Port Augusta 2008 set up to tell its own stories from people whose voices would not usually be heard. Have a look at — http://bigstories.com.au/#PA

I love facebook it allows me to interact with people and keep upwith whats going on in their lives and its fun.

Early morning is a great time to walk up our hill. Facing east, we can watch the sun leave a shimmering trail across a vast lake; facing south, treeless paddocks, ragged quarries and dry lagoons sometimes look magical thanks to a mantle of sea-mist; facing west, we can just make out the long ribbon of Kurangk dunes; facing north, another vast lake shrinks to reveal white sands and the ancient technology of Ngarrindjeri fish-traps. Beside this hill, nestles Pullewewal, ancient home of Wyangari. Traditional Owners, the Ngarrindjeri say that the lagoons are formed from the kangaroo skins this great hunter stretched out, which is not so mythical when you consider that mega-fauna once roamed here. It is awesome to stand on the hill and look over a landscape shaped by ancient story. But each day from this hill, I see the Australian story with its inappropriate technology turn more disastrous. Diesel pumps keep the vast lake from collapse; a dredge battles a growing island of grey silt; dust blows across what was once the wetland home of swans, spoonbills, stilts and sand-pipers; crowds of crows caw and clamour around abandoned dwellings, abandoned cattle carcasses, while beer cans, bottle shards and shreds of plastic adorn the road verge with careless disrespect. One day, unannounced, a telecommunications’ tower was built on this hill. One day my head began to ache. It aches so often now, I am virtually housebound. The internet provides the means for me to order food, shop, do banking, pay bills, and keep in touch with family and friends. Life here would be tough without access to the internet, seeing as the local general store, bank agency, fuel pump, school, church, and police station are now all closed, and the local ferry runs irregularly. But if given a choice between my health and the stealthy encroach of all this technology, without any doubt I’d choose health, especially a healthy environment and a healthy community. Some things no amount of technology can replace.

The switch from paper to electronic - I had no idea how hard it would be when we started out! My wife and I have scheduled our lives with a paper diary for many years. In December we decided to go digital, intending that we’d each have our own digital diary and be able to read each other’s diary, and also have read & write access to our diaries “out and about” through a portable electronic device. That should be pretty easy for current technology to do, surely? It turns out it is pretty easy only if you can afford to throw money at it - buy an iPhone each ($1800 for 2) with an iPhone internet data plan ($50/month/person = $100/month for us) and use Google to host & share the calendars - and then it all just works. But that’s a total cost of $3000 in the first year, compared to the $2 cost of the paper calendar it is replacing! Is an electronic diary 1500 times better than a paper diary? To achieve the same effect on a small budget is much harder. I’ve now evaluated many calendar programs, calendar websites, calendar sharing tools, calendar synchronisation tools, and portable devices including PDAs and smartphones. After many hours of evaluations and reading reviews and blog postings, months of elapsed time, we have an electronic diary system that *almost* does all we want. There are still bugs in the synchronisation tool which cause duplicated calendar events sometimes, and because of this my wife is holding off from buying a portable device. Instead she prints out her electronic calendar every few days, and carries the printout around with her! For me synchronisation with my PDA is working well, so I can see my calendar on the road and schedule a new calendar event wherever I am out and without using any mobile broadband data charges. The new or updated event will be propogated on to my online calendar and on to my wife later when I dock the PDA with my desktop PC.

I love my satellite dish. Its the window to the world of wonderful stories on the ABC podcasts. Can’t be done on dial-up. AND I don’t see a fibre coming anywhere near Point Sturt for a very long time…