Something I have been doing a lot more of lately is writing. About 4 years ago I wrote quite a lot, mostly by hand. When going through my belongings prior to moving into my own place I found dozens of loose pages of writing. The picture here shows some of my collection of travel diarys, dream diarys, exercise books and letter writing sets.

Over time I’ve done a lot more writing while on my laptop. I can more closely get my thoughts out as quickly as I have them with my fingers flying across the keys and not caring straight away whether I’ve spelt things correctly or words are in the order that makes for the best sentences.

For as long as I can remember I’ve written, or wanted to write. Stories, thought excerpts, braindumps and sometimes just pages that would make little sense even to myself when I reread them. Being particularly fond of writing out observations from people-watching, snippets of an interesting parts of my day, something that I dreamt and am still tossing around in my mind a day later.

While talking with a friend the other day we were discussing some of the stories I’ve acquired over the years from my various adventures and misadventures through life. I’ve become newly inspired to start trying to document them for a book idea I had earlier this year incorporating some of my own experiences with those that I’ve observed around me. At present it’s tempting to start by going into my head and just writing about my own stuff. Majority of the pieces I’ve written that weren’t specifically for blogs, emails etc have only been by myself and 1-2 others. Their feedback has been nothing but positive. Once I’ve got more pieces in electronic format I’ll decide what to do with them. Have already decided to anonymously post 3yrs of writing from all those years ago somewhere that I’m not planning to reveal to anybody.

I’m a relative newcomer but have been involved with spreading the good word since my university days and have now managed to forge my way ahead into this brave new landscape which I never imagined I’d get to so soon. Leaving academia and struggling to find my feet in a career that was both rewarding and sustaining I was offered an unexpected chance to move into a position I hadn’t envisaged for myself so soon. Working as a contractor for a remarkable company who took a chance in me and I can only hope has paid off. While I’m still learning the world of self-employment and contracting it would be a pleasure to inspire and assist others to reach for their wildest dreams also.

All this would never have been possible if not for the following women who rock my world: Sue, Angela, Jenine, Leigh Ellen, Pia, Catherine, Kate, Jodie, Susan, Damana, Cathie and MissWired.

Kicking along, have a few posts I’d love to put up if only they’d stop getting lost along the way.

Go to http://www.bighugelabs.com/flickr and create a mosaic using the answers from these questions. Take your answer to Flickr and search for it.. Pick an image from the first page of search results, put it into the mosaic maker and post your results!

NB: For simplicity’s sake I’m linking and attributing after each answer and licensed under the  Creative Commons.

1. What is your first name? Alison
2. What is your favorite food? Rib Eye Steak
3. What high school did you go to? Pioneer
4. What is your favorite color? Purple
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Clive Owen
6. Favorite drink? mojito
7. Dream vacation? Santorini
8. Favorite dessert? vanilla bean gelati
9. What you want to be when you grow up? a writer
10. What do you love most in life? discovery
11. One Word to describe you? dedicated
12. Look up my flickr name and found something someone dedicated to me – Alegrya not dedicated to me in particular but then again none are… so this is for each of the fine chicks in the photo who are now all scattered across the country.

Thanks to Fifikins and Monnie who inspird me to have a go at this myself.

There are any number of calendar applications which suit various peoples needs and lifestyles. My calendar of choice is Google Calendar for reasons of flexibility, expansion and accessibility. Please feel free to comment with the calendars you use and why you love them. The things I love about Gcal may or may not be able to be done on something else better, who knows. This isn’t a Gcal push post, it’s a calendar love post.

So what calendars do you have?

I have a few calendars which I have feeding into my central calendar repository. I have my personal, health, rent and work calendars that I update. I also have subscriptions to my Facebook events, Sydney Linux User Group and selected friends calendars. Sharing of calendars among friends can be very useful if you all have very busy schedules but like to catch up often. When being a social organiser as I often find myself doing it’s wonderful to know at a glance who is free on what days.

There are quite a number of calendars I have for good reason, all are important and useful t me but I don’t need to see all of them all of the time. The thing I love is the ability to select which calendars I have in the current view. I only need to see the rent calendar once a week for approximately 30seconds to know who, if anybody, I need to be chasing for rent that week and who’s paid up for the next few weeks.

Wait, did you say health?

