The alarming thing is that they signify temperatures of over 50°C. SO hot!

It has been so hot in Canberra this summer. Certainly the hottest summer since we have been living here (the last 5 years).  I remember last summer as feeling particularly mild, with only a few days over 30°C. This year though it has been consistently hot here, as with around the country.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the heatwave has broken national records. Last Monday the average daily temperature was 40.33°C…. Crazy!! So hot! And we also broke the record for the most days in a row that the national average temperature was above 39°C between 2-8 January.

Tim Flannery says:

When you start breaking records, and you do it consistently, and you see it over and over again, that is a good indication there’s a shift underway — this is not just within the normal variation of things.

So, for those of you who are climate skeptics, is this convincing for you of evidence of climate change? Do you think anything of the current heatwave here or other patterns of weather around the world? For instance that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the USA? Or is it just fudging numbers, or an attempt for government to justify introducing their new taxes?

Very keen to hear what people are thinking about this at the moment!

Farming in rural China (photo by Stephen Codrington)

It has been all very busy here lately with a couple of contracts happening. I have however found time to read some interesting articles online and I want to share some of them with you. I hope you enjoy them.

• The west isn’t ready for the rise of China

This is a really interesting article on the rise of China written by Kevin Rudd (Australia’s former PM). I guess with some extra time on his hands he is able to put pen to paper and write intelligent papers like these!

• How fair trade supports children’s rights to a safer environment

This article looks at how fair trade can improve a farmer’s (and his family’s) standard of living, with better access to healthy land and water.

• Climate reality bites: Gen-Xers don’t care much about global warming

Sadly, it seems Gen-Xers don’t think climate change is worth worrying about, even less-so than was the case in 2009. And, even worse, those with children seem to care less than those without…. weird. And worrying.

• What we really care about, and how to lift sustainability’s real appeal

A very interesting look at what social, political and economic issues matter most to people in Australia, the US, the UK and Germany. It seems we care a whole lots less about environmental sustainability than we used to. A full report will be available in September 2012 and I’m looking forward to reading it!

Closest to home for me is the ACT data and there was some really interesting outcomes from it. A few of the main points taken from the Canberra Times article are:

-there are 93,397 families, with an average of 1.8 children
-the overall population is up by 10% to 357,222
-we’ve had a decrease in standalone home and an increase in units (one of which I am living in!!)
-the proportion of Canberrans in de facto relationships is up, and marriage is very slightly down
-Canberra is more culturally diverse, but still less diverse than the national average
-28.9% have no religion which is the largest ‘religious affiliation’ though 55% identify with a denomination of Christianity
-income in the ACT is high, high, high…. way above the national average.

You can also look at the official Census 2011 website for a whole ream of fabulous information. There are QuickStats and Community Profiles, and I love the section Spotlight on You that gives some key population stats in a user-friendly way. It’s worth checking out.

Some stats on Australia:

• Population: 21,507,717 (as of 2011 Census)
• We have slightly more females than males
• Average number of children per family: 1.9
• Median age: 37 years
• Average number of people per household: 2.6
• Australia is the top country of birth (69.8%), next followed by England (4.2%)
• 75.6% of us live in detached dwellings, slightly down from 2006 (76.6%).

And from a sustainability point of view I find these stats surprising:

• 30.3% of private dwellings have 4 or more bedrooms
• 16.5% have 3 or more cars.

So we still love living in excess here in Australia!!

Anyway, there is lots to explore, at the links provided above. I hope you enjoy it, and if you find any interesting facts, I’d love it if you share them in the comments below.

You may have noticed that I have made some changes to my website, both on the home page (simplifying and streamlining), and a couple of new pages: my CV and Why choose me?. Hopefully these changes make it easier to find the information you need. I’d love to hear what you think about them in the comments section below.

I’ve been enjoying developing my templates for my business branding (the ones I will use for proposals, reports and invoices), which has been a bit of an organic process, developing along the way as I’ve needed it to (as I guess tends to be the case with a home business in its early stages).

I’ve also been exploring various small business apps to help me along the way with the accounting side of things. I do love that being a small business owner allows me to be a bit of a multi-dimensional professional – marketer, accountant and consultant all in one. Lots of fun!

Thanks for sharing the journey with me and following along with me as I grow my business. I can’t wait to share more about the project I am working on now when I am able to, as well as share about the next projects that I have coming up. So watch this space!

photo by Brendan Codrington

I recently went on a trip to Adelaide, one of the cities I used to live in. It was Fringe Festival time, which meant there was a whole lot of fun happening in the evenings. As I wandered down Rundle Street, a place that I used to frequent daily as I worked there and walked to and from uni along there, I just loved the vibe. It was active, funky, and it had soul. People were laughing and social, there was fabulous fashion shops fronting onto the street and there were street vendors smattered along the sides.

Another moment on our trip that stands out was just a casual outing to a park in a suburb south of the city called Christies Beach. Many families were there with their kids and dogs running around and playing. The family we were with knew a few other parents by name and went over to chat. What great community! There at the park we had a discussion about the ‘personality’ of the various Australian cities. It was suggested that Canberra was ‘academic, straight, boring’.

Wow. And this is the city I live in!

Therefore, when, not long after I read the article I linked to above I thought -YES! We need a planning shakeup! We need community! We need “energy, passion, engagement, community momentum to realise something needs to be done”.

I know so many great people in Canberra, and none of them are boring. They are fun, bright, engaged and love living in a city that provides a fabulous lifestyle, much open space, little traffic, and good access to local foods. Why then is Canberra seen as having all these negative attributes? As being “a place to go instead of waiting to die”?

