From: SIONE LAMIPETI TUIHALANGINGIE [mailto:panatonga@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 26, 2009 2:58 PM
To: samt@nomoa.com
Subject: Mr Curtis Tuihalangingie First Tongan to attend Beijing University interview with Global time

Curtis Leonard Tu'ihalangingie wearing the Tongan ta'ovala. Photo: courtesy of Tu'ihalangingie

It's not often that The Kingdom of Tonga has been honored in a ceremony at Peking University. Most of the student body might not even know where this island nation is located, not to mention what a Tongan looks like.

Good luck with the effort CLT and best wishes this Christmas and the following new year.

Sam T

We got the CD whilst in Tonga, and have been to non-tech to realise that music videos exist of these things let alone that pirated copies are viewable to anyone on youtube.

some how doesn’t have the same impact as one of my favourite “PI Action Films”

There are apparently more cut scenes of the movie on youtube, and you can probably get the full thing on video.google.com or other enterprising means.

Of course we generally don’t have slick productions coming out of Tonga, and are more into just wacking things together when getting around with friends and family. So, well done to the Mascot youth for their posting.

Well done. Amazing how the kids have grown up.

My Grandma went to this Church and may even be one of those ladies with the white hats. Intresting production, some of the photos are really old but some of them aren’t that old and are probably colour changed to b & w.

Funny I was listening to this old Rock n Roll piece about getting into trouble and not believing what was taught in Sunday School, but that’s another story.

We’re doing the Sunday School thang with the kids, and they absolutely love going to Sunday School. So much so, that they get up in the morning prepped to go, and as soon as Sunday School is over there’s a million reasons why we have to come home.

Funny to see how far we have come, not, when it comes to the Sunday School and the Tongan congregations.

The farthest I recall back with the Tongan community church services, is back to when services were held at the Pitt St. Chapel (hmmm, I’ll have to visit there some lunch time next time I’m in the city.) and at the 5 Rogers Avenue, Haberfield, Mission Centre (long since sold to the heathens with better financial management skills. (smiling)

The thing I recall is that we didn’t really have Sunday School for the Tongan Language at the Pitt St. church, and Sunday School at 5 Rogers Avenue was on a Monday evening.

On Monday evening’s the Sunday School members would gather with our teachers at the 5 Rogers Avenue Chapel (a small room part of the complex.)

Sometime later the Sunday School moved together with the main service to St. David’s Haberfield where they actually had a hall and separate rooms. So Sunday School developed into having separate classes and being in different parts of the hall. There were some material, but I’m not sure they were ours or ‘left-overs’ from the palangi church.

Something or someone did something and the congregation moved again to the Ashfield Uniting Church, and they too had a hall and rooms. Sunday school got bigger as we had more kids and plenty of volunteers to be teachers.

Bill Crews expanded his Exodus Foundation on the premises so Sunday School programs moved to the Minister’s Manse (i.e where the faifekau lived) but again we have plenty of space to spread out the classes.

I went on vacation into la la land and came back 10+ years later to find out that we’re back to using the main chapel for our Sunday School program, with only a single volunteer teacher.

Fiona’s busy being creative with a program that fits everyone, and the youngest children get activities they can do on the seats, or on the floor, while she puts in some more in depth time with the older kids.

Petersham Uniting Church – Tongan Congregation is definitely very fortunate to have Fiona on the team.

Well done Fiona.

The 3^rd Annual “Battle of the Bands” is a music festival of ethnic youth and young people within Victoria. The night will include ethnic action dancing, sway of the pacific, the glitter of Asia, Bands from the church groups will range from heavy rock to gospel country.

Many of the stars of the music festival will be “Second Generation” Australian born children of immigrants and refugees as performers.

Everyone is welcome to come and join in the fun and audience members are encouraged to come in costume of your ethnic heritage which include Anglo, European background.(Dutch, German, Scottish, English, Wales, etc)

It is proudly supported by the Uniting Church in Australia.

Date 22 November 2008.

Location Box Hill Wesley Uniting Church in 2-6 Oxford Street, Box Hill, Melbourne.

Times 3pm to 9.30pm

parking details Street parking

Tickets secretary. Tee Makoni - talaheumakoni@hotmail.com

Adults $5.00

Young people 12 to 25 Goldcoin donation

Children under 12 free.

