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Monday, February 21, 2011

Social Media Women Australia



Social media really speaks across roles in business today; not just for the geeks social media has gained the eye of Marketers, sales people, brand representatives and digital strategists looking to reach out to the public and start the two way conversation.

The great news is there are a lot more roles out there for women in Social Media and we'd like to see even more.

If you're in Sydney you can sign up to be at the next Social Media Women event in person:
http://socialmediawomenmarch.eventbrite.com/

The next event is all about International Women's Day and it's 100th Anniversary and contributing to one of the greatest achievements in social networking; Wikipedia.

Date: Tuesday 8 March 2011
Time: 6:00pm - 8:30pm
Venue: The Supper Club at the Oxford Hotel,
134 Oxford St, Darlinghurst.

Fear not if you're not nearby you can follow the campaign on Twitter follow #women4wikipedia and join in the weekly Twitter Chat Monday nights 8pm AEST (Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney); 7pm Brisbane; 7.30pm Adelaide; 5pm AWST Perth/WA; 9am UTC/GMT.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Learn to speak Huttese and command your own clone army

Have you ever wanted to speak just like Jabba the Hut? Or wondered how the folks at LucasFilm write those wacky conversations with Han Solo? This guide to some basic Huttese vocabulary is just for you"

 

Greetings

  • Achuta 'Hello
  • Achute, my pee kasa ______ 'Hello, my name is ______
  • Ah'chu apenkee? 'Who are you?'
  • Bo shuda Greeting
  • Chowbaso or Chobaso 'Welcome'
  • Choy 'What?'
  • Chuba! 'Hey you!'
  • Dolpee kikyuna! 'I am a friend!'
  • Gooddé da lodia! 'Good day to you!'
  • H'chu apenkee 'Greetings.'
  • Hi chuba da naga? 'What do you want?'
  • Kee chai chai cun kuta? 'What are you doing here?'
  • Waki mallya kuna chu chu? 'What do you do?'
  • Koona t'chuta? (Pronounced oota goota) 'Going somewhere?'
  • Mee jewz ku 'Goodbye'
  • Sie batha ne beechee? 'Are you talking about me?'

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Androidify yourself!

Who doesn't love the super cute Android logo? The growing collection of Android toys on my desk at work is proof that I'm a bit of a fanatic and now you can bring that cute droid style to your own avatar!

The Androidify application is a free fun app by Google for the Android platform, great for a little bit of free fun!



Here's my avatar to give you ideas:

Monday, February 14, 2011

Why nerd girls love Nathan Fillion

Online shopping, Star Wars toys and destroying the notion of "cool" here's Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog, Castle) on Jimmy Kimmel being a dashing nerd girl fantasy.

Anti Valentine? St Harlequin's Day is for you

A long time ago, on a mailing list far far away, in fact back when Mailing Lists were about as good as social media got we had a group of like minded wacky gamers called the Malkavian Madness Network, later to become an IRC channel I am still a part of today (oh yes IRC lives on like a sysadmin sleeper agent ready to infect again).




Christopher Dorrega known to us as Harlequin Grimaldi was the Patron Saint of Bitterness and on this day we celebrate Harlequin's Day both as an antidote to Valentine's Day but also in memory of his passing from cancer in April of 2000.

It has become somewhat of a tradition amongst the geeks we touch to take on the day and the cause, and it's always met with a bit of a smile and a twinkle in the eye (and may be just the occasional kicking of a puppy). So to you I leave Harle's own words on St Harlequin's Day and invite you to partake, let the rage over take you and stroke the bitterness in your own heart.

Subject: [Malks] Saint Harlequin’s annual rant

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2000 00:35:46 EST From: "Saint Harlequin Grimaldi"

To: malks@thehub.com.au

It's that time. Let’'s talk about love, shall we?

What the hell IS love, anyway? Encarta Dictionary has eleven noun and five verb entries for the word. I love my mother. I love my cat. I love my best friend. One word, all these uses! And the emotions are only superficially similar towards each. Five hundred thousand words in the damned language, and we reuse one too many times. Typical. But for our purposes, love can be defined as; "The emotional state in which another’s well-being becomes more important than one's own".

But the love discussed during this time of year is a deeper, more abiding, more passionate variety, geared towards coupling.So what IS this Love thing, anyway?

Some people point towards beauty and joy and utter compassion, towards majestic, sweeping emotions seen in DeBeers diamond commercials and such.This, they reason, is this great thing that the poets wrote of. This is this great thing that Shakespere created passion and tragedy from. This is Love.

These people are absolutely right.

Some people point towards lighter, happier emotions, towards lighthearted romantic comedy and happy carefree times. Shakespere also created, they explain, A Midsummer Night's Dream, did he not?

They’re also absolutely right.

Whatever you want to consider it, though, here’s the sad fact about modern society. We’ve become a society about compartmentalizing things, of buying things presanitized for our protection. And we NEED protection, don’t we, boys and girls? We NEED protection against the fact that it’s a hard world, that there are people out there who will hurt us, that the world owes us nothing, nothing whatsoever, and even our so highly self-appraised society or societies guarantees each and every human being NOTHING MORE THAN A NAME AND A COUNTRY OF ORIGIN. We need to be PROTECTED against the Bad Men, yes, protected and kept safe and clean and pure, and the only way to do that, because WE are the Bad Men, is to tell us how to feel and when. It's almost February 14th. This tells us it’s time to allow ourselves to feel Love.

Bah.

Bah and humbug, I say. Spittle and shit all over your protection, and see if you can protect yourself from THAT. I don’t WANT to be protected from Love. I want it to EXPLODE and be DANGEROUS and MESSY and I want to see people swept under and drown in the outpourings of my emotions, and if I get swept under in theirs, SO BE IT, I took my chances by waking up in the morning.

