Helidon - The Flood

Received via a small email list this morning.

Helidon 14 January 2010

We are feeling rather useless as there were more than enough volunteers at the Evac.Centre , I wasn't sure what we could do to help. All of the people living there (100+) want to keep busy, so volunteers are starting to get in the way a bit. You can see the people developing their own community and trying to do as much as they can for themselves rather than sit around and let others do it for them.

The town has electricity, intermittent phone and internet and mobile phones. Texting seems to work all of the time.

We have no water. The army has delivered palets of bottled water and we have tank water but its not connected to the house. So at the moment its dip baths only for us and the poor people at the Evac Centre cant even have that.

Access situation:..road is open to Gatton along the bypass so we can get some supplies from there (life is normal in Gatton). Heading west to Toowoomba - The Bridge on the Highway at Helidon has been deemed not structurally sound, so they are only allowing one car at a time over it and due to the massive landslide on the Toowoomba Range, they are allowing ten cars at a time up the range under escort only. The travel time yesterday was approximately 4 hours Helidon-Toowoomba (usually 15-20 minutes).

Grantham was a town with a population of around 400 people, 8kms from where I live. Our town is celebrating 170 years of settlement this year and Grantham would be around the same. Most people have been there 3 or 4 generations. Grantham has been totally flattened. There are only a few houses at the top of the hill, but most houses have been knocked down, carried away or are half standing and are not structurally sound. No-one is allowed into Grantham yet, even the people who live there. Yesterday,
anyone who still had their car keys on them where escorted by police to their cars at Grantham, were allowed to check that their cars were OK and if so, allowed to bring them to Helidon. If people didn't have their car keys but knew where they were then they had to write instructions on a piece of paper and the police went and tried to find their keys and their cars and bring them back to them. Many people don't know if their pets are alive or dead or dieing.

I think that the people are much better off psychologically if they are staying in the Evac Centre with their friends and family rather than being billotted out to other people and becoming a bit isolated from the information and support.

The situation here in the valley was so different to Rocky, Ipswich, Brisbane. We had no warning at all for the first wave of water. People were at work and at home doing their normal daily things and a wall of water like a tsunami came rushing at them and knocked them off their feet. The only warning was the sound of water like a train coming at you and by then it was too late. People saw their friends, family, pets and livestock drowned before their very eyes. The force was so great that many people had their clothes ripped from them.

Toowoomba got a huge storm unparalleled in their history. Toowoomba is 700m above sea level. Helidon is 150metres above sea level. The water rushed down the range, through Withcott, Murphys Creek, Helidon, Grantham and further down the valley. It was almost a sheer drop of 550metres. Imagine the force of Niagara Falls and it is only a drop of 60 metres. This was even worse than a tsunami because it was carrying trees, rocks, houses, cars, machinery, people - you name it.

We have set up a bit of an internet cafe in our garage. The people over at the Evacuation Centre have no internet access (Wireless doesn't work in Helidon) so we have had a steady stream of people coming to use it to do financial transactions, check emails, contact insurance companies, put messages on Facebook and the like. We are hearing horror story after horror story but we have also been talking about lots of other things - everyone has thanked us for having somewhere to go to use the internet but also to
talk about things other than the flood. It's the first time my endless meaningless chatter has actually been put to good use. I've had people helping me plan the trip to Ireland, help Graeme fix the bore, do stuff just to keep them occupied, and its us who are trying to help them??? Our dogs have never been hugged and loved so much. Levi is loving it. I have never been hugged so much, and I'm kind of liking it too J

EVERYTHING: the word everything has been bandied about and I never realised before that there were different degrees of EVERYTHING. There are people in places like Brisbane who still have houses, but they are covered in mud and their possessions are gone or destroyed and they say they have lost everything. There are people whose homes have been swept away as well as their cars and all of their possessions and we say they've lost everything. The next extreme are those who have lost all of those things as well as their workplace and livelihood, their local pub, the local shop, school and all of their lifestyle. Then there are the ones who have also lost their beloved pets and livestock. There are people who have lost all of the things above and loved ones. And there are those who still have homes and
cars and possession but have lost that one person who was their reason for living. Who out of all of these has lost EVERYTHING. I just shake my head.

