SAGE-AU 2006 wrap-up
I'm home from The Australian System Administrators Conference, more commonly known as SAGE-AU 2006. This year the conference was held in Canberra, in the middle of winter, but since my entire time was spent indoors I didn't really have a chance to discover if the weather was as cold as it was supposed to be.

Perl Training Australia often uses conferences as a way to boot-strap new courses, and this year the boot-strapped course was Perl for System Administration. The full-day tutorial was held on Monday, and I stayed up rather late the night before getting the slides and materials just right.

During the tutorial I discovered that my audience had a lot more knowledge than I had anticipated, but this ended up being very good as I could cover more advanced topics in more depth, and more material overall. I was also worried that the content wasn't SysAdmin-focused enough, but the great many comments I received after the course indicated otherwise.

The conference dinner this year was held in the ANZAC museum, which featured a great many original and recreated artifacts from WWII. Overall it was a very sobering experience, despite the copious amounts of free alcoholic beverages that were available.

Lee Monette, SAGE-AU's administrative head and heart is moving on to greener pastures, and was given a standing ovation at the dinner for her amazing service to the guild throughout the years. Lee's efficiency and organisation has been nothing less of astounding, and I am certain she'll have great success in her new adventures.

Friday morning at 9am I presented my paper on Human Interfaces for Geeks. I try to put a little humour into my talks, although I wasn't sure how many laughs I'd get with everyone being hung-over from the dinner the night before.

I was very pleased to discover that SysAdmins keep their sense of humour even after a long night of festivities, and that many had woken "early" and consumed a great deal of caffeine to see my presentation. The talk was extremely well received, with a great many laughs all around. With luck, a few people may have even learnt a thing or two.

I'm now back in Melbourne, enjoying a beautiful weekend before starting on yet another hard-slog finishing our web development course. My plans are then to stop biting off huge chunks of coursework, and instead take the rest of the decade off.