Training, Swordfighting, and Europe Trip

[tcpip]

Wednesday was a training day for Edward to Spartan transition workshop, which went very smoothly and also had a visiting sysadmin of the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (who, in his evening hours, was a lead Pirate Party Senate candidate in the state). Thursday was mostly spent at an Amazon scientific computing immersion day which regrettably contained too much marketing material, not enough compute time. It can be quite telling when a course is not designed by educators. Other major work-related events was the installation of a metric tonne of software - an interesting feature of EasyBuild - as more dependencies are installed, installation processes become easier.

Only one major gaming event this week, being GURPS Middle Earth last Sunday. In lieu of our regular game members of our mid-week group visited the Melbourne Swordplay Guild on invitation from kits_the_dm, to engage in some backsword immersion in preparation for playing some Backswords and Bucklers. Content for issue 31 of RPG Review has been positively powering along and it should be released this weekend.

As mentioned in passing, caseopaya and I are visiting Europe in two months. At least for one of us it's a working trip however. I currently have plans to visit the The Goethe Center for Scientific Computing, then the High Performance Computing Center of Stuttgart, then to the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, then on to CERN, before reaching Barcelona for the OpenStack Summit, and visiting the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. It is just as well I have concentrated on German, French, and Spanish in Duolingo in recent weeks. Yes, it is fair to say that there is a degree of excitement for this planned trip.

Comments

[helvetica]

Wow your trip to Europe sounds especially amazing. It sounds like you have a very full schedule! How long are you staying in Europe?

[tcpip]

Alas, only three weeks. It is a busy schedule but in a straight line, more or less.

[kaleidodope]

You're going to Europe and I am experiencing jealousy. pics!!!! Pics of everything!

[tcpip]

I'm pretty sure I'll take a few and post them as the journey continues.

[vlion]

I have found Amazon to be *profoundly* useless in its documentation, training, etc, outside of the raw API guides. I hate being marketed at. So when NewPeople join the team, I advise them to read the API docs for the services we use, they are smart and can connect the dots.

[tcpip]

That's probably a good idea.

Certainly the audience on the receiving end of this session (post-doctoral researchers, infrastructure sysadmins etc) I think would have appreciated "yielding to the hands on imperative" a lot earlier.

The day started at 8.30am; it was after 2pm before we were actually setting up an account.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

That's a beautiful list of institutions to visit. I really hope you'll enjoy your visit to Europe!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It's not a bad trip, and I'm doing a lot of it by train. I would obviously like to stay longer and visit people (such as your good self), but alas, this is primarily for me a work trip.

Still, it also serves as a good scouting mission for a real holiday.

[trar.livejournal.com]

CERN!!!!!!!!!!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Not confirmed yet, but planned. Stuttgart, Freiburg, and Barcelona have confirmed however. Currently re-arranging timetable to get Montpellier into the list as well :)

It can be done!