Linux Conf Part II and Sunny New Zealand

[tcpip]

Returned from New Zealand last night and have spent the last twenty hours or so getting my life back into a modicum of order. Holidays, conferences and travel do things like that.

Linux Conf continued at a high standard. Damian Conway explained why Perl 6 had taken so long to develop and why it was all worth it (Perl 6 is telepathic). John 'Maddog' Hall (the person responsible for introducing me to Linux) gave an amusing tale of open source projects in history (including the piano!). Van Jacobson really stole the show however; his modest proposal to speed up the Linux networking stack received an encore and a standing ovation. How often do you see that at a technical conference? For the technically inclined slides of his presentation are available. Also worthy of note was Mark Shuttleworth's presentation on collaboration in the open source world; a call for a more disciplined process and in particular attention to translations.

Whilst I was being an extremely deep nerd, caseopaya was enjoying the excellent partner's programme, which included tours of Cadbury World, a trip to Lanarch Castle (a place full of Scottish tragedy!) and a rail journey along the Taieri Gorge. We stayed at the allegedly haunted (former private hospital) Chalet Backpackers and dined one evening at the delightfully deco Etrusco.

OK, so Dunedin was a magnificant place, the conference was excellent, the weather was constantly in the high twenties and even pushed the mid-thirties one day and I'm scouting real estate there. ;-)

Following Dunedin we made our way to central Otago and spent a couple of nights at Wanaka. Normally an Alpine ski resort, in these unusually warm conditions it became a sea-side (or rather lakeside) playground for water-skiers, paragliders and swimmers. One unusual discovery, which perhaps the biological scientists reading this could explain, is what sort of stupid fish eats a hedgehog whole? And what was a hedgehog doing swimming in the lake?

From Wanaka it was a journey to the West Coast, notorious for the rain and cold. We had blue skies for the entire journey. Even at the Franz Josef Glacier, tourists were seen in bikini tops and short shorts! Continuing up the coast it was up to Hokitika, the most famous location in New Zealand for greenstone and related carvings and then onwards to the beautifully complex Malborough Sounds. Then it was across the strait, to spend a day in Wellington and then back to cold and grey Melbourne ;-)

Other stuff has been happening in the world apparently. Including a wheat-for-guns scandal involving the Australian Wheat Board and the Hussein regime. I must do some reading up on this ironic tale. Oh, and Hamas was elected in Palestine; well that's an ironic tragedy.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/raven_/]

I cannae see nerd pic :)

[delicious-irony.livejournal.com]

If the strangely-angled bendy thing at the bottom of the hedgehog pic is a fish tail, your idiot fish might have been a Tetradontid (a blowfish or pufferfish). Those things will have a go at eating anything, so I wouldn't be surprised.

[elzia.livejournal.com]

mmmmm Cadbury World.... is that like the land of chocolate?

[imajica-lj.livejournal.com]

Deep nerd =! high camp.
Very swish. :->

Hog fish.

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

And the moral is - never eat anything bigger than your own head.

I'll be very happy for those shirts to come back into fashion, we've never really left the 80s here.

[stawberi.livejournal.com]

Hedgehogs are pretty good swimmers, although they generally don't like water (mine goes nuts when I try to bath her), so... no idea.

Yikes

[locustinferno.livejournal.com]

That fish looked completely shredded.

Incidentally, the same kind of thing happened over here in the States, except it was with an alligator and a Burmese python:



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4313978.stm


Small brains + ability to swallow large prey items = disaster

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

Glad to hear you had a fun trip... I always enjoy my tours of S. Island... Too bad circumstances didn't work out, I'd have enjoyed liunx conf. Ah well.

[v3nu5.livejournal.com]

Oh God, I hate you so much right now. I love Dunedin! I love Otago! you got to see all the stuff on the west coast that I'm going back to see next may. But you didn't get to see ALL the things I saw on the east coast last may. Nerny!

I'll be in melbourne this may - hope to actually meet you and caseopaya! I'll be involved in birthday shenanigans at luna park st kilda on the 13th and there may be clubs on the 12th and 13th.