tyabblemons Said:

When posting to social media, please use the hashtag #forestryfacts so people can find all the memes currently posted. Thank you for sharing!

These are really good tweets. Firstly, the actual towns in the Watch and Act are mentioned. Where it can fit, a suggested course of action is recommended. A capture of the EMV map is included. The only improvements I could suggest are a timestamp, and a hashtag for the job stream. Break up lots of town names by making two (or even 3) tweets to cover all the towns mentioned, and you'll have room for further info.

This is the bot tweet for this Watch and Act. Notice how town names not mentioned, and job name is not hashtagged:

This is another example of a great SMEM tweet on the same day:

Here's the bot tweet for this job:

So, the SMEM op is really good. The next most important bit of info is the direction the fire is traveling - if there is room in the tweet. Space is not a problem on Facebook.

I've been posting Watch and Acts and Emergency Warnings for years to include all the town names mentioned. Incident Alert have been doing it since before me, but they don't include as much info. When people at home search Twitter for emergency traffic in their area, they are likely to search for their town name, or the town name where they think the job is - ie: 'Tyabb'. Some may think to hashtag this, but I don't think that would be common. Once a search for the town name is done, they will find traffic with the job name hashtag on it. They click on the hashtag to find the job stream. They may scroll back through the job stream to the first tweet about the event. Some users are aware of the #vicfires hashtag and may check that first. There, they will find the job name hashtag, and the job stream. Even if the public search for the word 'fire', there is every chance they will find a tweet from the job stream with the job hashtag on it, and so find the entire job stream. This is why I always mention the word 'fire' somewhere in every tweet about a fire event.

This is great work by CFA and Emergency Management Victoria on 19th January, 2016 :)

We all fantasize about doing it! Most of us have done it on video games. The most powerful vehicle on the road. Everyone gives way. Well, nearly everyone. There are some idiots.

I've been unlucky enough to have done it so many times I've lost count, over the years. I say unlucky, because you have to see the bigger picture. The only reason for a vehicle to be using lights and sirens is because someone is in danger. It's not fun. While you're busy breaking the road rules, you're acutely aware that someone is desperately waiting for you to arrive. You're listening to information about the job on the radio, and you're trying to plan what you will do when you arrive. Your crew leader is giving everyone orders. You're terrified of what you're doing, and what you will find when you get there. But don't forget to concentrate on the driving...

The first time I did it was in 1986. I was a rooky with Langwarrin Fire Brigade. I'd been with them a little while, and had nearly earned my proper firefighter's jacket. I was still wearing yellow overalls. We were called ducks. A few of us ducks were sent off with the rescue unit to check and maintain fire hydrants one Sunday morning. I was the most experienced duck, so they made me crew leader/driver. While were out checking the hydrants, we got a call on the radio telling us to return to the station 'code 1' (lights and sirens). I asked them send the message again. They confirmed. A bunch of rookies shat themselves. I remember the first red light I ever drove through legally. I remember the cars which were in the intersection. I can tell you their colours, and exactly where they stopped when they gave way. I will never forget it.

Yes, it's a huge rush. But you're terrified out of your mind. If you make a single mistake, people will get hurt.

Some drivers get what we call 'siren syndrome'. They've got such a rush of adrenaline that they break out into a dramatic sweat, and they make a lot of mistakes. It's a common thing and brigades watch for it and help people to overcome it. A driver with siren syndrome may be told by the officer in charge to downgrade to code 3 (normal road rules) to reduce risk.

One of the most dangerous parts of driving code 1 is that the public often overreact and do crazy things right in front of you. It is intimidating to have a firetruck up your arse! It's not possible for us to avoid doing it - we have to get past. Oncoming traffic freaks out and swerves off the road to try to give you room. If a car gets onto the gravel shoulder of the road at 100kmh, it's likely to get out of control. The back end slides out and when it grabs it sends them straight across the road into the oncoming traffic (and you). That's if it doesn't roll. It's happened in front of me.

