My son is living at home again now and has chosen to do home school with his sister. Wow what a challenge for me year 11. I didn’t do too well the first time I tried it 🙂 They’ve both started off well. I’m happy with the first week. They’re both keen to learn and they like their books and what we’re planning to do for the term. It’s exciting to learn things together and also to plan together what we can work on and achieve. My son is teaching himself some programming. He’s starting off with a book on the basics of computer programming 🙂 I’ve never seen him read so much before!!! It’s great what personal motivation does.

Both the children come with me to work now and help with the running of the Teen Challenge drop-in centre as well as helping teaching computing classes, fixing computers, admin etc. Jessica is now a junior trainee as well as a TC volunteer!

I came across the Coca Cola Zero website today. http://thezeromovement.com Hmm well I’m not sure whether to take it very seriously or not but it still seems bizarre and slightly worrying to me. The whole site talks about having a world of zero responsibility, zero negativity, zero boundaries, no limits, nothing to hold us back…… This is from the site:

“Now you can have real taste with zero sugar. So why can’t life be more like Coca-Cola Zero? All the good bits with zero negative stuff.

Why can’t you have a sick of work day? Or why can’t every weekend be long? And how good would it be if relationships came with a gap year?

The zero movement is about living life your way, a life free of limits and consequences.”

Some of it sounds okay and fun but should we be encouraging young people to think that they can live life without consequences? Aren’t there enough single parents, people killed in car accidents, drunk drivers, crime, violence towards women etc etc.

What do others think? Am I over-reacting?

The following was posted to the LinuxSA-talk list.

“Not enough ingredients (or too many) and cannot work out what to have
for dinner ?

This works for me – have a look in the fridge and pantry and put the
ingredients into your favorite search engine

bread cheese milk tomato tuna + recipe

and google gives me 320,000 ideas. Handy when you are hungry and don’t
know what to make for dinner.
Andy”

Totally geeky!!! I’d never’ve thought of doing this before. I’ve looked for individual recipes I didn’t have before but I’ve never just searched on a list of ingredients. Or is this just a guy thing??

This is the original bridge over the river Murray at Murray Bridge. It was used as a footbridge, car and train bridge. There is now a separate train bridge and this is just used for cars, trucks etc.

I think this is fantastic, and well done Pascal!!! It’s great to hear about what young people are achieving in technology and open source!

Media release: Canberra student to take on the world

January 5, 2006

Linux Australia is pleased to announce Pascal Klein as the inaugural winner of the organisation’s People’s Choice Community Member of the Year award.

Klein, a sixteen year old student from Canberra, was selected from a field of over fifteen candidates nominated by the Linux Australia community. His prize consists of a complimentary ticket to the world’s premier technical open source software (OSS) conference, linux.conf.au (LCA), and money to help cover travel and accommodation expenses. This year’s linux.conf.au is being held at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Competition organiser and Linux user group (LUG) Roundup podcast presenter Karin Purser said the decision to award the prize to Klein was unanimous.

“We felt his dedication to the community and work with a number of different projects, combined with his youth and obvious enthusiasm, meant he would get the most out of the opportunities presented by attending LCA”, Purser said.

Klein said he was “blown away” with the prize and going to the conference will “allow me to speak to some of the best names in the business, like [Ubuntu Linux founder] Mark Shuttleworth”.

Linux Australia vice president Pia Waugh said the organisation is proud to be able to help “up and coming” community members to fulfill their interest in open source.

“Getting Pascal to Linux.conf.au will no doubt help him in the future, and also benefit the community” Waugh said.

Waugh said this year’s conference is “going to be great” with several overseas speakers including Linux International’s Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall, PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, and Mark Shuttleworth.

“Being able to attend will give Pascal access to some of the best and brightest both from the local community and the world”, Waugh said.

About linux.conf.au

Linux.conf.au is Australia’s annual technical conference focusing on Linux
and open source software. Now in its eigth year, linux.conf.au is regarded
as one of the premier global Linux and open souce software technical events
and attracts many international open source software developers and users.
This year’s linux.conf.au will be held for the first time at the University
of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand from January 23 to 28. For more information
visit http://linux.conf.au

About Linux Australia

Linux Australia exists to serve and promote the Australian Linux and Open
Source community. The organisation aims to do this best by taking
enthusiasms within the community, such as FOSS issues, projects, education,
advocacy just to name a few, and help them flourish, to succeed. The
lifeblood of this organisation is the people in the community, and Linux
Australia strives to be both relevant and useful to the community. For more
details on Linux Australia visit http://linux.org.au

Cheers,
Pia

—
Linux Australia http://linux.org.au/

I had a very nice Christmas and New Year. They were both fairly quiet celebrations with family and friends. I had a week off work between Christmas and New Year (except for trying to fix a client’s WinNT4 computer). I’ll be having a few more days off here and there before school goes back at the start of February which is when I’ll begin teaching my computer classes again.

Now that my son is back living at home again I’m also looking forward to homeschooling him too. He’s doing year 11 this year and he chose home school himself, I didn’t put any pressure on him he just chose it. I’m thrilled!

I’m now co-regional director of Teen Challenge Murray Bridge with Jenny Kay. We work well together, I’m really looking forward to this year!!!! There are new programs I’d like to run, new courses to teach, it’s all good!