The Little World

Perhaps. And it was just a series of events…

The Scale Modellers Club of Western Australia newsletter that has just started to appear in this column was initially going to be an email-based bulletin that would reach out to some 50 or so members and local shops. I gathered email addresses from the club members and made a detailed list here in my computer.

The first issue – produced by myself and my accomplice, John France – came out in September but the mechanism of transmission seemed to be flawed. The newsletter was too big a chunk of information to send over my email connection.

I’d heard about Dropbox and Google Drive and similar deposit sites but hadn’t looked into them very deeply. The thought of sending a document or set of images somewhere else, to be inspected by whoever, did not appeal all that much. I was resigned to the fact that little is private any more, but if I was going to be glared at, I didn’t want to have to jump through IT hoops to do it.

So I reduced the pages of the TRUE SCALE newsletter to jpegs and stacked them together on this WordPress column. It is something I post daily to the SMCWA Facebook page…and the members can read it there at their leisure. The wonderful thing is that the newsletter is also read by some 500 other people around the world – and some of them are real people and not just commercial bots. Two issues of the newsletter have been launched this way.

In the meantime I told myself I would have to buckle down and deal with the IT chain and get the email system going.

Step in Optus – my internet service provider – and step in some hacker who breached their security a fortnight ago. Enormous governmental and media fuss, as quite a few pieces of personal information were purloined, and no end of people have been affected. Fortunately, I wasn’t, and none of the email addresses I’d collected were seen by anyone. Nor will they be.

Also in the meantime, the newsletter’s mild-mannered reporter John has been trying to send an article and images for a future issue through the Google Drive mechanism, and so far between it and Optus, the flow of information is interrupted at all stages. Flawed would be a word to use, but some would use another ” F” word for it…

So I think the SMCWA newsletter will continue to appear here on The Little World for the foreseeable future. It works, and we know it works. The steps required to convert the finished copy to jpegs and post them are simple. The subscribers in the rest of the world can look on the doings of the Noranda Asylum with admiration or horror – just as they please. The club members can read about themselves – or write about themselves if they are brave enough – and the internet hackers can go to Edmonton.

Note to all: Reserve your desire for complexity to kits of plastic parts and PE frets. Simplify all else in your lives.