Some drivers pretend the firetruck doesn't exist and ignore it. If you can't get past them, you crawl along behind them wondering how they even got a license. Everyone in the cabin is swearing. You're on the horn, and they go slower...

You learn some pretty neat tricks after a while - how to get around traffic banked up at an intersection; how to get creative when forging new pathways. I learned that if you're on the wrong side of the road, oncoming traffic is highly motivated to give way to you. But that's very dangerous, because if just one driver doesn't see you, they'll drive straight into you with catastrophic results.

If there is an accident of any kind while you're traveling with lights and sirens on, it is always your fault. The rules say you can only break the road rules if it is safe and expedient to do so. If there is an accident, it obviously wasn't safe! So you are to blame. If someone dies, you will face the coroner.

And there are accidents. They are always tragic.

When you've done it a lot, you don't get a buzz from the lights and sirens. Instead, as you begin your journey, you have butterflies in your stomach and a feeling like you've got an unpleasant task to do and you'd best just get it done.

It takes a lot of practice to do it well. You have to operate the switch for the siren as you drive - changing the tone for straight sections, and emergency vehicles need to make a different noise when they are entering dangerous areas like intersections to let everyone know. Nobody else in the cabin will touch any of the controls. They're not allowed to even operate the switch.

Driving code 1 at night has greater challenges because the lights reflect off EVERYTHING. This makes you think there's movement everywhere, and it attracts your eye. You can't help it. The lights are very bright.

The siren drives you crazy. You turn it off whenever you can get away with it. When it's on, you can't hear yourself think. It makes communicating in the cabin of the truck difficult.

Yes, it's the greatest rush you can imagine. It's not a rush you can enjoy. Being able to break the road rules does not give you freedom - it ties you up in knots.

Spongebob did a cover:

An actress did it as an audition:

And even Microsoft got in on the action:

Feel free to be impressed next time you see a double rainbow.

Both these secrets are revealed in just a single day's readings from our smart-meter. By controlling the price paid for electricity, government and big business set the growth rate for the adoption of solar power in Victoria, regardless of any 'rebates' being offered for installation. Secondly, private individuals and families generating power for Victoria's grid are being ripped off, by being paid a fraction of what their power is worth. The situation is unsustainable, and will soon impact on the Victorian economy.

Tensions are simmering in the Napthine government after Agriculture Minister Peter Walsh unexpectedly declared the Coalition would go to the election with a policy for no new national parks.

In a move that caught many of his colleagues by surprise, the Nationals deputy leader made the announcement at a recent forestry industry dinner, putting the government on a collision course with community groups, who had been assured a proposal for a new park in the state's north-east was being considered.

Environmentalists have been pushing for the creation of a proposed Great Forest National Park stretching between Kinglake, Baw Baw and Eildon in a bid to protect the Leadbeater's possum after the 2009 bushfires destroyed 45 per cent of its habitat.

Agriculture Minister Peter Walsh. Photo: Eddie Jim

The idea was being examined by a National Parks Advisory Council that reports to Environment Minister Ryan Smith. However, Mr Smith's office was not aware of Mr Walsh's announcement when contacted by The Sunday Age last week and had to take advice before confirming that, "as the Minister indicated, the Coalition has no plans to announce new national parks during the campaign".

It is understood that some Liberal MPs were privately sympathetic to the great forest park concept, and insiders have question why Mr Walsh appeared to be "freelancing" on environmental policy to appease the timber industry when the matter could prove highly contentious for the government.

With four weeks until the election, green groups are campaigning  in key seats over what they say is the  government's poor environmental performance.

Illustration: Matt Golding.

Flyers were handed our in Mr Smith's Warrandyte electorate on Saturday branding him the "Minister for Extinction", while voters in the inner-city seat of Prahran, held by Liberal MP Clem Newton Brown, will soon get Wilderness Society leaflets asking them to save the Leadbeater's possum, Victoria's faunal emblem.

Sarah Rees, from the group My Environment, said she felt "angry, deceived and let down" by the government, while Victorian National Parks Association spokesman Nick Roberts said: "A four-year policy vacuum has seen a National Party hit list on Victoria's natural environment. Our forests, rivers and coasts deserve much better from Victoria's next government."

