Chinese Friendship, Bad Universe Timing, Work Matters

Last Tuesday was invited to the annual meeting of the Australia-China Friendship Society, held at the Queens Hall of Parliament House. Not being a churlish sort, I didn't wear a badge advocating a Free Tibet or to end the persecution of the Falun Gong. This is more than one way to skin that cat, no matter what colour it is. The speakers included the president of the society, who was a little partisan, the Chinese Chinese Ambassador to Australia, Mr. Chen Yuming, who gave diplomatic truisms, the former Prime Minister, Malcom Fraser, who argued against military build-ups in the west Pacific, and finally Daniel Andrews who emphasised the cultural contributions of the Chinese to Victoria.

The day however was not exactly the most pleasant for other reasons. Having managed the installation of Avoca, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, David B., announced his retirement and he and his partner sold their house, bought a caravan and were planning a long tour of the Australian countryside; unfortunately his wife died quite unexpectedly from an infection which, to say the least, has left a great number of people in the small high-performance computing community in Melbourne more than a little shocked. Dawn was a lovely person, a delight to spend company with, and the effects on David must be just awful. The funeral is on Monday.

Much of last week has been spent doing some fairly gruelling work on upgrading our external website to include most of the functionality that the previous version had. Whilst much of it simple matters like fixing fonts due to a particularly crazy and evil theme, or updating our custom staff module, incorporating LDAP integration and roles, the really new part was trying to find a replacement for the old Events module.