Grid room at UNE.

Have you ever used Access Grid for group-to-group interaction and collaboration?