Mr Walsh defended the government's position, saying through spokeswoman Deborah Cole that the Coalition had done more to protect the Leadbeater's possum than Labor did in office, including investing $11 million to implement all 13 recommendations made by a possum advisory group.

Ms Cole said the announcement came during a question-and-answer session at a recent Victorian Association of Forest Industries dinner.

"Minister Walsh told the VAFI dinner that the Coalition would not be committing to new national parks that would result in the loss of timber resources," Ms Cole said.

"For 11 years Labor knew the Leadbeater's possum was endangered and they sat on their hands and did nothing."

The proposed Great Forest National Park would protect 355,000 hectares of forest, added to the existing 170,000 hectares of parks and protected areas in the central highlands.

Supporters admit its size would thwart native timber harvesting in the highlands, but argue more jobs could be created by encouraging nature-based tourism in the region. A Labor source said the ALP was formulating a policy on the issue.

Reprinted from The Sunday Age.

Our beautiful solar panels (rated at 250 watts each @ 30 volts) arrived in the back of a van:

And so did the 5KVA inverter:

The installers got to work. They were very nice people, who were very helpful with loads of information about our new system. They worked up in the heat, putting in the brackets for the panels:

They'd come all the way from Melbourne to do the work. It turned out it was the apprentice's birthday, and he had to be back in Melbourne by 5pm to knock off, so they didn't get all the work done in the one day. This meant we had to store the panels overnight:

This turned out to be a joy. I got to play with one of the panels with my multimeter, and measure its output even with just a worklight shining on it. It was a cool experiment.

The next day, the installers returned and completed the installation of the panels:

And by the time they'd finished, there was just the wires feeding down from the panels waiting to be terminated at the inverter. The panels were isolated by switches up on the roof.

Today, a team arrived to install the inverter, and wire the whole thing up. It didn't take them long before they had the basic components mounted:

When they finished wiring the whole lot up (and there was a lot of wiring!), we were allowed to test the system. It was late this afternoon, and the day was quite overcast. It seemed like poor conditions for solar power, but when they turned it on, I couldn't believe the results:

The house was using power - the lights were all on, and some computers were on, and the solar system was outputting 613.9 watts back into the grid!! That's incredible! In the ten minutes while I watched the test, we actually put .1 kilowatt back into the grid. And this is in poor light conditions. The electrician says we'll have enough power to run the airconditioner on a summer's day.

Some people might find this ugly, but I find it beautiful. This is an example of putting modern technology to work for us. We have spent more money than it costs to buy a car to put this system in, but it will pay for itself in two years, and continue to save us money over the next 30 years. More importantly for the planet, we've reduced the amount of coal we burn for power.

We have 20 panels. We nailed it, guys :)

Bright sunshine:

There were a lot of other people standing around at the cemetery, which seemed odd to me, because it was night-time. I just stood where I was for a while, and tried to get my bearings.

A whole crowd of people were over in one corner of the cemetery. There were other people scattered around, in small groups - not doing much. Maybe they were talking.

I spotted a fellow about my age standing off by himself, bundled up against the cold, watching the large crowd in the corner. I made my way over to him, being careful not to step on anyone's grave.

"Hello matey, can you tell me whose funeral this is?", I uttered through chattering teeth. Strange way to break the ice. He turned and looked at me for a few seconds before replying.

He said "You're new here. I'm Dave." He held out his hand.

I shook his hand - it was cold to the touch. "Hi Dave, I'm Brad, and yes, I seem to have suddenly found myself here. Who's funeral is it?"

Dave studied the crowd. He asked "What sort of box did they put you in?"

"They didn't put me in any box. Last thing I remember was going to sleep in my bed. I don't remember coming here."

"Brad, you died. You were buried - don't you remember what kind of coffin they put you in?"

"I don't remember dying!"

"Aye, it can happen like that." said Dave, as he tried to wrap his coat tighter around himself.

Dave took a seat on a granite grave. He said "You're stuck here for a while - until the flesh of your body completely decomposes. And that depends on what type of box they put you in."

