I just went on the website of wordcampvictoria.ca and submitted three possible speaking topics. One of the requirements is to post the topics somewhere – seems like the blog is the best place! Besides, some weeks ago I decided to blog more and even challenged myself to do 100 days of blogging. Much as I have not succeeded in blogging every day, I still want to communicate MORE. So here are the ideas – please comment and tell me which one you would be most likely to go to:

Why would government departments want to blog?
I suppose the subtitle and subcontext would be why would anyone want to read a government blog? It sounds like a recipe for more spin, doesn’t it? However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of posts on certain government blogs, particularly when they know exactly who their audience is, like OpenData BC does. In addition there are some great “internal to government” bloggers who are both insightful and personal – unfortunately you can only access their work if you are work for the BC government.

The follow-up to this question is, of course, can government do a better job of blogging? It would be great to have some government communications people weigh in on this question. In fact, maybe I don’t want to do a speech on this so much as I want to moderate a panel.

Another topic was “Why I love Weaver, and how it has made me better at CSS”
Weaver is a very interesting template, in that it isn’t really a template so much as it is an approach to designing in WordPress that takes all the scary CSS stuff I’ve never bothered to learn, and makes it accessible to writers like me. I’d like to go through the Weaver Adminstration section in a Weaver-based site, and customize the 2011 template to look like something quite different than Weaver’s standard templates. I’ll show how it uses CSS formatting to make a customized theme in the same way as a traveller might use a phrasebook. Handy stuff.

The third topics is… shoot, I don’t remember the third topic. And that in itself is probably a good enough reason not to consider it.

So there you go, social media public. Tell me which topic stands out for you, and I will work with the folks at WordCampVictoria to make a great presentation. (Or, if you hate all of them, I’ll make the coffee at WordCamp….)

Yesterday, my sons and I cleaned the house and did a ton of laundry. Chores like that require you to crank the tunes, and so of course we had the XBox 360 blaring through the TV speakers the current heavy-rotation favourite: Midnight Oil.

I find it fascinating that three boys born in 1994, 1997 and 2000 could love this 1980s-90s band, and find nothing unusual about that. Back when I was 15, any song that was older than 6 months was “old” , never to be heard on the radio again unless it was part of a “discumentary” or perhaps the countdown of the year’s best songs. We’d hang onto our favourite artists through our record collections, but old records were hard to come by unless you had a big brother or sister.

Now, it seems to be pretty common to pick and choose your favourite artist from any era, thanks to 3 generations of rock and roll, combined with the magic of the Internet. Sure, there will always be kids who like the current batch of pop music the best, even if it is manufactured commercial music like Justin Bieber, Katy Perry or Bruno Mars. But since digital media makes music from any time and any country so much more available, why not pick exactly what you want?

I love our world where Peter Garrett rocks on like he’s not yet an Australian senator; where “War of the Worlds” is more likely to be a 1938 radio play, 1979 record or even an 1898 book than a 2005 movie; where good music in specific and good culture in general can be found anywhere and everywhere.

Now I have to go plug in my smartphone so that I can read Pride and Prejudice in bed, with the Kindle app on my Android…

Today – no, make that since yesterday because I did 3 loads after work – I have done more laundry than I think I’ve ever done in my life. 9, maybe 10 loads of clothing for four people, towels, sheets, linens, duvets… in short, everything I could stuff into a washer and a dryer. I’ve kept those machines humming all day! And alas, I have no outside clothesline to hang them on.

I LOVE putting sheets on the line to dry: the crisp feeling of them as I pull them off the line and then again as I slip beneath the covers, the anti-bacterial action of the sun, the fresh air smell. It makes laundry worth doing. It bugs me that I’ve missed out on months worth of air and sunshine on the sheets.

What’s more, I’m missing out on some great morning walks because I haven’t gotten around to getting one of those wonderful high-capacity grocery totes either. Here I am, living within a ten-minute walk to work, to my boys’ school, and to the shops, and I am still way too car-dependent. The moment I think about lugging a 4 litre jug of milk in a grocery bag, I go all wimpy and get in the car.

So along with my commitment to blogging every day (yeah, I know – missed two now but yesterday was NUTS) I’m going to commit to being car-free and clotheslineful, at least on the weeks when I am in my own bed and not at my sweetie’s place across town. Even then, HE already has a clothesline!