We met a great guy yesterday who has lost his house and his possessions but still has his kids. He recorded his first song last month ironically called "The Flood" . I am urging people to buy his single off Itunes - its called The Flood by the Beau Rivers Band. You can listen to the song at http://www.reverbnation.com/beauriversband by clicking on the PLAY ALL tab about half way down the screen. He was moving from the Gold Coast to Grantham to be close to his kids. In the middle of moving, he and everything he owns got swept away. He rescued his kids and his ex-wife (what a man) and they found high ground. The rescue team came through about midnight (the flood hit at around 4-ish in the afternoon) and he got their attention by waving his torch around. They said they'd come back for him but didn't. At about 2am he and his family walked 8kms down the trainlines through mud and deepwater in places to get to Helidon. All they have is the donated clothing they are standing in. They will be at the Helidon Evacuation Centre for some time, I think. He also has a Facebook page Beau
Rivers Band if you'd like to put some words of encouragement on there.

Well, we'll be opening our doors again soon, so I'd better have a 'wash' and put some clothes on.

Best wishes to everyone and please send my love to anyone who has lost anything or everything.

[I want to thank Jacqui for writing this to me she is quite exceptional and it is very hard to read without feeling it. Thankyou so much for sharing with us, Jacqui. Big Al]

[NB: ex Big Al - Perhaps we can bring the song and his story to all our local radio station's attention, ask them to play it and tell his story and where to get it. Seems very fitting somehow. Especially you pls Annie, John R, Barb, Joanne and Sandy as who knows what a difference it might make if it got picked up over there!]

Death by Powerpoint

How to do good presentations ...

(Best played via the "Open in new window" button)

Gliding into Green Day Out inspired me to update my ebike log http://goo.gl/R2o6

Some of the many features of Green Day out: Meeting and talking -

1. about other eBikes and bicycles, especially to Mark Allen and Peter Gorden, who have built a few e-cars and e-bikes. See their websites, Plugincars and HybridHonda. Having read their websites, I thought I had better get my own one updated. Also bicycle restorers (recyclers?) at the Bicycle Revolution. 
2. about great and tasty organic food, eg from Roar Food
3. to solar panel installers

Dozens of other stalls

Live music

Posted via email from davidtangye's posterous

The end of an era of printing

My 2nd ever printer, a faithful old HP Deskjet Plus, bought late 1980's, is finally sent to printer heaven, aka the Gold Coast Suntown tip. Since I have not used a printer for several years now, preferring to leave trees where they are, in the ground, growing, I finally got around to clearing this old workhorse out from under a bed. Its ink cartridges are too expensive to buy, at $50 each, or $30 for refills, when I might then at best print 10 pages per year before they would dry up. Better to get printing done at Officeworks if necessary. Mostly however, documents are exported as .PDF files and emailed for people to read using Acrobat, xpdf or a browser-embedded whatever. Farewell 20th century. Farewell printer.

The guy at the tip gate said to chuck it in the landfill. The council has no recycling facility for electronics hardware on the Gold Coast. I left it where metals get put for recycling. Hopefully one day plastics and electronics hardware will be recycled from there too.

I was down at Gecko today. Every time we spoke of an event, the nice old lady there tried to foist another page of A4 or a brochure related to it onto me. People have to stop consuming forests every time they go to communicate something!

Happy ensconsed at Fisherman Wharf tavern. FIRST beer going nicely.

(From my mobile phone)

As a boatload of people arrive to witness the event!

Google holds back on hiring the best talent - Techworld.com

Google holds back on hiring the best talent - Techworld.com

"It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google"

A great example of why Google will succeed in the long term where Microsoft is a failure.

Google, Oracle and many other companies have always looked at their position as being co-operative where possible, whereas Gates and his bastard son Ballmer never understood that. They wanted to crush everything around them, seeing them as competition to be eliminated. Like only children, they never learnt to play with others unless it meant they could incorporate a Machievellian scheme in the plot somewhere to wipe out the others one by one. They never wanted to play the game, but to own and control it, and be the star and only player on the field. To their credit Google and Oracle have always had a more civilised view of the world around them, and their more respectful place within it.

GCLUG meeting topics

Add your topic to present at a Gold Coast Linux Users Group meeting.