He let this sink in. I couldn't collect my thoughts well enough to reply straight away.

"Now, if it was just a pine box, then you'll be out of here in around five years. But if they used hardwood it will take double that. All these people are waiting to decompose before they can move on."

I had no recollection of being in a box. I said this to Dave. He just shook his head.

"See old Hosking, over there?" He pointed.

"He was rolling in money when he died. Specified a lead-lined, solid-stone coffin in his will, and he's been here for nearly 200 years."

I live in a small town southeast of Melbourne, Australia. While I was formerly the Secretary and Lieutenant of Tyabb Volunteer Fire Brigade, I first discovered community organizations back in the 1960's when I joined St John’s Ambulance; I was just a kid, and I learned first-aid. I've been a member of community orgs on and off ever since.

In my experience working with new community organizations, one of the most commonly asked questions is "what the heck should we do about a website?"

Here I am to tell you the answer:

Over the last few years, I’ve been looking for new tools to make websites for the various organizations I work with. As someone who is somewhat technologically inclined, I've tried all sorts of ways to create a website on the cheap. I've even paid for hosting, and used free tools to make HTML pages to populate a website. But this takes hours and hours of work, and everything still has to be indexed so users can navigate around the website.

Some systems charge a fee to access their platform, but you almost need a computer engineer's certificate to work with them. And, once again, there’s the numerous hours spent in set up. Yes, cheap, simple (and ugly) options exist, but you'll want your community org website to look professional to reflect the legitimacy of your org, not a platform for someone else's ads.

Oh yes: you can establish a presence through social media, but not everybody in your target audience will use it. Even worse, you probably won’t get the exposure you need. Consider that less than %1 of Facebook users actively engage with the pages they follow or ‘like’. You also won’t rank well in a Google Search compared to real websites.

After experimenting with what seems like hundreds of ways to publish content I found the perfect option in a tool I'd already been using for a while: Evernote.

Through Evernote, one can create content in any form and share it with others through ‘notebooks’ that contain individual notes. It also allows users to generate their own searchable library, and works on almost any platform, including mobile. However, Evernote alone does not have the ability to index pages on the internet in the way a website does.

While looking for an answer to this problem, I found Postach.io - the ’The Evernote-Powered Website Builder’. Watch a video here if you'd like a formal introduction.

It is! But in order to understand this, you need to imagine a Postach.io site as not just a great blog, but also as a fully functioning website, ready-made for any organization! Postach.io is simple, looks beautiful, and requires next to no experience, training, or upkeep.

The best part: it’s exactly in the right price bracket for most emerging orgs; Postach.io is FREE! Anyone who can type can use it, and there are loads of themes to choose from to make a community org website stand out. Postach.io can be set up in under an hour, by anyone. Embeds, Comments, and Google Analytics are fully supported.

This is what I was looking for! It’s a bloody miracle…

I'll admit my bias straight up. Postach.io is my favourite platform for blogging - all I have to do is make a note in Evernote, tag it ‘published’, and it's instantly online and fully indexed. But there's other genius applications of the Postach.io platform, like the ability to create a fully functional website for an organization without hosting fees.

As a premium Postach.io member, I run more than one website. I'm no coding guru, but I manage to run multiple websites through Postach.io with minimal effort or maintenance. Recently, I have been tasked with establishing two community organizations: One is a wildlife preservation group that looks after a flock of around 100 Sulphur Crested Cockatoos that roost in ancient trees in the heart of our town. The other, a volunteer organization called VOST Victoria. It’s my flagship project; a social enterprise that works in emergency information management though online mediums. We've even found ways for our volunteers to collaborate on published content by using Evernote and Postach.io.

Typically, it's not easy for an emerging organization to host a website. It can be expensive, time consuming, and difficult to update on a regular bases. Plus, you typically have to train staff to operate and update the website, and only a limited amount of team members will be able to contribute to it. But with Postach.io, you can do this for free with absolutely no coding experience. You could even use your phone through the Evernote app and update your pages with the click (or touch) of a sync button. It’s so good, that you might even decide to upgrade to premium like I did so you can make more than one website for your org.