Food stalls will be available

New Performers wishing to join in should contact:

Don Ikitoelagi (03) 9251- 5287 email Don.Ikitoelagi@victas.uca.org.au

The Free Press failed democracy in Australia when it kept silent and did not dig into the Howard Government exploitation of asylum seekers for political (let alone all the other nasties of that situation to maintain the facade), and it again looks to be failing Democracy. This time the failing is in the US Presidential elections where for some reason the ‘free press’ is conveniently forgetting the atrocities of this financial melt down brought forth by one candidate’s party politics.

Orson Scott Card, a noted author et. al. pulls the details in his treatise …

I  remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism.  You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere.  It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan?  It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

Seems similar to the existing two party system in Australia. One side has great economic nuance and atrocious concept of humanity, while the other side is all hugs and kisses and kiss economic stability goodbye.

There’s little worst in life than to live a lie and to be ignorant of it. It seems the ‘Free Press’ really isn’t that ‘free.’

From: Orson Scott Card, I love you.

Something seems to have gone without mention on the globe. Windows Mobile 6.5 build 23075, as accounted for in the cooked roms from xda-developers.com … supports flash!!

Woo hoo, now I can just click through on my mobile to flash video content and just watch it there on my phone.

• Windows Mobile 6.5 build 23075
• Internet Explorer
  • ROMs HTC Elfin (Miky, AHEN)

No one seems to have made any noise about this, but the Zune HD browser doesn’t support watching videos (strange for a music/video/entertainment device) so here’s hoping that Microsoft will soon release a firmware update to resolve this abnormality.

Edit, (cue: some hours later) I guess I should get more intimate with mobile tech. It seems that what I am observing is not flash players, but some sort of integration of Youtube Player and IE. I tried one of my other online video haunts (http://www.stupidvideos.com) and things weren’t so moviesh.

‘Ofa introduced Taufa #4 into the world this evening (January 25th circa 11:30 pm)

Mum and Baby are doing very well. Kid looks like he’s going to be a Titan. He’s pretty big (forget the measurement, things kinda went blurry for a while there.) He’ been kicking around in mum’s stomach pretty actively and he got out just as active.

WIthin minutes his mouth was moving seeking out food like a heat seeking missile in the sun, pointing everywhere at once.

Hope to see you two out of hospital real soon.

Thanks for the well wishes and be catching up with you all soon.

http://www.freedomkeys.com/vigil.htm

"As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism -- unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell

"Well, who is more likely to volunteer to take a job in a bureaucracy that has little to recommend it except that it gives you the power to use government force to control the lives of others? A dispassionate scientist or a zealot? In government, the zealots eventually take over." -- John Stossel

One of the wonderful things about Open Source software is that there is a continuum of upgrades where users and developers find things that are broken and fix them.

Unfortunately, some of the fixes cause more breaks than existed in the system.

Gallery 2.1 upgrade to 2.3svn failings

Posted by: Samiuela LV Taufa on January 11, 2008 2:56:59 PM (821 Reads)

The regular problems taking for ever and a day to resolve happened again when I tried upgrading (due to security warnings) to a more current version of Gallery2.

Unfortunately, the upgrade coincided with Tonfon deciding to give me a hard time with Internet connections.

Clear problems from the upgrade.

it’s a good thing I’ve wandered this space often enough that my own records are augmenting poor memory, such that I can fix the new problem with the old fix.

Upgraded my Gallery to the current release as there were a number of documented security reasons to upgrade. Unfortunately, the update broke my Gallery and I haven’t been able to dedicate the time to fixing it, until I decided to google nomoa.com!!! Way to go nomoa.com.

If you want to really screw up things … you really have to be part of the largest institutes, and in most cases they happen to be national or multinational, including straight national states.

From the UK Telegraph.

The Department for Work and Pensions last year admitted that seven in 10 government IT projects fail.

So it is hardly surprising that progress on the NHS’s “Connecting for Health” computerisation scheme, already running at least four years late, has almost ground to a halt.

What is particularly concerning about this case, however, is its sheer cost - £12 billion.

All well to glorify the doom scenarios, but what can we do to find a solution? There’s a short ‘prescription’ in the above article. But, as it also ascribes things on paper don’t always become effective implementations.

As the most dangerous part of a car is the nut loose behind the wheel so is IT deployment. Fix the ‘nut’ and you’re more than half-way to your solution.