Sustainable Land Use?

Tyagarah Sustainable Community Alliance

In 1999 the Byron Flora and Fauna study identified the Tyagarah area as:
* "An integral part of the coastal vegetation wildlife corridor" and
* "An area of High Ecological Significance, containing core native vegetation."

Sounds like a silly place to put a 5 day music festival and 50,000 plus people.

But wait, theres more. The developers are not planning on using the site for only 5 days per year. they could host up to 20 (maybe more) events per year. I wonder what the wildlife (animals, not drunk and stoned youth) will think.

Here's a toon

Site Details

A map showing the site that Noble & Chugg (bluesfest) want to develop.
Click it to or view the whole map on a new page.

Lets be clear! The proposed site borders a national park, contains high conservation value flora, and is smack in the middle of a wildlife coridoor.

Oh, and it floods. Sometimes 3 times per year. Dont give me any "ooh but its a local event" rubbish either. Having Coca Cola commercials beaming out at me from multiple bigscreens in between acts at the popfest is not a "unique Byron event". Take it to the Goldcoast or the Woodford site!

The Proposed Site!!

The Picture of the new bluesfest site that offended Bluesfest Inc so much that they have threatened legal action, and have removed any suggestion of site criticism from their bulletin board. The moderator is careful to leave comments supporting the site.

Click the pic for the big picture.

Bluesfest: Roots and Leaves!

Peter Noble, organiser of the Blues and Roots Festival, says change is afoot for the event.

Is the bluesfest leaving its roots? With Coca Cola ads blasting the site from multiple screens, and many punters munching on pluto pups and hot chips, it would appear so.

Surely the Gold coast is more appropriate for an event of this style?

Add to this the heavy handed deletion of unfavourable coments from its bulletin board, and the banning of posters it would seem like the glory days are gone for all but the "true believers"

Do you agree?

Bluesfest ready to leave behind its teenage years - Lismore Northern Star - Mar 31 2007 8:00AM – localnews

Bluesfest ready to leave behind its teenage years

31.03.2007

By Jamie Brown

BYRON’S Bluesfest has come a long way since it grew out of the Piggery and moved to the Red Devils’ home ground. And the man behind the main event, Peter Noble, says it has a long way to go before it does its dash. But whether it will always be a fully blues-orientated event is a moot point, says the talented and worldly promoter. “Like any event you need to crawl before you can walk and then you need to develop your faculties,” the self-confessed ‘aging hippy’ noted. “The Byron Bluesfest is almost out of its teenage years now and we still have a long way to grow.” But a straight diet of blues is a bit like bacon and eggs for breakfast every day.

“I like bacon and eggs, but not all the time. After a while I want muesli,” Mr Noble mused. “There is a world of music out there, a world of quality music. And the right music makes a better world.” This is where Peter Noble’s Bluesfest is headed, along with his related blues fests in Fremantle, Point Nepean, Durban and Singapore: They are about people with a message who play music at the highest level. “Blues is a part of this, but it is not everything,” he says. “ I am not going to be kept in a ‘blues’ pigeon hole.”

The Peter Noble and Jan Barham Show

Brought to you by coca cola and jim beam.

Read on for the article from the Northern Star.





20.01.2007

By HEATH GILMORE





New location has to be big and close to festival’s home base of Byron Bay


PETER NOBLE has big plans for the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival — a 121 hectare site only 15 minutes away from downtown Byron Bay.

The Bluesfest supremo is again scouting for a local site after passing up an opportunity to buy a Yelgun land holding, or possibly move even further north.

This opportunity was taken up by the Splendour in the Grass promoters, who lodged a development application for the Yelgun site this year.

Buoyed by the reaction to this year’s Bluesfest line-up, the promoter agreed to a wideranging interview about his dream for a 121-hectare site, love for his dead best friend’s wife and an unlikely business relationship with the late gangster rapper Tupac.

Mr Noble, who had mooted the possibility of moving Bluesfest outside the area, revealed for the first time that a heartfelt lunch with Byron mayor Jan Barham convinced him to stay put.

"We decided not to go ahead with the Yelgun site that the Splendour people bought. We pulled out of negotiations on it, and partially the reason is because I sat down and had a coffee with Jan Barham," he said.



"She said, ‘Peter, please don’t leave Byron, you are the iconic event here. You mean a lot to our town. We don’t mind you being 15 minutes away, just don’t be 30 minutes outside town. Then it’s not Byron any more.



"And her point was strong. And I said, ‘Gee, I hope you were not the only one to support that’."



Mr Noble said he wanted a big enough site for five stages, camping and increased comfort for patrons.



He said this area would be developed to minimise its carbon footprint in the region and maximise the use of solar power, recycled water and composting toilets.



"There is something else about the event for the town, the majority of the town, because there are detractors, they are proud of it. A little town, Byron Bay, is the centre of this huge music festival.