You don't have to be an expert, you just need to know a couple of tricks - so here they are:

Make use of Postach.io's ability to embed Google Docs, among other things (just use the embed code that Google gives you in your post, and you have a Google Doc embedded in your post). For example, you could make a form with Google Docs to collect data about your users and feed the results to a spreadsheet. In this way, users can interact with your posts by inputting data in a way that can normally only be done using complicated HTML code or by jumping to some other off-site third-party provider.

With an embed like this, you can keep all forms for the organization on your own website (and in Google Drive) without added cost or confusion to your visitors.

Don't be afraid to experiment with embedding. You'll be surprised at how many third-party embeds already work. The Postach.io team is always writing new updates for the parser to accept all sorts of new code from third-party providers. The developers have very few rules when it comes to embedding things - and trust me, the code works.

The same goes for themes. Postach.io’s designs are sleek, simple, and minimal. I’ve found that this allows you to personalize your blog or website to match your target market and raison d’être; upload your organization’s logo and banner, fill in the bio, and you’re good to go.

Got a video about your org? Embed your Youtube videos directly into the page with ease (again, just copy the embed code that Google supplies).

If your organization related to music, maybe feature an audio recording? Try using a Soundcloud embed. By using embeds, you can turn your site into anything you want it to be.

And suddenly, you're not confined to just a blog anymore - the possibilities are endless. You can even make changes to the source code directly through the Postach.io site settings (if you know how) to add things like 'dropdown' menus and customized colour schemes.

Allow me to advocate for the Postach.io team. For anyone who has ANY issues, the support button (the question mark on the bottom-right of the Postach.io dashboard) works really well! The team is reliable and they don't care if you're bending the rules. On the contrary, they’ll likely cheer you on, no matter what crazy ideas you have.

I'm happy to talk to any organisation who is just starting out and exploring options for setting up a website. You can contact me on Twitter (@tyabblemons) or by leaving a message on any of my websites.

There was a report released by Victoria University recently called 'Build it and they will come?'. The study was conducted under a predefined set of rules, which should have been a clue to everyone that it couldn't be taken seriously. I can only assume that the people who promoted the report as fact either didn't read it carefully, or were motivated to publish a rather sensational story to sell papers.

At the beginning of the report, the good people from Victoria University clearly tell the reader that the way the report was produced was by using the 'pre-mortem analysis' technique. "The pre-mortem technique involves imagining that the project has failed, and inventing a story to explain why..." !!

Here's a screen capture from the report:

Indeed, the authors "encourage your participation in the process".

In other words, they'd like you to help them imagine reasons why the Port of Hastings might fail, and develop scenarios to explain the imagined failure. And we do have vivid imaginations!

I don't think it's right that people use a report of this nature to mislead the public and cause panic that our roads will be congested and ships won't come. If you give the subject just a few minute's thought, the logistics of Melbourne's container traffic are simple and clear:

• Containers (to carry goods) were invented just after World War 2. Somewhere had to be found to store the containers associated with the Port of Melbourne, and the then empty land to the west of Melbourne was chosen as the most convenient spot. Back then, there was little population in the southeast suburbs.
• The majority of manufacturing is now done in the southeast suburbs of Melbourne in places like Dandenong. Some container traffic also heads to Gippsland.
• The Port of Melbourne is being upgraded and will continue to receive and dispatch container traffic into the future to service the north and west of Melbourne.
• The Port of Hastings will actually help remove congestion from Melbourne's roads, not add to it.
• Victoria's two Stevedore companies have confirmed (by phone) that they would like to send the larger, more efficient container ships to Hastings now! I encourage you to make your own inquiries.

I believe this is a case of public opinion being deliberately manipulated by forces unknown. The Victoria University study should be taken at face value - that is: a fictitious story where we all try to imagine that the Port of Hastings has failed, and why that might be. The commentators who reported information contained in the imaginary scenarios appear to have deliberately misled the public, and I can't imagine why that might be. Politics?