Tennessee Valley News Video I left the DEP at the beginning of 1988 to start my own Eco-Tourism business. I took groups of people around Australia and described the ecology, aboriginal history, flora and fauna to them. I was living with Simon Hackett at the time and he was working at The University of Adelaide, but in his spare time he was designing all sorts of interesting networked objects in conjunction with some people in California.
His inventions took him to Santa Cruz for long periods on many occasions and he noticed there was much Eco-Tourism there too, so he took me along with him on one trip, in October 1990 to interop90 in San Jose. So the relevance of the Linda Jackson bag. I chose this because it was brightly and distinctly Australian, and in particular covered in Sturt’s Desert Pea, the floral symbol of SA and a plant I was very fond of and had seen in flower many times in the desert. Also, the bag was an excellent size and shape for travelling and flying. This particular trip culminated in us having a choice of either living in working in Santa Cruz or going back to Australia and starting up a company together selling Multinet Software and developing Simon’s projects to commercialisation. I have enclosed some images and recent comments from Facebook regarding that trip. As it turned out, most of the people in the photo became billionaires and have their names in wikipedia as leaders in networking technology history!
I took this special bag again on another very career relevant trip to the US. This trip was specifically to educate young children about Australia. In April 1991 Simon and I officially founded Internode and as we did I continued my Eco-Tourism business part-time (weekends). Because we had access to new technologies such as email and the internet I was able to expand my eco-tourism to children in the US via email. I essentially educated children in different schools in various states using the internet, I was a kind of pen pal. This culminated in October 1993 in me travelling to two of the schools, Michigan and Alabama, to meet the children and show them an audio visual presentation of my travels in oz, and my family of course. There were many newspaper articles and radio shows, including a TV news item about it, in the states, because the internet was so new and schools got more funding for it with lots of publicity.
Big Blue Chips 
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