Time to celebrate, & Oops! The price of success

Meet other skeptics and celebrate!

With the ongoing battle for logic and reason, it’s easy to forget that saving Australia from an ETS, and slowing the train-wreck in Copenhagen were major successes. Even though the battle to save Peter Spencer is still very much on our minds, it’s time to celebrate.

It’s not often humanity collectively “misses a bullet…”

I’m happy to post contacts in different cities around the world to help connect people who live near each other. If you are willing to be a central point coordinator for your region and to post some contact details please use the thread below to organize events in your area. I’ll update this post with any events or contacts that are generated. Even if it’s just Friday afternoon drinks after work. There is strength in numbers.

See below for: Germany, France, and Australia

Behind the scenes there is a very healthy skeptical community in Perth Australia, and we are planning to meet in the next few weeks, purely for drinks and a shared meal. To express an interest and find out details you’ll need to email me: joanne AT joannenova.com.au. (We’d love to hear from you but please keep emails brief!)

Oops! The price of success

Web traffic rose to massive record for this site in December, and I’m not complaining, but I was not expecting the site costs for December to rise to $678! I thought electrons were cheaper than that. 🙂 Because this site stores many images and large documents for downloading, like the Handbooks and the Timeline there are a vast number of gigabytes being stored and also transferred. According to my web manager for all his accounts: “the next highest account’s bandwidth for a month is generally a max of 10 G.”  We hit 280G.

Any contributions to help cover these costs would be most gratefully accepted. Thanks to all the people who have generously helped already.

It’s time to rearrange the way I store and link to images and audio, and possibly to accept more paid offers to write! (For those who are interested – Coding Horror has sharp commentary and I’ll look at AmazonS3 or Photobucket).

Site Handy Hints

I’m working to make the site as user friendly as possible. In case you haven’t noticed it there’s a new Navigation section up at the top of the right hand column with an INDEX, ARCHIVES and links to sources. I’ll be adding a “New-Here?” post soon, as well as moving the Guide for Comments where people find answers about gravatars, comment buttons, html and policies etc.

UPDATE3:  So far these people below have volunteered to be local contacts for people in their region. (I’ll be updating regularly).

Contacts for social skeptical gatherings

Australia

Sydney

Jim (0417) 285 884: every Thursday evening at Club Five Dock, 66 Great North Road, Five Dock from around 7pm.

Join Jim & Mike for dinner  at Club Five Dock. Phone Jim in advance so he can reserve a table. He says: “I’m given to understand, good company, good tucker & the odd ale (or wine) to help stimulate conversation!”

Brisbane

Ruth Bonnett, canmor AT tpg.com.au,      Ph (07) 3831 8430     (0407)     580 028

Melbourne

Mike D climategate777 AT gmail.com

Perth

Anne-Kit Littler alittler55 AT  gmail.com

France

La Garde Freinet

Ed Hoskins,    edhoskins AT me.com

Pyrenées Orientales

Geoff Chambers,  Perpignan,   gmchambers AT orange.fr

Germany –

Pierre Gosselin
Asternweg 1
49605 Quakenbrück, Germany
E-mail: pierre.gosselin AT t-online.de