I have about 50 business cards to go through and catalogue, as well as many people to write to. Unfortunately it looks like I’ll be restricted to an internet cafe, so floppy disk storage, here I come!
Stewart says the membership database is almost done. Going to announce on linux-aus soon, am a little disappointed we couldn’t get it done before now, as is people will only have 3 weeks to become members, and nominate people for the elections in January. I say three weeks because current constitution denotes that nominatinos close 7 days prior to the election. I feel so distant but will still be doing LA stuff from over here. I fly directly into Adelaide from China on the 14th. The AGM is on the 15th. I managed to convince the Chinese uni to let me do my end exam two days early (hopefully!) so as it I’m cutting it fine. They originally wanted me to do the exam on the 18th, which would have meant either not being able to go to LCA2004 at all, or dishing out for another ticket.
We set up imap access to my mail at home, but this has gone all screwy because we don’t have a permanent ADSL address, and so far I’ve only been able to get my mail about 50% of the time. Gar! I may try to get dial up from my room so I can work from my laptop.
Happy 18th Birthday to my dear sister for the 13th! (Yes I did remember on the day!) I can’t believe how quickly my siblings are growing up. I’m very proud of her 🙂
One other kewl thing from WSIS, I was speaking to a young guy from Sierre Leone. He was trying to get people to understand that the country is peaceful again, and we ended up getting around to discussing ICT. He said that not only does most of the country not have electricity, but there is a total of 1 telephone provider who can only support 22,000 lines. In a country of more than 15 million, this isn’t very useful. It seems he isn’t so interesting in trying to get computers into his country, but rather show the world that it is ready for development again. I offered to create a website for him, where he could put his information, and his eyes just lit up 🙂 He mentioned that it is the young people in his country that are making to difference and helping rebuild the country. It was quite an inspiration speaking to him. Will post the site when I set it up. There were many young people at WSIS, in varying capacities, it was great to see young people from countries such as India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Peru, Brazil, Cuba and many African countries stepping up and doing great things. I had one guy see Linux on my badge and start pumping my hand saying he was a big fan of Linux. It all only makes me more passionate about pushing FOSS in order to help entire countries (let alone businesses and individuals) become ICT autonomous, facilitate education, encourage equality (gender, religion, race, etc), facilitate people learning programming and other job skills, ensure government files are not controlled by a vendor, and to generally make things much better. As for us ‘developed’ countries, haven’t we got something to learn of the benefits of FOSS from these highly successful ‘developing’ countries?