Booglegum

Booglegum is the Aboriginal Place name for a hill now known as Pine Mountain, near Possum Creek, also near Bangalow and Byron Bay, in NSW Australia.

In the 1920s it was adopted as the property name for the original Possum Creek homestead of Frank O’Meara, formerly known as Jerseyville, which overlooks Pine Mountain from a nearby hill. The Booglegum homestead, built in the 1890s from timber cut from the property, remains to this day and has recently been restored by its current owners , Sue Taylor and Ian Peter.  Sue Taylor originally purchased the property in the early 1980s after it had been in a state of disrepair and had become a hippie squatter camp during the 1970s.

Booglegum is a fine heritage homestead, one of the finest in the Byron Bay area. The origins of the name and the use of the name to denote the area now known as Pine Mountain (and until recently home to Paul Hogan) seems to be unrecorded.

Hence this small piece of local history!

No broadband, no blog

Since moving to Possum Creek in January I have been struggling with 28.8kbs dialup Internet. Bloggiong or what had been normal Internet usage for me has become pretty difficult.
Now this isn’t exactly a remote area – 10 minutes from the village of Bangalow, 15 minutes from the prosperous tourist centre of Byron Bay. A near neighbouring property was owned for many years by Paul Hogan – other near neighbours include ex members of parliament. This is 5 acre block territory, not remote rural holdings.

But no ADSL. No wireless either from local providers.

Or no infrastructure if you like…..

So a satellite dish is on its way, I’m told mid April. Lot of catching up to do when it arrives!

Bob Frankston on Internet futures

Here’s a few thoughts for 2007 from one of the visionaries of network infrastructure. To quote Bob,

Today’s Internet is treated just like another service in the image of the phone networks or even another channel on your Broadband Set Top Box. And to a large extent that image is reinforced by the central authority of ICANN as the dispenser of identifiers and identities.

But this isn’t in the spirit of the Internet which is defined by the user/developers outside the network. The Internet is just a name for the community of those cooperating and using common protocols. Instead of viewing the Internet as something we connect to we should view it as radiating from us and our devices. Our home networks reach out through community networks and beyond finding paths that work.

More here…
http://www.frankston.com/public/?Name=OurInternet

Intro

This is an experiment. Finding myself without time to comment on all the lists and matters I am interested in, I figure a blog might help me. So here goes!