Backblog - Diving, days 4-5
Due to adverse weather conditions, one of the dives from the last day was shifted to the second-last, producing a rather hectic schedule with six dives being offered. We ended up skipping the second last one: exhaustion, short service intervals, and a reptetive dive profile made us feel this was a prudent choice. We did get the opportunity to dive the site at night, and wow, what a dive!

We saw two spanish dancers, one as large as a loaf of bread, and one smaller than my finger. We saw turtles everywhere, a moray eel, a wobbegong, a lion-fish, and a big phallic purple spawning... thing. I really have no idea what it was, and unfortunately we don't have a photo.

Today (Sunday) was our last day on the first leg of our journey, with two dives in the morning. Unfortunately our nitrogen loading has finally caught up with us (21 dives in five days), and our depth and bottom time were constrained because of this.

I'm now sitting at the marina while the crew debriefs and cleans the boat. I've confirmed that there's no big emergencies at home (our server is still up), and we'll be heading out for a celebratory dinner soon.

As a special, just-arrived news, I'm now an uncle. Jacinta's youngest sister, Zoe, has just has a baby boy named Joshua.

Backblog
I've been poor at updating my jounal recently, not due to lack of things to write about, but instead due to plans to impove a number of 'half-finished' entries I have floating around unpublished. However due to a lack of round tuits, I'm posting these wholesale, without much in the way of additional editing. There'll be one or two each day until I catch up. Apologies for anything that's out of order.

Hi-res Morrowind
Warning: This is written primarily for myself and others wanting to get Morrowind to run at high resolutions and frame-rates. If you don't play Morrowind, you may find it extremely dull.

A while ago Jacinta found me Morrowind in a bargain bin, and brought it home. I've only just got around to playing it, and it's made me realise just how fussy I can be about my games.

After installing the game, two expansions, and three patches, I start the game at its highest resolution (1600x1200). I play for a bit, it's fun, but there's a lot of text in a small fantasy-styled font, and that gets painful after a while. So I go looking for mods (Morrowind has lots of mods) to increase the font size, and find none whatsoever. Damn.

Luckily, there's a Morrowind.ini file with settings inside it. Morrowind seems to use its own font format, and the game comes with three font packs. I try to set the larger font for regular text:

Linux.con f.au - Aftermath
My talk on Thursday at linux.conf.au was very well attended, and received a very good reception indeed. For both Thursday and Friday I seemed to have no lack of attendees wishing to ask or comment on my talk; it seems my biggest failure was that I didn't come equipped with sufficient business cards, and I found myself having to start rationing them.

Friday morning I participated in the Speakers' Adventure. I'd heard a variety of reports on what this would be; the official documentation suggested heights, but Adam Kennedy had suggested it involved a swim at the aquarium, and Jamie on the organisation committee also backed up this story. As such, I arrived at Sydney Tower with mask, snorkel, and underwater camera. Thanks guys, they were really useful 250m in the air. ;)

The keynote on Friday was presented by Kathy Sierra. Essentially a talk on how to grow communities, Kathy covered how we're all fitted out with "legacy brains" that still react to stimulae that were important when we were living in caves. Kathy put her knowledge of legacy brains to good use in her talk, providing a good example of how presentations should be done.

LCA have been putting up a talk of talks on-line, including mine. Talks are in Ogg Theora format, so make sure you have an appropriate client if you want to view them.

linux.conf.au
The second day of linux.con f.au draws to a close. The second day of mini-confs, I was able to learn a little more about Battle for Wesnoth and attend interesting discussions on networking and negotiation.

My biggest regret is that I wasn't able to attend much of the LinuxChix miniconf as I would have liked. I'd like to say that my biggest achievement is reworking the slides for my talk on Thursday, but I'm still doing that.

Last night we had the Speakers' Dinner, which was held on a boat that cruised around Sydney Harbour. This event was the single point of failure for the conference, if the boat sunk, so would the conference. Luckily the cruise went without a hitch, and provided plenty of opportunity for photos of prominent landmarks, but I spent much more time talking to the people on the boat than looking out the window.

It's interesting to see how different the speaker demographics are for LCA compared to OSDC. At OSDC I can hardly move without bumping into Perl people. At LCA they're much more sparse, and I've probably spent more time with the Python crowd.

At the end of today was the Google party, where drinks, food, and swag were generously donated. I've taken my leave early, partially due to a full social buffer, partially due to the loud music, and partially due to me still wanting to rewrite my slides.

Tomorrow is the start of the conference proper, which I'm hoping will come with more generous seating arrangements. With a conference this big it's hard not to end up on the floor for popular talks.