Diving
Went diving before the Open Source Developers' Conference. A little special, because this trip included my 100th dive.

Open Source Developers' Conference 2007
I feel that OSDC 2007 was the best OSDC I have ever been to. There were three main contributors to this. Firstly, it was in Brisbane, which is warm, sunny, and has great diving. Secondly, my talk was given a very nice timeslot. Thirdly, I had nothing at all to do with its organisation. The conference just happened, and the other speakers were great. Awesome!

My very nice timeslot was a keynote. This is the first time I'd been invited to keynote at a conference, and was a huge and unexpected honour. Indeed, I was given the dinner keynote, the only session one can be sure that almost everyone will attend, on account of there being both free food and alcohol. The keynote went extremely well, I don't think I could have hoped for a better audience reaction. Once again, a huge amount of thanks goes to Jacinta Richardson, who spent countless hours helping me prepare the slides, and listening to me rehearse again and again.

Julien Goodwin recorded the entire keynote, and while I don't yet have a copy yet, it's my sincere hope to get the recording published on-line. Stay tuned for progress.

Holiday in Middle Earth
December is a quiet season for our business. Lots of people take holidays, so courses are hard to schedule. I think this is fantastic, because it means that I can take a break too!

That break has recently been filled with playing Lord of the Rings Online, which I noticed kept receiving good reviews, and deservedly so. The game looks great, runs on older hardware, can be entirely downloaded and registered on-line, and has been a tremendous amount of fun. I won't go into too much detail, but I can say that it's definitely worth having a play, and if you're a fan of Middle Earth you'll especially enjoy the sight-seeing.

On that note, I've been given the ability to hand out 10-day trials to the game. These are both longer than the 7-day trials you can get on-line, come with cheaper pricing if you do choose to subscribe, and give me kickbacks of free game-time if you do. Let me know if you'd like one, the only real condition is that you have to accept, since there's a limited number of unaccepted invites I can have floating around at any time.