apc.au

It’s Tuesday evening and there’s a vast rainbow over Kalk Bay. It’s been raining on and off cooling down what has been a succession of extremely warm days.

Despite the welcoming cafes and the even more inviting beaches, I’ve managed to break through some of the backlog of work that’s accumulated since I left Melbourne.

Today I published the first Secession Records newsletter of 2008 and added this to the new Secession wiki, which has also been set up (thanks Grant) and now rolling with data in the past couple of days.

The newsletter includes a review of the exhilarating Restless Natives, a Cape Town based free jazz group that are seriously good!

There’s also a new site for Secession underway and with only a booklet insert for our next release to be designed, it looks like April will see my Son of Science album finally out and available for purchase and fine listening.

All that’s left before I take a few days leave before hitting the road again is the paperwork and spreadsheets that seems to accompany me ever where these days, and some APC EBoard reporting and schedules to publish. At 6:28pm I’m calling it a day and may spend the rest of this evening with my guitar and a clear view of the Bay.

I have plenty of overdue blog entries, articles and two newsletters to write… One thing is for certain - I will never travel without a laptop again! The screen on my trusty Toshiba just stopped working and its only CTRL key hasn’t worked for a year now. I’ve traveled with a wireless keyboard for the past year or so, but loathe to take an external screen, I’d left the laptop in Melbourne and opted for PortableApps on a 160G USB drive.

In theory, the idea of traveling with all your essential applications on and files on a USB memory stick or portable drive is a great one… no laptop to be concerned about, gear small enough to carry in your pockets and a computer in just about every port to serve your needs.

WRONG!!!

Here’s a list of cons:

• No USB 2.0 support and you’re going to wait a long time for applications to load. Some may not load at all.
• Little memory and your portable applications will also load slowly and may often crash your drive!
• Some USB cables work and some don’t. I was astonished to find that my USB cable wouldn’t work with the laptop I’d borrowed from the APC office in Johannesburg! Luckily I found one that did.
• Some net cafe’s will have placed limitations on how USB devices can be used. In most cases this will mean that NO applications can be run from them.

If that isn’t enough to stifle one’s creativity, lets look at the workstation options one may deal with.

• Foreign language operating systems.
• USB ports that don’t work.
• Keyboards with inappropriately placed keys that one just can’t get used to.
• Foreign language keyboards (less of a hurdle, but in combination with any of the above, a pain…).
• Re-conditioned laptops with the least amount of memory and overall running capacity dragging one’s workflow out for HOURS!
• Inconsistent network support… wireless cards that don’t work, or will find networks but won’t get you online.

The latter point leads to the problems one encounters, and the cost, of getting online in a place such as South Africa. I’ll leave that for another post, but for now… after too many hours at this computer just to customize style sheets on this blog and prepare a newsletter for Secession’s 10th year (try running a browser, a CD player and OpenOffice on 125mgs of ram!) I need a break and my back needs one too.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the reasons we moved to DreamHost was their “One Click Installation” system that makes installing packages (Word Press, Media Wiki, etc) so much easier. Tonight I noticed that our blog was running on an older version and it needed updating. So, from the DreamHost control panel, I went to the blog setup and sure enough, there was an “Upgrade” button that I clicked and voila, it did all the work.

How cool is that?

Yes, I’m a geek and yes, I enjoy mucking around with systems, packages and so on, but only when I’m ready for it. I don’t like having to stop, spend some time figuring it out, then doing it, then testing it and (finally) getting back on with what I wanted to be doing. Usually by the time I’ve finished “geeking” I’ve got no time left to do the important thing I originally wanted to be doing.

Now back to the interesting entries that Andrew’s posting from Africa…

We’ve come to the end of another heady, productive and weary strategic planning session for the APC’s 2008 - 20012 Action Plan. This was held alongside staff and management meetings, as well as the first meeting of APC’s new Executive Board (elected by APC Council, Nov 2007) .

What we have here is one of the many pieces of butcher’s paper used to visualise program activities… here looked at the role an incubation space would play in relation to each program area, including management systems.

I’m always struck by the commitment APC management and staff make to these processes… our schedule was jam packed from dawn to dusk and often well into each night. The Ithala Reserve is an impressive environment to be working from, to be inspired by and to explore… if there was one thing I would have wanted more of, is time for reflection… something we offer little time for, but which is surely necessary as we move through indeed one of the more complex and challenging times of human history.