Business phones, personal tools, employee choice and empowerment.

To me, this article "Is the Apple iPhone a business phone? - Mobile OS - ComputerworldUK" raises a more interesting issue. It implies that many corporates never did understand and take on the cornerstone concept of "Universal Responsibility" within the world of Quality. They still try to dictate and control their employees, instead of guide and learn from the smarter and more progressive of them. They try to dictate which mobile device is "approved". The same "Network Nazis" block access to many internet sites and facilities on the basis that any visit to them could not be for any corporate benefit. This is an arrogant and/or outdated military attitude that assumes that quality and excellence flows from the top of organisations to the serfs at the bottom. In many institutions this is a great indicator of the abundance of mediocrity that is deeply embedded into the institution, and a good sign to not have anything to do with them, beyond perhaps a quick "hit and run" sale.

Sending blog posts with photos from the mobile phone

This photo was sent from my mobile phone directly to this blog. It is promising technology, but something (perhaps either my LG phone, or the Virgin email setup, or both) is still a bit buggy. I have so far had success sending:

1. simple text emails;
2. this photo with a text signature (sent via
   • selecting a photo, then selecting to send it, rather than
   • select to compose an email, then attach the photo file).

The objective is to take a photo when out and about, and add a minimal amount of text at that time, since I find it too inefficient to do this via phone keypads, then send it as a blog post. More text can be added later, as I have done here.

15 Rules for Business Bloggers | Internet Marketing Strategy: Conversation Marketing

The article "15 Rules for Business Bloggers | Internet Marketing Strategy: Conversation Marketing", which I found at The WebMarketCentral Blog, has some good ideas about blogging: why one might do it and how to be effective. It skirts the issue of ROI, an issue I find most interesting.

I think that many people simply blog because they feel the need to do so, with little regard for any reader. Is this the tormented artist in many of us, struggling to express themselves? How many artists, say they produce their art for themselves, and as a therapy with little regard for any consumer. ROI is therefore not expressed as a $sales return / hour expended, yet in the long-term there is either a perceived sense of satisfaction, or a real $'s return somewhere. Anyway, I do not intend to start blogging about blogging. It a tool to use presumably for a greater end than itself.

The future of collaboration - here now.

Two great reasons to clear your desktop and move to a world of better communication and integration with your associates, customers and audience.

Google Docs in Plain English: collaborative creation of content, made easy.

Add in Google Wave for a full and rich collaborative environment.

Flogging Molly - The Worst Day Since Yesterday

Larf til ya cry, cry til ya larf!

Meetups: where cyberspace REALLY supports the real world

Now here is a shining example of a really useful Web2 facility: The Meetup website. I am using it quite a lot lately, to get about and interact with like-minded people here on the Gold Coast. Meetups is an especially useful facility, as the Gold Coast is a place where many newcomers are always arriving and many are 'net savvy and therefore look to this sort of facility to find their way around.

'Green Drinks Gold Coast' is the first Meetup group that I am involved in.

I have just found how to get Meetup notifications via an RSS feed, ie into my Google Reader account, which is where I get all my news etc. This results in all the local meetings that might be of interest to me being aggregated into my favourite feed reader (Google Reader), where I can keep track of them... Nice.

Worldfocus.org’s OLPC Rwanda Video | One Laptop per Child

Worldfocus.org’s OLPC Rwanda Video | One Laptop per Child: March 30, 2009: Worldfocus.org has produced a good video report that describes OLPC Rwanda’s plans to provide computer access to the country’s 2.3 million schoolchildren. Note the discipline and pleasant respect shown by the children. How does this compare to those in the Australian educational system? Which group even speaks English better, and is better spoken? Which group shows more courtesy, respect and self discipline?

Linking to an OLPC XO via vnc

This screenshot is taken from my desktop, running the Vinagre vnc client on Ubuntu Intrepid. I can move the XO's mouse cursor from the desktop PC, and hovering over menu items pops the menus open. However that is as much control as I can currently achieve. I cannot send keystrokes nor mouseclicks from the desktop PC to the XO, so I cannot control the XO from the desktop PC. It wold have been especially nice to be able to use teh desktop PCs keyboard. Perhaps I should forget the vnc approach, and just plug a USB keyboard directly into the XO.