As a planner, I love planning. I love the good that can be achieved for sustainability and healthy living by well planned and thought through cities. I love that good planning can create good community. But for some reason this hasn’t happened in Canberra. As one of Australia’s ‘best-planned’ cities, it is certainly lacking something in the community department. Oh how I would love for that to change – for arts and culture to be celebrated, for food and wine festivals to bring the community together, for people to be proud to live here…. but it won’t just happen.

People of Canberra, we need to have the passion to see the change. While the article suggests a top down approach is the way to go, I’d like to suggest the opposite – the only way Canberra can change is through the heart and soul of its people. The very same fabulous people that I know and love.

The dawn service for ANZAC Day in Canberra - a real sense of community

These days spelling and grammar errors are way too common. Call it the age of instant publishing, but everyone should give their work a quick once over before hitting the send, share or tweet button. What’s out there on the web presents an image of you or your organisation, so make sure the spelling and the grammar are in order!

Or if you’d like someone else to take care of it for you, I offer editing and proofreading services.  To find out more or get a quote, just contact me via email using the link in the top right corner of this page, or use the contact form here.

The cartoon is by Joel Pett and was actually first posted back in 2009 but the point is still relevant today. Perhaps even moreso than it was back then. The momentum for taking action on climate change (in Australia at least) has waned and there isn’t as much interest in the issue, especially when compared to the big impetus for change we had in 2007 when Kevin Rudd was elected as PM.

Having said that, the policies and plans being introduced in the name of climate change are all great initiatives. If (and it’s a big IF!) climate change isn’t ‘real’, at least we can say we worked for the greater good of our planet by taking action in the name of climate change.

Just in case you haven’t heard of it, or you’ve heard of it but you’re not quite sure what it is, Pinterest is like a virtual pinboard where you can pin images onto your boards you find on the internet to refer back to later. Sort of like a bookmarking system, but a very pretty one. To give you an idea of some of the things that people bookmark on Pinterest, examples of the main categories are Food & Drink, DIY & Crafts, Photography, Travel & Places, Kids, Film Music & Books, and People.

There are a lot of pretty pictures, you get to make your boards represent who are you in pictures. You can create your own pins while you are browsing (using a ‘Pin It’ button), or you can ‘repin’ other pins you see on Pinterest. You can also ‘like’ others pins and comment on them. It is similar to services like Facebook and Twitter in that you follow people and there is a feed of the photos that you see on your main screen. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve heard more than one friend comment on how addictive it is!

Pinterest is great fun for personal use, but it is also a platform that brands and businesses can get into to promote their products or their causes. I’ve just recently found a bunch of NGOs that have begun posting on Pinterest such as water.org, UNICEF, and Amnesty International. Other big companies that are on Pinterest include Kikki-K, Wholefoods and Time Magazine. Pinterest is really suited to visual brands or ones that are able to use outstanding images as a way in to their content and to spread their content further.

In deciding whether it is a good service for your business or organisation to make use of, think about how you might be able to promote your services on there. For example, many people use Pinterest to find fashion inspiration, interior design ideas, plan their wedding, or to plan their next trip to an exotic location (or at least dream of it!). So any businesses that are related to these industries could share their services and products and really spread their reach of potential customers.

As someone with a keen interest in the sustainability and ethical sectors, I see real potential for eco-organisations to get on there and promote their causes and ideas. There are a lot of people on there with living more sustainably and cleanly so I see real potential for organisations to promote these ideas and associated products (like chemical free cleaners, ethical toys for kids, and home grown vegetable gardens) on Pinterest.

You can check out my boards here. Feel free to follow me and I can’t wait to see your boards as well!

It took us a few goes to actually all work out how to get onto the hangout. I think this was mainly because no one else in the family had been regularly on Google+ in months, and some signed up just to take part in the hangout. In reality, it really is very simple to create a hangout and to join one. There is a link on the right hand side of the stream that lets you create a hangout. Through that, a window pops up and you can invite specific people or circles to take part. Those invited will receive a notification in their stream about the hangout taking place, and a link to join it.

In total we had 6 computers logged in on the chat – 3 of those were in my house (one for me, my husband and my son…. my husband got a bit clever and got our 16 month old in front of the laptop screen while he was playing with his toys). We have quite a talkative family, and given the lack of structure for our video conference, it was probably about the limit we could cope with for the competing voices taking part in the conversation. A quieter group of people might be able to cope with more though, and I can imagine that in a meeting setting where there was an agenda and format for who spoke when, then these numbers wouldn’t be a problem.

The quality of the video was very good for the most part. There was some delay between the voice and video from my family member in the USA – he spoke a few seconds before the visual caught up with what he was saying. This wasn’t a problem with the others though. The audio quality was excellent with no problems there.

When you are in the hangout, by default the person who is speaking (the loudest) is in a large picture in the centre of the window, with all other participants below in smaller boxes within the same window. You can choose to select a person to keep watching them rather than having it switch between whoever is talking. This is particularly helpful if there is a fair amount of background noise in any of the participant’s vicinity that makes the program think someone is talking when in fact they are not.

Some additional points to note:

-The layout was clear and easy to use. It looked pretty.

-It is free.

-Anyone with a browser can access it.

I think hangouts are one of the stand-out features of Google+ that will keep it in the forefront of social networking options in the future. It is something that it offers to clearly differentiate itself from Facebook (for example). It is a great option for families who are dispersed like mine to chat together and is also a fabulous tool for business, enabling meetings to be held across large distances. For businesses, you can also screenshare, draw pictures/diagrams and you have the ability to record and broadcast hangouts.

I had a lot of fun in my first hangout. I hope I can convince my other family members, friends and colleagues to get involved in them more regularly.