"My search for a site around Byron is pretty well documented. Once we get the right site we will turn it into a real festi- val. It’s got to be on a big enough site with all the questions answered for traffic management and sound levels.



"Who knows where it’s going to go. But I know we are going to be on our own site in five years."



Mayor Jan Barham said her lunch with Mr Noble after the 2006 event was a ‘post-mortem’ to follow up on new measures to control traffic, noise and crowd behaviour at Red Devil park.



She said the festival had become the icon for Byron Bay’s cultural identity, however, few viable sites remained that could be developed as proposed by Mr Noble.

Bluesfest at tyagarah

Mitra Ardron, Byron resident and member of the Tyagarah Sustainable Community Alliance, writes:

Byron Bay forged its image as an alternative community hosting
intimate, quirky events, including the East Coast Blues and Roots
Festival, first held in a converted piggery before a few hundred stoned
hippies.

Last weekend’s version drew 15,000 punters and was
sponsored by Bundaberg Rum, Coca Cola, Jim Beam and Toohey’s. Between
acts, big screen ads intruded on conversations and local charities are
finding they no longer get the support from the event they used to. As
one festival worker said, ‘it’s just become too big and too corporate’.

But
not big enough, apparently. It’s rumoured that the promoter, Peter
Noble and partners, have paid a deposit on a new flood-prone site 10km
north of town. Plans are reputedly for five or six events a year,
audiences of 30,000 plus, a 24-hour liquor licence and, to snare a
larger share of total visitor spending, onsite camping.

The Blues
Festival trades on Byron Bay’s alternative reputation but in reality
it’s become Party HQ for kids too old for Schoolies. Holidaying
families are much less in evidence than they were a few years’ back
while locals, after battles with Club Med, Becton and Mcdonald’s, are
manning the barricades once more. The festival captures the paradox
faced by many country towns: how to prosper without losing what makes
the town special in the first place.

Local residents are again
asking themselves that question, and not just in Byron Bay. Sandwiched
either side of the proposed new site sit two of the area’s few
remaining alternative communities. Arising from the aftermath of
Nimbin’s Aquarius Festival of 1973, these residents must think last
weekend’s Blues Fest was from another planet. At the Bundy Marquee, for
example, you could "get your photograph taken with the Bundy girls"
while the Jim Beam Party Crew roamed around looking for drinkers "to
reward with a free photo invitation".

The Aquarius Festival
celebrated a "dawning of the consciousness and protest movements",
which in the past has been the defining character of Byron Bay. It
seems this year’s festival holds slightly different values: like being
unconscious and prostrate.

Label clouds for blogger

Beta Blogger Label Cloud

21st century Skills

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills - Framework for 21st Century Learning

ICT continuum

http://clas.cli.det.nsw.edu.au/ITC_website/index.htm

How effectively do you use Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in your teaching?

Use this ICT Continuum to review your practice in terms of the integration of ICT in your teaching and learning.

Download a copy of the ICT Continuum.

The ICT Continuum describes the knowledge, skills, understandings and capacities teachers need to ensure successful integration of ICT. This occurs across four phases of development. The phases are not intended to be treated in isolation but rather as a scaffold to help you reflect on your practice.

You will be able to identify professional learning activities that you could engage with to assist your development through the four phases.

Hacker

Is this for real?



Is Your Child A Computer Hacker?

There are, unfortunately, many hacking manuals available in bookshops today. A few titles to be on the lookout for are: "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson; "Neuromancer" by William Gibson; "Programming with Perl" by Timothy O'Reilly; "Geeks" by Jon Katz; "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling; "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland; "Hackers" by Steven Levy; and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric S. Raymond.

The Fastest way to find High-Quality Freebies on the Web

excellent search tips



The Fastest way to find High-Quality Freebies on the Web | BittBox





Thanks to site’s like Digg, Del.icio.us, Slashdot, Reddit, etc.

which rely on users submitting the best content from around the web,

there exists an easy way to find the best of the best using a quick

Google search trick. I’m not saying it never happens, but most of

the urls submitted to these popular social bookmarking sites are better than average, when it comes to freebies.

Movie Database

EMDB

EMDB is a small utility to keep track of your DVD collection. With an
automatic import from the database of IMDB, export to csv, text or
complete website, thumbnail cover preview, a loan tracker, search
function and multi-language user interface. EMDB is written in C++
using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and doesn't need a .NET framework or
any other external libraries. And best of all... it's free!

I just tested this on my growing library of 200 dvd's and it works rather well. type in a title keyword and it looks up details on IMDB. Cover art, year, director, genre, lead actors, duration. Searchable, will even track lending. Excellent work

teens and blogs

from the times online...



What does this mean for school libraries? What does it mean for parents?



