James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

Well it's been a week since we released the first episode of the new Open Source On The Air and it's doing better than we thought. At last count we had around 130 downloads, which to be honest is about 120 more than we thought we would get for the first episode.

My adventures with django have been held up slightly by a bad case of PEBKAC, but we seem to be moving passed that :) I'm going to have more about the two projects I'm working on for that shortly.

In gardening news, I went to a composting course yesterday up at GlenGarry Cottage in Wollongong, they do some really good stuff up there, however they look to be under the gun of a Council review. It appears the new Administrators would like to stop funding this cool service and invest the money into roads and infrastructure. I'm slightly torn on this, because one thing that Wollongong needs is infrastructure spending, however the stuff that is taught at Glen Garry is both interesting and of benefit to the wider community - teaching people to reduce waste and manage their energy use can only be a good thing.

Hmm, what else...

Oh yes, some genius has decided that cheating is actually a perfectly acceptable thing in an exam situation with a school in Sydney trialling allowing students to use the internet or phone friend during exams to get help. The stated reasoning being that students need to learn how to research things much more than they need to understand the underlying concepts of a subject. I'm sorry, but this sort of thing just encourages the idea that knowledge is like a Happy Meal, cheap, disposable, and of little value. Why bother learning anything if you can just look it up when you need it? Why bother developing an understanding of the subject beyond what you read on wikipedia or what your friend tells you?