This was only a recent idea of mine to create a health calendar for myself. You know those ideas that as soon as you have them and then start to create and use it you wonder why you didn’t do it years ago? This is one of those.

In my years of moving around Brisbane and then to Sydney and in the age of doctors that are increasingly apathetic I’ve had some difficulty finding one that I like. Hence why it’s been quite rare for me to return to the same doctor or even practice. My medical history records kept on the other end are spread far and wide. It made more sense to me to keep a record of my medical history on my end which I can give to a doctor quickly and easily if needed.

The sorts of ways this can be useful is amazingly broad. Been struck down by the flu this year, how about keeping track of the number of days. Even better, you can remind yourself t get a flu shot next year. It’s not unusual for me to suffer from 2-3 throat infection during winter at various stages. This is a useful way to keep track of when I got them and how long they stuck around for. I can detail the doctors I have seen and for what. How about all those times you’ve been on a course of antibiotics an forgotten to take them on time. Using a calendar you can set yourself reminders. GCal can even send your reminders as sms so no matter where you are, provided you have your phone you’ll get the message. As a woman there are some evil but necessary things it’s useful to keep a track of and set reminders for. Similar sort of things apply to you men as well. No more excuses.

The more I use it the more I can see the value of a health calendar. It’s totally private and most likely more secure than any medical records kept anywhere else. The more I think about it the more it makes sense.

I don’t think it’s unusual for people to have a number of calendars. I daresay most would be in a similar position to myself. Maybe not all the same but there are no shortage of ideas for things that you want a separate calendar for.

Why I love Google Calendar

So I may have changed my mind and am going to pimp GCal a bit here. I love a few things about it which may inspire you to use a calendar, whether GCal or not, find tha suits your needs. The big things I love about it are:

• ease of use, stupidly easy to create new calendars and only a little more difficult to subscribe to calendars. Drag and type to add events and there’s an additional screen to add more details, reminders and invite others.
• Reminders. I love the reminders so much I should have listed them first. I can set notification, email or sms reminders from anywhere to 5mins to weeks. The best part of the sms reminders is that GCal was written for the US to use where over there they pay to receive sms messages. Here in Australia we don’t pay but GCal still sends them to us. So many Aussies don’t realise we can use the sms reminder service. We can, so do! I often set an sms reminder between 1-2hrs before an event and it has saved me a number of times. Especially if you put address or phone number details in the field that’s sent. Perfect example is the Girl Geek Dinner I’m attending tonight. I had it in my mind that it was at number 70 but in fact it’s 51. There’s a potentially big dilemma avoided.
• Sharing and subscribing. I found this wonderful little application named FBCal that lets me share my facebook events with my GCal, more often than not I wind up putting those events in my personal calendar but it saves so much time avoiding having to flick backwards and forwards through tabs to copy details. It’s also simple for me to share my calendar with frinds who depending on my settings default settings and also for each event can see either the details of my events and appointments or only that I’m unavailable or free at a certain date and time.
• Flexibility. I can access my GCal from either of my laptops, I can view appointments from my phone and I can receive reminders to anywhere. The only caveat to this incredible flexibility is that I need an internet or data connection in order to access the calendars however if this isn’t possible then the sms reminders pick up any slack for me.

I like being organised, often I have to budget my time as carefully as I budget my finances, I also don’t like to disappoint people and try to make sure that I have adequate time for myself, work and socialising. I’m very fortunate in that at present my work hours are very flexible so that if needed I can work during the night, on weekends and from anywhere I have an internet connection. This leaves my time very open to events and also travel which can happen on very short notice or be planned months in advance.

My life is great fun and I’d like it to stay that way for a while yet. Planning and scheduling is often I do well naturally but sometimes it’s good to have calendars to pick up where I may forget things. Don’t forget the other basic things that everybody uses calendars for, remembering birthdays, anniversaries, holidays.

Have fun with your calendars and find the one, or selection of many, that works best for you.

It sounded rather dangerous and I excitedly gathered all in the ingredients today after work. Skipped the onion as they don’t like me a terrible lot and despite my initial reservations did include 2 chillis. I’m something of a wimp when it comes to facing down with anything chilli.

