Linux.Conf.au, days -1..2
I'm in New Zealand which is hosting the annual Australian Linux.Conf.au (LCA). It's in a lovely little town called Dunedin which all around seems to be a great little place. This is my first LCA, I'm not presenting, so I'm still discovering what to expect and what not.

The first two days have been filled with "mini-confs", baby conferences organised around particular themes. Unsurprisingly, the highlight so far has been the Conway mini-conf, where I was able to see Damian's Presentation Aikido. I was extremely pleased to see that Damian's talk was quite different to MJD's and my own.

Other nice things about the conference so far have been the accomodation (in-room ethernet), the breakfasts, and the conference bag. In fact, the conference bag is incredibly cool, and is designed around holding a laptop and gadgets.

The big down-points have been the lack of easily accessible timetabling information, the flakey network connectivity, and the quality of the talks themselves. It seems that I've had the misfortune to attend a number of poorly prepared talks, but I'm confident that the main conference will be of a higher quality. There have also been some very good ones; like many conferences the talk quality varies greatly.

My primary goal here is to meet new people, although I've been having mixed results. I think I'm going to have to engineer matters to my favour, which means I'll try to kickstart a Perl BOF. I'm particularly interested in meeting any NZ Perl-mongers (I've already bumped into a few).