Weeknotes 5

21 March 2019

This one is coming a bit early because I’m going away camping tomorrow for a friend’s birthday.

1. Monday marked a year since we moved to Australia. I can’t say I feel completely settled here yet, but I feel a lot more connected to this place and the people than I did a year ago, so that’s progress.

2. I came across the Subtle Disrupters podcast, where the host Adam Murray interviews local people in Melbourne, that you probably haven’t heard of, but who are doing interesting things.

   The first one I listened to was with Lina Patel, and I was really impressed by Adam’s thoughtful questions, as well as Lina’s insightful responses. Lina talked about having worked in the banking sector, and getting to the point where she recognised it was not fulfilling her, so she quit. Her life was then quite tumultuous for a while.

   I then listed to one with Amy Churchouse, who founded Good Karma Networks. I’ve met Amy, so it wasn’t completely new ground for me, but was still an interesting listen—her passion and energy really comes through.

3. I finished reading Better Work Together, a book about Enspiral, which is a co-operative network of organisations in New Zealand (mostly), with the mission statement “More People Working on Stuff That Matters”.

   I’ve been following Enspiral for a number of years now and I’m pretty interested in how they work. Since it’s quite an unusual structure, it can be hard to understand the reality of what they do. The book really helped with this, and I’d like to find time to write a bit of a summary/review soon.

   I’m looking forward to meeting Anthony Cabraal, one of the book’s co-producers, for a coffee next week while he’s in Melbourne.

4. Something I forgot to mention last week is that I chipped in for the crowd-funder of Jaunt, a company who are planning to convert old-school four wheel drives into electric vehicles, and rent them out to people for adventures in the Australian bush. I love the idea so I hope they are successful.

5. I’ve been working on a wearable electronics project to create a costume for a party at the weekend. It’s essentially 40 individually-controllable colour LEDs attached to a piece of clothing. Every stage of the process has taken much longer than I anticipated, but once I’d finally finished all the sewing it was really fun to play with the code to animate the LEDs. Maybe I’ll write up some more details in a separate blog post soon.