Invasion Day, Linux Conf, Social Life

Like Melbourne's most well-known anarchist, Dr. Joe Toscano, I cringe in anger and shame at the "celebrations" of Australia Day. Like Toscano, I believe it would be far more sensible and sensitive to have a national holiday on "Mabo Day" as a good symbolic step towards reconciliation. Nevertheless, the day was spent in the fine company of Chris Samuel who become an Australian citizen (now he can get back into the country). At the ceremony itself Tony Smith (Liberal, Casey) provided one of the biggest loads of empty-headed jingoistic nonsense I have had the displeasure to listen to.

Linux Conference Australia is being held in Melbourne this year and like a damn fool I've volunteered to help out with registrations every morning before work this week, along with caseopaya. Nevertheless it's a extremely impressive programme and I hope to see at least some of it whilst helping out. On a related topic, Shahrokh Montazavi , Microsoft’s main HPC Developer Architect, recently gave a talk at VPAC on Pure Mpi.NET developer tools they've recently released. They're pretty good, but stuck within the Microsoft operating system, which probably means the ideas will have to be picked up by the open source community which has several operating systems which are actually suitable for High Performance Computing.

First week of social life post-forty (thank you all for the kind comments, btw) included dinner with severina_242, _zombiemonkey, imajica_lj and caseopaya followed by a accidental involvenment in a trivia night at the Drunk Poet (or something) where we did fairly well. Later in the week dined with ser_pounce (his 24th, the young 'un) and hathhalla and went to see Sweeny Todd at the deco (or more precisely, apparently, "jazz moderne" and "streamlined moderne") Rivoli cinema. Director Tim Burton's influence is everwhere as gothic, bloody and whimsically semi-operatic. Producer and script-writer John Logan certainly deserves kudos as well. Excellent performances are given by the morose Johnny Depp as Sweeny Todd, Alan Rickman as the manipulative Judge Turpin, Helena Carter as a lovesick Ms. Lovett, and Timothy Spall as the violent Beadle. Also I am sure Jamie Campbell (Anthony Hope) is going to become a heart-throb for numerous aging homosexuals. Anyway, a highly recommended film and one I suspect will be good on multiple viewings as well.