May Day! May Day!, East Timor, More Meetings, Business Demand, Red Friday, Weirdness Magnet Strikes!

Always with more than a slight lean to the libertarian left, the Melbourne Unitarian Church raised the scarlet standard high on its May Day service. My reading was Rosa Luxembourg's Origins of May Day (congratulations Melbourne, you were first), the presentation was by Clinton Fernandes and then we all sang Joe Hill. After the service we watched a video on civil disobedience during the Vietnam war.

Clinton made two very salient points during his presentation. The first that it was the work of "activists on the ground" which kept the East Timorese issue going for so long when the diplomatic world turned a blind eye to the massacres and accepted the integration as a matter of fact (remember the Gareth Evans handshake?). The second point was it was the action of Australians as workers that forced the government's hand for international intervention. The protests for intervention in East Timor were smaller than the protests against the invasion in Iraq - but the fact that Indonesian ships were being loaded in ports, that Garuda airlines were grounded, that the rubbish wasn't being picked up from their embassy - that's what freaked out the government - the idea that working people could actually discover that they have the power.

A related meeting was on Tuesday at Trades Hall "East Timor: The And Now" which I attended with severina_242 and was organised by East Timor Women Australia, The Timor Sea Justice Campaign and the Australia East Timor Association. The main feature was Canadian film-maker Elaine Briere presenting her film "Bitter Paradise: The Sell-Out of East Timor" and her latest book "Testimony". The meeting of just under a hundred was convened by Clinton (in a tie and collared shirt no less!). On the journey back from Trades Hall I ran into lei_loo whom I hadn't seen for just ages. We had a bit of a chat (we were both on the rush to catch different trains) which was followed up the following eve via 'phone.

On a further related topic, I'm writing a paper on decentralised governance for a Deakin University symposium on East Timor and presenting a workshop on IT issues on a two-day conference at Victoria University of Technology on Cooperating With East Timor.

Other meetings in the past week included an all-day national committee meeting for SAGE-AU which is uncontroversial and efficient and a thoroughly pleasant afternoon with tabouli which consisted of discussion on web design and development, unitarianism, politics and economics, caste systems, medieval and ancient warfare, and publishing. Something will come of all this I'm sure ;-)

I'm in demand, business-wise. Apart from the ISP I work for, I've also started do tech and sysadmin work in a the very formal and conservative business and finance planning firm Inmatrix. They seem happy with me, because in the short time I've been there I've fixed lots of things, so that's good. Also Datalink seem to be head-hunting me for Linux admin work. Oh, and there's some little Yarraville firm as well who'se name temporarily escapes me. The practical upshot of all this is that I'm going to increase me hourly rate. It's about time anyway.

Red Friday 0504 is up, featuring an article about ICT in New Zealand (which I'm sure my NZ el-jay friends will correct me on), a business survey by damien_wise (go on, fill it out - it'll take two minutes) and a a humour article originally posted by allezbleu many moons ago. Oh, and check the "Who Says Spam Doesn't Pay" bit on the ICT news section. Explains why people do it. Next issue of Red Friday will be on computer game programming and retro-games, which means I'll also get around to doing that article for luciousmalfroy.

The weirdness magnet has struck! Many brain-breakers of the week. From patchworkkid - A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it's actually the far less ominous 616. From p_cat; A Queensland fisherman suffered the ultimate revenge when a mackerel jumped into his boat and floored him - and then got away. In what he called a bad case of "fishy's revenge", Glen Hopper suffered bruised ribs, cuts to his face and arms and a dented ego when the 1.5m fish jumped out of the water and hit him on Sunday morning.. But the winner goes to drjon; Cambodian Troops Quarantine Quan'sul - as zombies take over!. The culprit was discovered to be mosquitoes native to that region carrying a new strain of Malaria which thus far has a 100 percent mortality rating killing victims in fewer than 2 days. After death, this virus is able to restart the heart of it's victim for up to two hours after the initial demise of the person where the individual behaves in extremely violent ways from what is believe to be a combination of brain damage and a chemical released into blood during "resurrection".