2012 has kicked off with two interesting projects. First was editing a short report about a civil engineering project in Darwin and its construction plan. The second was a fascinating exercise to write a submission to the Biodeversity Fund, part of the Federal Government’s Clean Energy Future Program. The submission seeks funds to reforest and revegetate a large area of farmland on the Eyre Peninsula to improve biodiversity and create potential carbon offsets.

It’s been a busy couple of months since returning from holiday, with some interesting pieces of work:
- helping the Australian Institute for Loss and Grief to determine pricing schedules for its range of workshops and related training services;
- reviewing and editing content for SAGE Automation’s new web site;
- editing documents for a large mediation/arbitration for an Extension of Time Claim for a major international civil engineering project and
- reviewing and editing a Field Trials Report on the collection of post-harvest biomass for energy production for Syngas, an outcome of the previous submission that won Syngas $300,000 in R&D funding for this project a year ago, almost to the day.

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be all right really.

(Douglas Adams, 1999)

It’s good to play a small part in another winning project.

The ALLWATER Consortium – a Transfield Services joint venture with Degremont and Suez Environnement has secured a new 10 year alliance contract worth approximately $1.1 billion with its new customer, SA Water, to operate and maintain water and wastewater services for the City of Adelaide and the surrounding metropolitan area.

I am delighted to have made a small contribution to the winning bid by editing and rewriting parts of the extensive and complex tender documents, including those dealing with water and wastewater treatment plants, leak management and R&D. Congratulations to Les, Ben and their expert teams for their successful submission.

Completed HGT Application ready for lodgement

Congratulations to the team at Hospitality Group Training for completing and lodging their Application to the Commonwealth Government’s Industry Skills Centre Fund. I enjoyed working with them on this submission for funds to help establish a commercial training kitchen in Adelaide’s CBD.

The proposed project is to provide a modern, eco-friendly and environmentally sustainable commercial kitchen and associated training facilities for hospitality students to complete certificate and work skills training and gain general and technical competencies to be effective Chefs, Cooks, Waiters and Bar Persons in the high demand area of Hospitality.

Thanks go to Wendy, Jodi and Janet for their energy and focus and for including me on their team for this bid.

Before - The Funding Submission and Business Plan

After - the result - the new MTA Workshop

Congratulations to the Motor Traders Association and its Group Training Scheme on the official opening of their new apprentice training centre for heavy vehicle maintenance at Royal Park.

On the left is the “before” – the submission I wrote for the MTA back in March 2009. It won $1.359 million in Federal Government funding. The MTA matched the funding and built this new $3 million Apprentice Training Centre shown on the right – “after”.

Chris Evans, Federal Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Jobs and Workplace Relations officially opened the centre today. It will be a great asset to help kickstart the careers of the many young people who train here.

The Tomorrow Grant Program provides two competitive grants that support South Australian digital media businesses at different stages of development. The purpose of this Creative Industries SA Program is to inspire South Australian businesses to develop digital media products and services for local and global commercial opportunities.

The Tomorrow Start Grant provides up to $10,000 to South Australian start-up digital media businesses to establish and build a commercial business.

The Tomorrow IP Grant provides up to $100,000 to established South Australian businesses to develop and commercialise strategic Intellectual Property relevant to digital media and generate additional revenue streams.

Click here for more information about the grants and how to apply.

On this day, 47 years ago, late on a Friday night, my dad and I were coming out of the AGM of our fishing club in downtown Birmingham, UK. Stepping out into the normally bustling Friday night city streets, we wondered why everything seemed so quiet. There was hardly any traffic and small groups of people were huddled on street corners, talking together quietly but intently. It was very strange. Dad asked someone, “What’s going on?” The reply: “Kennedy’s been shot”.

They said it couldn’t be done – get wireless broadband on my netbook. Hah!

Go to any high street retailer of mobile broadband services such as Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Three and Virgin and ask if their gadget works on Linux.

“Sorry”, they’ll say, “it only works on Windows or Mac”.

They are wrong. It was like being told in 1985 that you couldn’t access the embryonic internet with one of those new fangled Macintoshes.  They said Macs didn’t have the F keys that you needed at that time for the log-on process. So I just telnetted around a few archives until I found a software F-key emulator, FTP’d it across and used it to log onto their system and send them emails complaining that I could access it on a Mac when they promised me I couldn’t.

Nowadays I have one of the early netbooks, a very cute, very tiny, Asus eee PC. In the days before Blackberries and iPhones, a netbook with a cheap, pre-paid wireless broadband “dongle” (a thumb-sized, plug-in broadband modem that looks like a fat USB memory stick) was an ideal solution for occasional use. I still use it when travelling. No bigger than a slim paper-back book, it is still very convenient and prepaid wireless broadband is much cheaper than the internet fees in hotels and the like.

However, the Linux operating system is Open Source software, and that is anathema to Microsoft and Apple who own the proprietary Windows and Mac operating systems. And it seems as if the retailers are either colluding with them or have been competely conned by their propaganda.

There is nothing intrinsically ‘wrong’ with any of these systems, they are all fine for a great range of business and personal computing activities. But to be told in 2010 that my Linux netbook could not use wireless broadband was bizarre.

None of the retailers nor their help desks could even begin to get their heads around using their products on Linux. Their “best” advice was to change the operating system to Windows XP. Yeah, right!

Many simply didn’t want to know – for them it was simply a case of “It can’t be done”. That was the ‘deja vu’ moment of being told that you couldn’t access the internet on the early Macs.

But it can be done. I have posted a fairly detailed explanation of the relatively straight-forward process on EEE user forums. If you are interested, this link will take you to a copy of those notes.

It was the 60s, and I was in a Linguistics tutorial.

At that time, a new breed of student was beginning to go to university in the UK, thanks to the recently introduced grants system – clever kids from ordinary families who otherwise could not have afforded it.

In this session we were talking about accents and dialects. As the only member of the group who had a regional accent (Birmingham) I was a ‘person of interest’ in a good sense. I was also the only male apart from the tutor. Everyone except me “spoke posh”.

We had talked about accents as they related to geographic areas, now we began to discuss accents as they related to social class.

To make a point, the tutor went around each member of the group in turn and asked, “What do you call your male parent?”

The responses from the young women varied: a couple of “Dad”s, a few “Daddy”s, a “Pop” and even a “Pops”.

As the answers went round the table I pretended first to be puzzled, then surprised and eventually mildly shocked.

By chance, I was last. He fed me the line beautifully. “And lastly Mr Short, what do you call your male parent?”

“Sir.”

Poor sucker. He didn’t see it coming. A good tutor, not much older than us, enthusiastic and knew his stuff. But he couldn’t read the sub-text, even as it happened.

He might have understood the theory and mechanics of regional accents but I understood the dynamics. In those days I used to speak like Ozzy Osborne, for pity’s sake. And of course I understood the dynamics of class accents, far better than the tutor or any of the young woman in the group, all of whom had upper crust accents and came from well-heeled families.

He took it at face value. He couldn’t see that I was making a statement about the dis-connect between academic understanding of a concept and actually living the reality; that I was ironically telling him “Yes, I get it” at the same time as sticking it to the posh chicks; and that I was letting them know that they shouldn’t make assumptions about a person’s background or capabilities based on his regional accent, just as they shouldn’t based on the jeans and tee-shirt I wore compared with the up-town frocks they wore.

There was a moment of embarrassed silence, then the now flustered tutor muttered, “Yes, well…” and hurriedly went on to the next topic. The posh chicks were eyeing me with peculiar interest.