Perth's abysmal power supply

Excuse me a little rant. I guess I should get into micro-blogging from my mobile. A blog about new technology usually needs some power, which was not be be had in some areas of Perth on Feb 25, 2009.

Yesterday our suburb was without power for more than 8 hours. The reason? A few mm of rain fell during the day. It seems incredible, but Perth's above ground power poles cannot cope with being rained on, after a long period of dry weather. There were 10 pole fires caused by the rain and teams of technicians were working well into the night to replace the poles. This is the third time in several months that we have had major outages of power.

Time to write to the MP. I'll let you know how I go!

Victorian bushfires, books and libraries

With the devastating bushfires in Victoria many libraries and booksellers are rallying around and contributing to the affected communities.

There's a message from Jan Richards ALIA Vice President on the ALIA Blog outlining some of the action taking place: " libraries across the country are acting as collection points for local relief efforts and throwing their weight behind fundraising campaigns. "

One of the major Australian book suppliers, DA Information Services, is donating $5 to the Bushfire Appeal from the proceeds of every book ordered before the end of February 2009:
"This collaboration between members of the Australian Library and Information Association, Public Libraries Victoria, the Australian Publishers Association and the Australian Booksellers Association is demonstrating a unity of purpose for these times. Books are being consolidated at the Mitcham premises of library wholesaler DA Information Services located just 40km from the nearest affected region"

Borders are also donating books to schools and libraries in fire affected communities.

The major centre for cash donations via phone or online is the Australian RED CROSS Bushfire Appeal

Organisational change, herding cats

At the Teaching and Learning Forum, at Curtin University last week, January 29-30, 2009, Barbara Holland gave the first keynote address. Her point about organisational change and the difficulties in getting staff involved in change, related quite well to our efforts with the
Web 2.0 training. We were trying to get staff to complete the Learning 2.0 program and thought 50% completion would be ideal. Barbara felt 20% buy in was quite good, so maybe we were aiming too high.

Holland also showed this hilarious video about organisational change: "Herding cats"....

Sophie Masson's love song to libraries

Staying with the theme of libraries and love of libraries, I read this a while back and starred it in my Google Reader account. It’s a beautiful post, written by Sophie Masson: A love song to libraries
What a great tribute to the power of parents to engender in their children a love of books and libraries.

Sophie Masson is one of the writers on the excellent literary group blog, Writer Unboxed, dedicated to the "craft and business of genre fiction".