what are we doing today, brain?

Here is part of a message about Leons pretty gutsy recovery. He has always been a strong character in the community and now he is showing his strength in his rapid recovery:

Leon was conscious most of the day yesterday (thursday), and very much in his own mind! Yesterday, when I arrived at the hospital, he had been positioned in the pink chair again, and was holding his head up with minimum support, and impatiently jiggling his legs and tapping his fingers, while looking huntedly about the room, obviously unhappy with his situation. Through answering yes/no questions with a nod or head shake, he was able to communicate (quite emphatically!) that he was very angry, and depressed, and in quite some pain from his back in the position he was placed, and frustrated about not being able to speak, or make himself understood when he mouthed words. He let me know that he didn’t want me to leave him, even to go to the toilet, that he was scared of the prison his body was being, and he wanted to get back on top of things, specifically asking for his laptop!

Rock on Leon, keep it up and we are all thinking of you

So over the last few days I have presented about the wide world of IT and in particular FOSS to about 1200 out of ~2400 young women at school. The event was called Go girl, go for IT which admittedly is a bit of a silly name, but the event itself was incredible. Loads of great speakers, heaps of very smart, confident and rocking young women, prizes, a beautiful Ducati motorbike (for show only ) and much more. I think some stats out of this will be great and very interesting.

Every one of these attendees took home a copy of The Open CD, kindly donated by Kevin Russell from Opensource WA which is a great Government project with a demo centre of loads of FOSS as well as doing mini-projects like buses kitted out with computers to help people in rural and remote WA. Every one of these women learnt something about FOSS and why we have all been drawn to the penguin, and hopefully more of them will participate in FOSS andfind out for themselves how wonderful and diverse a world it is

Rock on geek girls, and welcome to the community!

Even though Jaq will probably blog this too, I wanted to draw attention to the bid for the 2014 Olympics by the planet Hoth! Awesome stuff!

PS - I am not an Olympics fan

Wow, I think Australias premier copyright body, Copyright Agency Limited has finally gone one step too far:

“SCHOOLS have warned they will have to turn off the internet if a move by the nation’s copyright collection society forces them to pay a fee every time a teacher instructs students to browse a website.”

I’ve said it before, and I continue to say, we are putting a price tag on our education, and our ability to evolve. Hopefully this will push people yet another step to realising that protecting IP can go too far, and we end up protecting business rights at the expense of individual and society rights.

I highly recommend anyone who cares about the quality of education in Australian schools to write to the Hon Julie Bishop, the Minister for Education, Science and Training. Perhaps we can get this issue on the political agenda. Perhaps we can get people thinking about this bigger issue of only making information available under the rules corporates set.