Summer flowers
arranged in a vase
A new book on my lap

maybe not a Haiku by John Holman

One of my obsessions over the past few years has been to try and reduce my travel technology down to a couple of items — namely a smart phone (Treo 680) and a digital camera (Panasonic FZ5).

The Treo 680 contains all my travel information and contact details and on the road I also use it to browse the Internet and to send and receive emails. I also write stuff and send it out in MSWord format with the help of Documents to Go and my Palm Wireless Keyboard.

With a program called CallRec I can record anything from a phone conversation to the sound of a Indian Sitar. And with an 8GB SD-card full of ebooks and music and a video or two it also helps keep me occupied.

I’ve found my Treo to be so versatile I rarely need to travel with a laptop any more.

Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s most important contemporary writers. A prolific poet, novelist, literary critic, feminist and political activist. I have enjoyed reading a number of her novels including Oryx and Crake and The Blind Assassin. I never realised she wrote poetry until a few days ago. This one is a fun:

We already have increasing numbers of surveillance cameras all over our cities. We monitor international and some domestic fixed-phone, mobile-phone and Internet communications. We monitor most domestic and international financial transactions. Trucks and soon cars will be videotaped on our highways. All this I am sure will be cross checked and stored in what may become our very own Orwellian nightmare.

This snip from Yahoo News is a stark reminder of how a population’s fear might be responded to by a government and the police to create Big Brother.

While the U.S. government, supported by majorities in national polls, is ignoring laws on oversight of homeland spying, the British are developing systems to literally follow, photographically, every citizen on his or her daily rounds. Big Brother, the fictional invention of a British writer, George Orwell, will be real and functional within a year. The first step, scheduled to be operational next March, will use thousands of cameras linked to government databases to photograph every vehicle entering or leaving London, driving on major highways or stopping for gasoline — and checking those movements against driver’s licenses and other government information over two- and five-year periods.

“The new national surveillance network for tracking car journeys,” said Steve Conner, science editor of The Independent, “… is already working on ways of automatically recognizing human faces by computer … every move recorded and stored by machines.” Police also project a need for more complicated surveillance systems, schemes aided by hidden computer chips in new cars and trucks.

Richard Reeves| Yahoo News | Link

Amanda Hampson is a mate.  She has been writing professionally for more than a decade. Her non-fiction titles include Battles with the Baby Gods: Stories of Hope and Take Me Home: Families Living with Alzheimer’s.

The Olive Sisters is her first novel.

‘I open the gate and walk into the field . . . As the sun pours a river of light down this valley, I realise there are hundreds and hundreds of trees and I’ve seen those silver leaves before, not here in Australia, but shimmering in the groves that grace the terraced hillsides of Tuscany.’

When Adrienne’s marketing company goes down, her lifestyle does too. She retreats from the city to the beautiful, abandoned olive grove once owned by her Italian grandparents. A ‘tree change’ isn’t what Adrienne has in mind, however, and life in the country delivers some surprises as she confronts the past and learns the secrets of the Olive Sisters . . .

Old loves, new loves, warm toast and rich traditions are all part of the delicious blend of this absorbing story.