Human Brochure Eve

It's almost as exciting as Christmas Eve! Tomorrow is the start of the Human Brochure social media 'experiment' by Canberra Tourism.

If you click on the logo above, you'll be able to follow any of the first batch of 250 humans as they tweet, blog, post, instagram, foursquare, and generally social media their way around the nation's capital.

My day will start at 8:58 as I catch the local bus just outside my house for the short trip into Bacchus Marsh proper. Then the Ballarat airport shuttle will pick me up at 9:20 and take me to Melbourne airport.

That will be followed by a lot of thumb-twiddling and coffee-drinking at the airport until I can check in at 11:30. The next airport shuttle would have got me to the airport 5 minutes too late to check in!

Scheduled departure time is 12:15 and we are due to arrive in Canberra at 13:20. After transferring to, and checking in at, the Mantra hotel we'll have some free time before the Opening Ceremony at the Australian War Memorial.

Then let the games begin!

Stay tuned (probably the best way to do that is to follow me on Twitter), this is gonna get big!

Good Light.

Human Brochure - Four more sleeps!

It's getting pretty exciting around the Human Brochure/500 Humans cohort now. Only four more sleeps, to use the kiddy countdown to Christmas terminology, before the first batch of us head to the nation's capital, Canberra.

To continue the kids at Christmas theme, I actually had trouble getting to sleep last night. It was partly excitement, but also partly anxiety and worry.

You see, I've lived in or visited all of the state capitals of Australia and I've lived for periods overseas (Hong Kong and San Angelo, Texas) and I've visited many other countries around the Asia-Pacific region. However, since I returned from the USA in 1996 after a two year stay, I haven't even left the state of Victoria.

This means that I haven't flown anywhere in the post-9/11 era, and I honestly have no idea what to expect.

I don't know how much, or what size, luggage is acceptable. How long prior to the flight to arrive at the airport? Heck, I don't even know how I'm going to get to the airport!

I don't know what isn't allowed to be taken into the aircraft cabin. I don't normally carry knitting needles or nail scissors on me, but I do always carry a pocket knife. I must leave that at home because I simply cannot have it taken away from me; it was my late father's. That whole "bottles of liquid" thing, is that just for international flights? That's not really a worry either. The only time I carry a bottle of liquid with me that I couldn't just dump is when I take a hip flask on a cold night's long-exposure starry sky shoot!

Anyway, I'm sure that the team behind the Human Brochure weekend (who seem like lovely people to judge from the tweets and FB posts that I've seen), will clear all this up for me, hopefully tomorrow when we receive our itineraries. Either that or you lovely readers will give me the lowdown in the comments.

You guys wouldn't lead a poor old blue muppet astray, would you?

Best spoof flying advice comment will win control of the internet for a whole day.

Looking forward to meeting some of you during the weekend.

Good Light,

Jim

Human Brochure - Some thoughts before the event.

Some time ago, alerted by an RT from somebody on Twitter, I threw my name into the hat for Australian Capital Tourism's "500 Humans" campaign. It must have been a big hat; apparently some 31,405 other people also tossed their name in as well!

The idea is that 500 "social media savvy" people will be chosen to travel to Canberra either on the weekends of 26-28 October or 15-17 February and will get to participate in a number of events which will showcase the best that Canberra can offer to tourists. The events, and the winners, will be split into 4 'streams'; Arts & Culture, Adventure, Family fun, and Food & Wine.

In return, the successful applicants are asked to publish content about their experience on social media; Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs etc.

On Monday evening I got an email to say that I had been accepted and would be in the adventure stream for the October weekend! "Whooo", as they say, "Hoooo!"

An interesting aside, if you like probability maths:- Of those 31,406 applications, 500 were selected, 250 for each weekend. Of the 249 other people selected for the October weekend, two of them I have actually met after following them on Twitter! What are the odds? No, really, what are the odds? I can't figure it out. Seems like a huge coincidence to me.

Anyway, it appears that I'll be traipsing off to Canberra, a city I haven't been to since the early 80s, in a couple of weeks. There I shall have adventures. A hot air balloon ride has been mentioned, as has mountain biking and a visit to the alpine wilderness.

I'll be taking lots of photographs and sharing them via Twitter and through this little blog.

So, who has suggestions as to what I should do in whatever downtime is left by all this adventuring?