Dear diary, I prefer to vent my private angst in cyberspace-Arts & Entertainment-Books-TimesOnline

A survey of 1,019 teenagers suggests that almost half write blogs while fewer than one in ten keeps a traditional pen-and-paper diary.



According to the
survey, commissioned by Sky's Young Journalist Awards, teenagers believe
that internet Ludditism and the use of a pseudonym would prevent parents or
teachers finding their blogs. Few were worried about their safety online.
The average teenager spends 4½ hours a week blogging or visiting sharing
sites such as MySpace, compared with two hours reading books.

Community walk

Mullumbimby - CommunityWalk



what are some of the uses for such a great tool in the classroom?

Powered by ScribeFire.

cbox, advanced tagboard service

Wow, this looks good.





Cbox · About · Free Tagboard and Chat Widget for your Site

Get a Cbox tagboard for your website or blog and let your visitors leave you messages or chat with each other. Getting started couldn't be easier – sign up, get your code, and start chatting!

Cbox gives your website an edge over the rest. It attracts visitors and keeps them coming back for more. It gives people with common interests a place to meet and chat – right on your own website!

10 Tips for Attracting More Comments

http://performancing.com/node/1210

Hal Higdon's Marathon Training guide

PEOPLE DIFFER GREATLY IN ABILITY, but ideally before
starting a marathon program, you should have been running about a
year. You should be able to comfortably run distances between 3
and 6 miles. You should be training 3-5 days a week, averaging
15-25 miles a week. You should have run an occasional 5-K or 10-K
race. It is possible to run a marathon with less of a training
base (particularly if you come from another sport), but the higher
your fitness level, the easier this 18-week program will be.



from http://www.halhigdon.com/marathon/Mar00novice.htm

teenage blogging

A survey of 1019 teenagers reported last week that only one in
10 of them wrote a diary compared with the 47 per cent who blog.
Could there have been, in the seven or eight years since the
arrival of the blog and online diary, a cultural shift of such a
size that the privacy of the bound diary is now regarded as some
quaint, predigital relic, as derisory to young people as some
Victorian ideas about modesty now appear to us?

further...

Those of us from the generation of the book inevitably sneer at
and fear MySpace, where teenagers think nothing of recording their
late period alongside their favourite band.An article in The New York Times last month argued that young people today not only have a much less developed sense of shame than their parents but also live their lives in front of a kind of invisible audience. As ours is a surveillance society, they reason, why not seize control and display ourselves?

from Sydney Morning Herald.

Powered by ScribeFire.

John Mayer at bluesfest

John Mayer from wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_mayer

John Clayton Mayer (born on October 16, 1977) is an American Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter and guitarist. Originally from Connecticut, he briefly attended Berklee College of Music before moving to Atlanta, Georgia in 1998, where he refined his skills and began gaining a following. After originally performing mainly acoustic rock, in 2005 he made a transition towards the bluesJohn Mayer Trio. The blues influence can also be seen on his latest studio album Continuum, which was released on September 12, 2006. Mayer won two Grammy awards for Pop Vocal Album for Continuum and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for "Waiting on the World to Change" at the 49th Grammy Awards in February 2007.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Lee "Scratch" Perry

Coming to bluesfest

More here...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Scratch_Perry

Powered by ScribeFire.

Scribefire looks great.

Lets me drag and drop an image, what about tags?

Version 1.4 — March 7, 2007 — 351 KB

Version 1.4 changes:





* Rebranding of Performancing for Firefox as ScribeFire


* Improved support for Blogger accounts


* Improved file upload support

Powered by ScribeFire.

ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) :: Firefox Add-ons

ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) :: Firefox Add-ons: "ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) 1.4 Homepage
by Christopher Finke, Performancing

ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.

ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox) is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog."

netWeather v2.0

netWeather v2.0: "AccuWeather.com's netWeather v2.0 is free, and easy to add to any page or blog.
Features:
# Choose from one of six sizes and eight colors
# Choose from locations around the world
# Display current conditions, five-day forecast, temperature maps, and radar or precipitation maps
# Available in English or Spanish
# Now available for your MySpace page!"

Larry Carlton - at bluesfest

Larry Carlton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Larry Carlton (born 2 March 1948) is an American jazz guitarist, dividing his recording time between solo recordings and session appearances with more popular bands. Over his career Carlton has won three Grammys for his performances and compositions, including the theme music for the hit television series, Hill Street Blues (1981).

Carlton started learning to play guitar when he was six years old. Taking an interest in jazz whilst at high school, his playing style was most influenced by guitarists Joe Pass, Wes Montgomery, Barney Kessel, and B.B. King. Saxophonist John Coltrane has also made a notable impression on Carlton, and Carlton's live albums have featured cuts from Miles Davis's hallmark Kind of Blue. He is married to Contemporary Christian music artist Michele Pillar."

