I wrote this several years ago at this time of year, and it still feels very relevant. Happy Diwali, everyone ————————————————————- Today marks the start of the 8-day long diwali (or d?p?vali) festival. It is a festival of light, celebrated in Hinduism and Buddhism, among others. Traditionally, people light candles, wear new clothes, and celebrate …
Tag Archive: inspiration
Nov
12
Nov
14
The Mechanical Turk and OSDC
OSDC 2011 kicked off today at the ANU. I tripped along to the OSIA (Open Source Industry Australia) miniconf, which Red Hat sponsored, and was mightily pleased to hear Stuart Gutherie reference one of my favourite pieces of historical weirdness: the mechanical turk. I couldn’t help but hold forth, and eventually gave an impromptu lightning …
Aug
10
The Language of Change, and the Changing of Language
A conversation on the Australian Tech Writers mailing list prompted me to dig up these old blog posts from 2008 and repost them here. It was a short impromptu series of the changing face of language, and how we as wordsmiths deal with it: Merriam-Webster – Bringing The Mondegreen To Linguistic Fanboys Everywhere July 2008 …
Feb
15
Louisa Lawson and The Digitise The Dawn Project
Louisa Albury was born in 1848 in Mudgee, the second of twelve children. Although she was offered a position as ‘pupil teacher’ at school, she was encouraged by her parents to leave school in order to look after her younger siblings. It was a fairly common thing to happen to eldest girls at the time, …
Dec
15
Rule 16 of the Internet
In her introduction to the 1994 edition of “Damned Whores and God’s Police”, the wonderful Anne Summers wrote “I believe that to address these questions [of women's struggle for equality] adequately, a new book is needed and I hope that someone, somewhere, right now is hatching another ‘big book’, a sweeping feminist perspective on contemporary …
Dec
14
Where do you get your ideas?
Every writer has been asked this. Even unpublished, unknown, and unrecognised writers like me. In Stephen King’s brilliant book “On Writing” (which, you might have noticed, was the inspiration for this blog’s title) he gives a simple and succinct answer: Anything you damn well want. Honestly, I don’t know where I get my ideas. Sometimes …
Coming up …
Lana wos ‘ere
January 2012
November 2011
June 2011
April 2011
November 2011
June 2011
April 2011