As the whole idea of making soup came from my Plurk community I decided to post pictures to BrightKite of the process and crosspost the same pictures back to Plurk. It was a bit of fun for me and I got to combine two things which I find a lot of fun, being a geek and cooking. The results were spectacular, all the garlic was either softened to the ‘melt in your mouth’ point or had been absorbed into the broth, chilli was flavoursome but only very minor burn inducing. Anticipating it burning a lot more I made toast which wasn’t needed at all.

For all you people who are too busy to get sick, I can highly recommend spending 1.5hrs making this up. It’s delicious, potent, and will make 4-6 meals depending on portion size. I’m not sure who Becky-Lee Reed is but I’m thankful for her recipe and Rori for sending it to me.

Maybe Schnubbs can give it a try next time one of his housemates is unwell or starting to feel that way.

Update (June 2009): as I mentioned pictures I should probably add some or at least links. So here are the BrightKite links to my photos I took and posted as I prepared. I haz a flava; It’s got chicken legs; Stocking up and Soup-erficial success story.

Recording will be taking place on Tuesday evening after weeks of trying to co-ordinate the hectic schedules of the 4 people presenting. I’m pleased to be doing something again that raises awareness of women involved in IT.

We need to get more girls involved with technology and I’ve enjoyed being involved in things like Girls and IT days and the WIT Regional Tour which I went on in early 2006 just before I started Honours.

I attended both the Sydney and Melbourne PubCamp events which were organised by Jed White of itechne. Sydney was a very polarising experience, the room was even physically divided between Old and New Media. There was lively debate, and plenty of unspoken communication going on in the room as the two seemingly different worlds and views faced off against each other.

My Sydney presentation was quite structured, I presented a modified version of the widely recognised Twitter talk from BarCamp Sydney and Canberra. Instead this time I added more about social networking in general to spark discussion about not only the tools, applications and sites that integrate with Twitter but other social networks too and the different ways we all use them. Slides for the Sydney talk can be found on my slideshare.

Melbourne was an entirely different story, the debate between Old and New Media was significantly muted compared to Sydney. However there were very valid points raised and discussed which was good to see. People in Melbourne were quieter but no less passionate.

For my unconference presentation in Melbourne I took a different approach. The laptop wouldn’t work with the projector so I decided to do away with the slides and just talking about Twitter. We talked a bit about Twitter but also about other social networks, how we all use them and the place they have in our lives. I had an audience of approximately 30 and the room buzzed with discussion. It was pretty great as I’ve never had anything like that happen before and I really liked it. This time it wasn’t about me talking and them discussing later, the discussion was now and I can thank a few key people who started speaking up and then that inspired the others. There were a few new people who’d never heard of Twitter or considered using social networks before. I hope they took something away from the talk. It was my absolute pleasure to be involved in something like PubCamp.

There is a big post about social networks which I will write and publish in the very near future. I’ve been using them for long enough now that I feel I can articulate the motivation and effects that using them has had on my life to date and potentially what the future may hold.

Huge thank-you must again go to itechne and Jed who very generously sponsored my travel and accomodation in Melbourne. It would not have been possible without their support and I had a such a good time meeting all the Melbourne Twitter people who came out and ran amok with us who travelled down for PubCamp. I look forward to going back there soon and catching up again.

To get involved you can pledge your bandwidth by clicking the banner below.

I’ve been using the Firefox 3 beta release candidate since I upgraded to Hardy Heron and it’s grown on me. I’ll like it even more when they start supporting more of the extensions I used to use with FF2. On the other hand, it’s been good to clean out the extension collection to determine what I really use and what I can live without.

Nobody was more surprised than I when Jed originally contacted me; however I am pleased to have the opportunity to talk about something I’ve become increasingly passionate about, namely social media. The talk won’t be exactly the same but it will contain similar content. I’m still reeling a little by it all, having never dreamt that I’d become known as a speaker but somewhat pleased with the small ways I’m building a reputation.

If you’re going to be in Sydney or Melbourne and have an interest in the future of media and the web then come along. Attendance is free so register at the event pages for Sydney and Melbourne and we look forward to seeing you there. In the meantime if you’re on Twitter follow @pubcamp for all the latest information and speaker teasers.

Follow-up blog post covering both the Sydney and Melbourne events will be posted after I return from Melbourne. My trip to Melbourne would not have been possible without the generous sponsership of itechne. Thank-you! I’m very excited by it as I haven’t visited Melbourne for many years and also because I’ll hopefully get to meet more of the Melbourne Twitterati.