I used to write poetry, way back when I still thought I knew everything about everything. My poetry was mostly sad and dark and not very good and after a few years I just quit.

I started to write ‘maybe not a Haiku’ a few months back and have been enjoying publishing some of my rather naive efforts along with a snapshot. What has also returned — thanks mainly to my mate Harvey, because he keeps sending me great poems to read — is a renewed interest and growing appreciation of poetry as a whole.

This one was in my mailbox yesterday. I really enjoyed it and wanted to find out about John Fox. What I found was a wonderful site and some lovely poetry and thoughts. Well worth a look…

Last night I went to see the Al Gore documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Which highlight’s Gore’s persuasive argument that global warming is the biggest challenge facing our global civilisation.

This morning I woke to one newspaper article reporting that our NSW State Government is getting ready to appeal against the recent landmark ruling that it must consider the greenhouse impacts of burning coal to make electricity.

And, another article about a New Zealand-led scientific drilling team in Antarctica that has recently recovered three million years of climate history. Their conclusion — the Ross Ice Shelf, a raft of ice the size of France, may collapse as quickly as Larsen B did in 2002, triggering a dramatic rise in sea level.

The Larsen Ice Shelf which is on the Antarctic Peninsula had been stable for 10 thousand years or so but in 2002 proved that when these things decide to go, they go extremely quickly. A total of about 3,250 km2 of shelf area disappeared in a 35-day period. The Larsen Ice Shelf is now about 40 percent of the size of its previous stable minimum. You can view the speed and the extent of the Larsen B break up at the British Antarctic Survey. Link

The scientific consensus is clear: global warming is real, it’s happening now and it is the result of our use of oil and other fossil fuels. There is a lot you and I can do. Learn more here!

The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty on climate change, assigning mandatory targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to signatory nations. It has been signed and ratified by upward of 160 countries.

The USA and Australia continue to be the only countries that refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

Wordpress is a wonderfully versatile piece of sotfware with an on-line community that is vibrant, helpful and interesting. It’s the software that runs this site.

I’ve been trying to get this mobile blogging stuff happening for a few days now and I reckon I’ve tried probably every piece of blogging software available for the Treo 650.

The best was the latest beta version of a program called mo:Blog. It had everything I wanted but it caused my Treo to constantly reboot and I didn’t think I wanted to be in India with a phone that had totally hung. So now I have the slightly less functional but equally impressive and free u*Blog installed. As I mentioned it’s not quite as versatile but it seems rock solid and will do 85% of what I was looking for — which mostly revolved around category stuff. I’m also going to have another look at Plogit an Open-Source PalmOS blogging client that I think will retrieve posts so they can be updated or edited after they’ve been posted.

I also thought I’d try sending posts via e-mail (which I can do easily from my Treo as long as I have a cell) — that worked even better and since I’m won’t be posting photos I decided to stick with the vanilla Wordpress solution and not go down the Postie plugin route — I was having formatting issues using Postie anyway.

So, this post is being written on my Treo 650 using a Palm Wireless Keyboard and the standard VersaMail email program that comes with the package. I will then e-mail it to my Wordpress blog, and a few minutes later, thanks to wp-cron-mail, it will show up live for the world to read.

At least that’s what’s supposed to happen when I press the send button

It all happened as expected — I have since used my laptop to added the links and fixed a couple of typos.

Last week I bought a ticket to India. I’ve been there twice before and enjoyed it very much, although I will admit that India pushes quite a few of my buttons.

In 2003 and again in 2005 I stayed mostly in the South near Mysore in a place called Bylakuppe. I enjoyed staying-put and having the same bed to sleep in each night. Maybe it’s an age thing, but the thought of packing my bags every few days and moving-on has really lost its appeal. I sometimes got bored but for me that was part of the trip — staying in one place and experiencing the people and the community.

This time I am going to Varanasi in North India and will stay there for about 2 weeks, then travel to Bodh Gaya for a week and then back to Varanasi to catch a flight to Kathmandu, Nepal, also for a week.

I’m leave soon and I’ve started a blog category ‘on the road’ to chronicle this trip and maybe a few others if this mobile blogging thing works and I enjoy it.

At the moment I can’t quite make my mind up whether to blog via my Treo and email using the Wordpress Postie plugin or whether to use the free blogging software u*Blog on my Treo. There are pros and cons for both and for me neither of them seems perfect. Maybe in the end it will all be a tad too hard. We’ll see!

Sunday morning
awakens with my senses –
coffee and newspapers

maybe not a Haiku by John Holman