Month: November 2005

Unfortunately, we are bad winners and losers

So I always a most embarrassed about my country around the time when some hugely publicised sporting event comes up that Australian teams are participating in. Don’t get me wrong, I admire athletes and their trainers, and how they can achieve so much, however I am embarrassed about how the average Aussie deals with winning or losing such events. If we win, as is the case in the soccer recently against Uruguay, Aussies are gloating, some are even saying “oh the poor losers, it’s not like they have anything else to do” (yet another silly demonstration by a few individuals who are uneducated in the world), and generally not being in my opinion good winners. We tend to like rubbing it in to our competitors and I find such behaviour dishonorable and pathetic. Anyway, when we lose such events, we find every excuse under the sun rather than concede that the other side may simply be superior for that event at that time. There is rarely a graciousness to Australian participation in sports, and it’d be great if we could be competitive _and_ somewhat humble, or at least gracious in our participation.

Come on Aussies, lets take a little more joy in the participation of sport (and life), and a little less at other peoples expense. Lets try to match our competitive sporting attitudes with a positive and gracious attitude of participation.

Moving and Journos

Well on Sunday, I moved Jeff and I into a new apartment, what a day! Many many thanks to all those who helped out. That means you MIL (Kathryn), Silvia, Sue, Mick, Matt and Mark 🙂 We got almost everything done, and now I’m going to take all week to move the last 10% 🙂

Also, just a quick note to Rodney in relation to his latest post. We love ya Rodney, even if we are also your harshest critics. I think he has a good point that runs deeper than how our community treats journos, in that our community is very _bad_ at appreciating people. We are the first to bite, and the last to say thankyou. I think there’s a message in that for everyone, don’t you? 🙂

Thank someone today! I say thankyou to Rodney for all your efforts in getting FOSS into the mainstream consciousness, and for all your help and participation in the Linux Australia community 🙂

ACS – ICT in Government conference

So yesterday I went to the ACS ICT in Government conference, and was chuffed to see a lot of Open Source mentioned in talks, when it looked like there wouldn’t be any 🙂 In Edward Mandlas opening talk I listened to his points about needing to grow “IP” creation in Australia (he said we barely make any software here, he should check out the Open Source scene), needing to address our trade deficit, needing to become creators and not just users of ICT and asked the question whether we should leverage Open Source more as an industry to solve these and other issues. He only hesitated for a moment, and then very strongly said yes, which was great. Always good to get that kind of affirmation, particularly from bodies that are quite middle ground.

We got to hear about what the Bureau of Statistics in a new project completely based on Open Source, the National Data Network. Unfortunately they’ve made the system a client/server system and the client only runs on Windows, but it is nice to see Government agencies at least satisfying their technical needs with Open Source all over the place 🙂