So bah on your St. Valentine's day. I will not wish anyone a happy Valentine's day, nor will I accept any happy Valentine's days from anyone. I will not allow myself to be compartmentalized.

I have felt Love. I didn’t show it on Valentine's Day any different than I showed it every other day I felt it. February or October, I’d show it the same way, through tenderness and care and attention to my partner’s happiness and well-being.

But there are those of you out there who WANT this compartmentalization, who WANT to be protected against your own emotions. So be it. So, in the interests of fair play, I offer you once again...

SAINT HARLEQUIN'S DAY!

That’s right! The Patron Saint of Bitterness, Rage, and Hate has procaimed February 15th as his day! It's a day for SANCTIONED HATE!

As you all may recall, I, Harlequin Grimaldi, have long since declared myself the Saint of Hate. (Saints, for the record, are the cosmic middlemen. If you have a lost cause, pray to St. Jude, and he’ll plead your case to the Boss, and so forth.) I represent the bitter, the lonely, the hurt, the hate-filled, the enraged, the ugly, the too intelligent, the too nice, the "like a brother's, the "such good friends", and all other unwanteds, undesirables, undatables, and unfortunates littering the world who remain in a seeming perpetual state of being single. Poor souls, how we suffer this time of year, watching our friends who have this great thing, this Wonderful Emotion, this Love, deserved or otherwise.

And the bitterness grows, doesn't it? They look at us with pity, we return the gaze with contempt. We pretend to not want what they have, but we do, we do, and the jealousy grows. Or we remember times past, old loves, having none current to entertain our affections, and we remember the fights, and cheating, the lies, the bad times, the bad blood, the bad breakups, and all the agony afterwards.

Now is our time.

So go on! Kick your pets! Kick your neighbors! Kill the mailman! Let the HATE flow. Lower your inhibitions on it. Speak openly of your hate and your pain. It’s YOURS, it’s UNIQUELY YOURS, there are many in the world with similar hate and only one with YOUR hate, you are FREE TO USE IT.

And use it you should.Why? Because it's THERE, and it’s REAL, and because you are YOU, and because you are ALIVE. Try it. One day. February 15th. If you like it, try it a little more the next day. Let it FLOW, let the REALITY of the emotion consume you. If you escape being lost in your bitterness (and it took me YEARS to do so), you will never, ever see the world through the same eyes again. You’ll see the REAL more acutely, you’ll see what’s prepackaged and what’s REAL, and you’ll never, I predict, be quite willing to settle for anything less than dangerous reality again.

So go. Release your hate. I’ll hear your prayers.

This is my sig. Bite me. **Saint Harlequin Grimaldi**

Some brimstone-baritone anti-cyclone Rolling Stone

Preacher from the East

Says dethrone the dictaphone, hit it in its funny bone, That’s where they expect it least. ****************************

A mass of disjointed and drugged thoughts who had something to say and didn’t do a good job of saying it.

Interesting saints and patronages; Saint Dymphna (insanity), Saint Maria Goretti (teenage girls), Saint Agatha (volcanic eruptions), Saint Bona (flight attendants), and Erasmus (abdominal pains). There is no saint of stories or storytellers. I claim this patronage into my fold.

Jpop from American Dad? It's Perfume just for Valentine's Day!

One of the local digital stations did a Valentine's Day special of animation including the romantic episode of American Dad "May the best Stan win!" and I've had this song "Monochrome Effect" by Jpop Funk band Perfume stuck in my head ever since.

For your viewing pleasure!

X-Men: First Class Trailer

It's a Summer that's already full of deliciously nerdy comic book movies - Captain America, Thor, Green Lantern are all due for release. Is there really room for another super hero movie? After seeing this trailer I say yes!

While it's a little sad that there's no room for our Aussie hunk Wolverine played by Hugh Jackman, there is a young Professor X as played by Scottish spunk James McAvoy (made Hollywood famous by another graphic novel adaption Wanted). In my head it's his face and Patrick Stewart's voice and it is *all* *good*.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

World of WarCraft 4.0.6


I found myself with a quiet Tuesday night and headed home to hit up WarCraft only to find maintenance time was coming early. I had about enough time to do some chores around Orgrimmar and make some sordid jokes in guild chat before it was time to shut down.

But we all know what an extended maintenance window means don't we? Patch time has come!

The full list of Patch Notes is available from the Battle.net website but here are the important bits as I see them:
  • Many levelling dungeons from 1 - 60 have had their level requirements dropped
  • Daily caps for Guild Reputation are removed when  your guild reaches level 23
  • The first Random daily dungeon now rewards double the Justice points up to 140
  • You no longer need to visit the entrance to Cataclysm dungeons to add them to your random PUG queue
  • The Warlock skill Drain Mana has been removed from the game because Life Tap rendered it useless
  • Hunters can now use autoshoot while moving
  • Mage's Flame Orb now ignores critters (I mean what the hell was that about anyway?)
  • Mana and Energy costs are down on a range of skills, sadly so are the durations of many funkier skills
  • A great range of bug fixes has been installed across the board, a great feat so close to the launch of Cataclysm
Unmetered data files for Australian IPs:

New women in Open Source Non Profit: The Ada Initiative



The Ada Initiative is a new non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media.

The Ada Initiative is focused on helping women get careers in open technology through recruitment and training programs for women, education for community members who want to help women, and working with corporations and projects to improve their outreach to women.

As well as supporting women in the Open Source comunity and technology careers the non profit will offer free diversity consulting services to organisations wishing for assistance.

Want to know more? Friend The Ada Initative on Facebook, Follow them on Twitter or Subscribe to the blog!