House of Reps:
Quintin Hedges-Phillips – Secular Party: Decided to throw all I had at pushing back religion.
Andrew Leigh – Labor: Bob McMullan’s replacement, haven’t seen to much of the kid on the news, but have seen him in plenty of fluro vets and hardhats. Must be creating jobs!
Indra Esguerra – Greens: Greens always go above Liberal.
James Milligan – Liberal: Bottom of the barrel.

Senate:
Kate Lundy – Labor: Kate’s a good friend of CASE. She knows what’s going on and wouldn’t it be nice if she somehow ended up Communications Minister one day?
David Matthews – Labor: For added Labor support.
Hannah Parris – Greens: The Greens have some insane policies. Here in Fraser Green influence is on the rise. They’re effectively tempering any social swing to the right in this city, keeping Labor in check and pushing the Libs further away from power, which is what I like about them.
Lin Hatfield-Dodds – Greens: A nice woman who’s done a lot of work in the community. Her husband is a nice guy, too. But the Church Energy really, really turns me off here.
Darren Churchill – Democrats: These goons are referencing the Liberals for some reason. Since their almost total implosion a few years ago, I’ve heard almost nothing from them and don’t really expect to.
Anthony David – Democrats: Same goes for this guy. I might have even put them above The Greens had they not preferenced the Right.
John Glynn – Independent: Not much info on this guy. He could be a gun advocate for all I know, and since info was hard to come by, I have to put him towards the bottom. But not all the way…
Matthew Watts – Liberal: I’ll be honest, I didn’t look at this guy.
Gary Humphries – Liberal: At the end of the day ACT would be better off with Labor and Greens Senators.

If you like music check out www.thesixtyone.com.

We’re coming up on lunch in the first day of Connecting Up 09 – there have been some highlights so far including a great talk by Mark Pesce where he explored ideas surrounding the gradual change of our social fabric. An incredibly comprehensive online version of his presentation (plus much much more) can be found at his blog here.

Elliot Bledsoe’s talk on creative commons and copyright was very informative and ultimately, very important. Learning more about creative commons can be done (quite easily!) through their newly revamped website at www.creativecommons.org.au. A very important tip is to make sure you generate creative commons licenses specific to your country, even though CC applies worldwide.

The official Twitter feed has been getting a healthy workout despite generally poor wireless broadband at the venue! You can follow the twitter conversation here.

The second day of Connecting Up 09 is now in full swing. We’ve just had a talk from Alan Noble, engineering director of Google Aus/NZ. He gave a brief overview of some of their lesser known apps, cloud computing and answered some good questions. Just how green can cloud computing be? Can we get our information back out of the cloud if we place it there? He also detailed how adwords works and where community organisations can go to apply for grants from Google.

The wireless connectivity issues that plagued the conference seem to have been resolved (at this stage) so Twitter is still filling up with tweets. Elliott Bledsoe who gave the talk on Creative Commons yesterday also has a great blog post that explains how hash tagging in Twitter works and would be a valuable read for anyone new to Twitter.

Yesterday Susan Devine and Gail Tuft gave a talk on how they have used a wiki to maintain business knowledge. The session was packed and a lot of people were very interested in trying out a wiki themselves. Gail reccommended DocuWIKI for a simple, easy to use wiki platform.

Peter Deitz from Social Actions gave a thought provoking presentation on “Social Actions”. For his site you can see www.socialactions.com, for a list of social networking sites you can see this wikipedia entry.

Headshift, a social networking consultancy based in the UK (but looking to expand into Australia) has done some good work and their offical site can be found here: http://www.headshift.com.

CASE President, Darrell Burkey, presented also. His presentation “What’s in a Name – Choosing the Right Domain Name” looked at what makes a good domain name, how to register domain names and how to select the most effective name to represent your organisation. Also outlined were most common problems that organisations have with their domain names and how to prevent them. You can find CASE’s domain name info sheet here.

For the official CUA09 website, click here.

• Official Public Sphere event details on Senator Kate Lundy’s site.

• The Twitter feed from the morning.

• Craig Thomler’s liveblog from the event.

• Tom Worthington’s blog (Including links to the slides of the morning’s presentations)

More posts to follow, just need to let the dust settle!