Mullum Writers

Mullum Writers: "On the Weekend I...went to the Ballina Water slides for my friend's birthday.

Then I...went home and played on the PS2 with my Dad.
We tried to get to the next cliff but we kept on falling into the water.
I felt frustrated."

Now the class scapegoat is the teacher - Opinion - smh.com.au

Now the class scapegoat is the teacher - Opinion - smh.com.au:

"No one has a good word to say about teachers. Not so long ago they were well-informed and well-respected members of the community whose advice was sought after and highly valued."

By Dale Spender

Blogger Help : What is BlogThis! ?

Blogger Help : What is BlogThis! ?: "Once you add the BlogThis! link to your browser's toolbar, blogging will be a snap. Or rather, a click. Clicking BlogThis! creates a mini-interface to Blogger prepopulated with a link to the web page you are visiting, as well as any text you have highlighted on that page. Add additional text if you wish and then publish or post from within BlogThis!"

Another post at mullumwriters...

Mullum Writers: THE HOPKEYWAT:

“OKAY get out your spelling sheets” announced Mrs Bettison. Thanks to Madeline we get to do a 300 word test on Wednesday…TODAY! I was in great despair that she would change her mind(Mrs B hadn’t got a very good relationship with the class yet)then Leah had an idea"

Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1

Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1
With the start of the new school year, many teachers and students are seeking new products and technologies to help them through their upcoming academics. With the increase of teachers using blogs and wikis, and students networking and utilizing online tools, the demand for easier and more efficient ways of learning is on the rise. To me, the growing interest for web-based learning is amazing, which brought me to thinking; what if I were to consolodate some of the helpful online products and services that can help students, teachers and administrators alike? Well, I convinced myself. The following is a compilation of Web 2.0 products that I’ve personally researched and tested. These services are grouped into two main categories: “Tools”; and “Office Applications”. Some more specific services include: organizers, gradebooks, research tools, document managers, diagrams, and more.

YouTube's massive copyright suit - BizTech - Technology - smh.com.au

YouTube's massive copyright suit - BizTech - Technology - smh.com.au: "Media conglomerate Viacom sued Google and its internet video-sharing site YouTube for more than $US1 billion ($A1.27 billion) today in the biggest challenge yet to the web search leader's strategy to dominate the online video market.

The lawsuit accuses Google and its popular online video unit of 'massive intentional copyright infringement,' threatening its ambitions to turn YouTube into a major distributor of entertainment and outlet for advertising."

Hack Attack: Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD - Lifehacker

This looks useful:

Hack Attack: Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD - Lifehacker: "Putting any old video file - like the DivX/Xvid-encoded videos you've downloaded with BitTorrent - onto a DVD to play on your TV can be a daunting task. There's plenty of software that tackles this sort of thing for a price, but as a lover of open source software, free's always my first choice.

Luckily for all of us, authoring playable DVDs from just about any video file has gotten a lot easier in the open source community. This week I'm going to show you how to burn those downloaded TV shows to a DVD you can play in your living room using the free (as in speech), open source application, DVD Flick."

3 ways to use del.icio.us for categories in blogger - Freshblog

3 ways to use del.icio.us for categories in blogger - Freshblog: "Alright. As the title suggests, there are now 3 ways that I'm aware of to use del.icio.us for categories in blogger. All of these methods make tags that are picked up by technorati too, because Technorati tags don't have to link to technorati. They can link to del.icio.us and technorati will find them because of the rel: tag attribute. One set of tags is therefore capable of doing two things!! One more step: Each method still requires that you bookmark your post to del.icio.us, but there are one-click ways to do that too..."

Caedes Desktop Backgrounds - Photography, Abstract, 3D - Caedes Desktop Wallpaper - Caedes.net

Beautiful stuff. Free. Why look elsewhere?


Caedes Desktop Backgrounds - Photography, Abstract, 3D - Caedes Desktop Wallpaper - Caedes.net: "Welcome to Caedes, the Desktop Wallpaper and Artist Community
Caedes is a close community of artists, designers, and photographers who share their work through the medium of computer desktop wallpaper. Feel free to browse the galleries, comment on other's work, and even submit your own art when you're ready. Sign up for a free username to access all features."

del.icio.us/help/firefox

This has to be my alltime favourite firefox plugin:

NEW del.icio.us Bookmarks for Firefox

All the power of del.icio.us is now in your browser. The del.icio.us Bookmarks for Firefox extension replaces your Firefox bookmarking experience and gives you a better way to ...

• organize your bookmarks
• collect and retrive lots of bookmarks quickly
• access your bookmarks collection from any computer

Cool new features:

• Quick searching of your bookmark's tags, titles and notes
• Get to all your bookmarks and tags in the new sidebar
• A new bookmarks toolbar with two views for quick access to your favorite bookmarks.

del.icio.us/help/firefox