The following covers the week from the 16—20th May 2005

Canberra
I'm in Canberra teaching some huge classes (16 people!) how to use Perl. We have students not only from Canberra, but also Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland as well. Some of our students are from businesses that have attended our courses previously. Most are from the wealth of government departments that live in Canberra. Lost chickens
Murphy's law seems to pounce almost gleefully whenever I travel interstate. By the time I had boarded their airplane one of our clients had a machine with a hardware failure and filesystem corruption. By the morning I had received a phone-call saying that two of our chickens had died (possibly from exposure, not a fox), and within 12 hours another chicken had gone missing-in-action.

I'm still in Canberra as I write this, so I don't know which chickens are gone. While I'm happy enough for our old trouble-making chicken to pass away, I do like all the other chooks. If two (maybe three) are gone that means that I've lost at least one that I like. (Update: Ian called to say that the missing chicken returned, probably from roosting in a tree.)

We don't seem to be very good at keeping animals recently. Maybe I should get myself a tamagotchi instead?

Murphy's law continues
Two seriously ill machines in Melbourne now, but a few frantic calls to contacts means that we've been able to apply suitable damage control.

Canberra.PM
Spent Thursday night with the folks from Canberra.PM. One of the best things about having a Perl Mongers chapter in just about every major city in Australasia/Oceania is that whenever I travel for teaching I can usually find a group of like-minded people for a get-together with food and drink.

The Canberra.PM meeting involved not only food and drink, but one member (Sean from ANU) had brought along a data projector to the restaurant. Much to my delight I was able to give a "short" (30 minute) presentation on HTML::Mason, and Jacinta followed up with some material from our Perl Security course, notably on the null-byte, and how to get Perl's readline (<>) operator to do some very naughty things.

Chicken update
I'm back in Melbourne now, and it looks like we lost our old black chicken (Phoenix) who's been with us from the start. Phoenix stopped laying a while back, but was a friendly chicken and tolerant of children. The other lost chicken was one of the new ones we picked up recently, who hadn't really started to lay.

Unfortunately we still have our mean old trouble-making chicken that doesn't lay and which nobody likes. C'est la vie.