Akismet  for WordPress: Anti-spam. If you’re running WP you’re probably already running Akismet. It’s a fantastic anti spam plugin that fights against the scourge of comment spam. If you aren’t running Kismet you’ve probably got a lot of jibberish comments from Russia. If you’re not running it, you must set it up immediately! You’ll need an API key for this, but getting one is a simple process. Akismet = ftw.

NextGEN gallery: Photo Gallery. This is a fully featured but simple to use gallery plugin for WordPress. It uses the nice Lightbox transition effects to display your photos and there’s an option to turn those photos into a flash slideshow. It’s got good thumbnailing, tagging and watermarking options. I’ve tried a few gallery plugins and this is definately my most favourite to date!

Cystats: Cystats is a great web-stats plugin with a good layout and a comprehensive set of views. It lets you see who visists, when and where. I use Cystats for “blog-only” traffic data which for some people is going to be their focus. Free, well supported – a must have!

So there you have three essential plugins for a multimedia website. Check back later for additions to this list!

“The lovely folks at Radio Proglas have been foolish enough to give me 45 minutes of air time. I think they think that because the majority of the audiance doesn’t speak English, I can’t do any harm.Radio Proglas is a Christian Radio Staion, but from 7.15 to 8pm Feb 12, I promise there will be no mention of god…possibly of alcohol and sex, but no god.Feb 12 @ 7.15pm in Czech / EuropeFeb 13 @ 5.15am in Australia” (Radio Proglas)

For a preview, it’s worth checking his MySpace and if you like what you hear do yourself a favour and join his Facebook group.

The day was well balanced and very valuable. The audience of around sixty comprised of people who had never used Joomla before, to seasoned gurus, and everyone in between. For the uninitiated, the first hour was used to show how quickly and easily Joomla can be set up in a variety of environments. A very thoughtful suggestion from Raoul Callaghan for people who don’t have their own web hosting account was to use JumpBox, a virtualisation package that allows for a nearly instant install of Joomla for you to play with! Being told about JoomlaPack, a Joomla backup and migration tool, probably made my day! CASE is always looking for handy tools to make things easier, and JoomlaPack looks to be one of them.

The day moved onto discussions about templating, general design and then security. A tip from Nick Sibbing has three big ticks and a star next to it in my notepad, and that is putting ?tp=i after a URL to reveal location and name of each Joomla module – no more hunting! Potentially the most shocking number of the day was that despite millions of downloads of Joomla, only a few tens of thousands of people have subscribed to the Secuity Alert email service. If you run Joomla but aren’t subscribed, do it now!

During the day there were two other  pieces of software shown off, all Joomla friendly of course. OpenFreeway, an Open Source e-Commerce solution, I think, shows great potential. I would be very nervous using a FOSS e-commerce solution (especially if credit cards are envolved) but a note the FreeWay people made was that, unlike any other in it’s class, will be PA-DSS certified (that is, appoved by the credit card companies). So, FreeWay holds potential for small business and not for profits that previously couldn’t afford to take their commerce online! Then, in a global launch, the guys from Zac Ware revealed Jentla, the world’s first Joomla Enterprise Layer. This could be an exciting development for CASE, because it allows you to administer up to a thousand different Joomla sites from one point. This means security updates, rolling out new extensions network wide and things of that nature may have just become a lot, lot easier.

This is just a taste of what took place during the day and I can highly reccomend that anybody interested in Joomla to attend the next one, well worth the trip!

“Hello, Everyone.

It breaks my heart to inform you all that Charlie Cooper, my better half in Telefon Tel Aviv, passed away on January 22nd.

We have been friends since high school, and began making records together a decade ago.  We have been so fortunate to tour the world together, while at the same time having a massive amount of laughs at one another’s expense.

Aside from Charlie’s singular genius and musical gifts, I can tell you that he was a total sweetheart of a guy, and a loving friend and confidant to people everywhere.  His musicianship was surpassed only by his greater gift to the world – his warmth, his generosity, his unquenchable humor, and his undying loyalty to those whom he loved.  In the spirit of honorable mention, however, I should mention that he had a shoe collection that was marvelous, knowledge of hip-hop that was profound, and knowledge of wine that was subtle.

He is survived by a sister, a neice, a nephew, his mother, his stepfather, me, and more adoring friends than the Universe has dark matter.  As such, his family and I ask for your discretion and consideration of our privacy during these extremely turbulent waters.

Yours in Music,

Joshua Eustis”

Terrible, terrible times!

You can follow along with all CASE’s projects at the official CASE Blog.