OSDC-2006 Day 1
Today has been the first day of OSDC. My Perl 5.10 talk appeared to be received acceptably well, and I was humbled and honoured that Randal provided positive feedback. I consider today's talk my "poor" talk, and hope that I'll see a good crowd for my Friday talk, which I consider superior.

Jose Castro (cog) was scheduled with all three of his talks in the first day, and I admire his ability to present after a 26 hour commute from Portugal and 11 hours of timezone difference.

The highlight for the day was the dinner. Damian Conway's Da Vinci Codebase was awesomely fantastic. I mean, Damian's talks are normally awesome, but this really went above and beyond. If you get a chance to see it at another conference, see it. Wow.

The dinner continued with many jugs of diet beer (just like regular beer, but with "diet" written on the jug), and a discovery that Adam Kennedy covets the Acme::Playmate module. Actually, that's not quite fair. Adam wants to write a module that looks up stats on Playmates and allows you to print patterns so you can crochet clothing for your favourite model. I suspect there'll be a lightning talk very very soon.

Other features of the day included catching up with Skud and watching her music videos, and catching up with an incredible number of people who I haven't seen since last OSDC.

Life after thirty
About a month ago I turned thirty. Thirty is considered a significant number due to our obsession with the decimal counting system. However I had also expressed a number of times that I'd like to be retired by thirty... So, you may be wondering how I've gone.

Most of my plans involving retirement didn't actually involve the complete cessation of all work. I've known for some time that being able to stop work for ever would still take a few more years. Instead my goal for thirty was seeking to work as little as possible, preferably less than ten hours a week.

The good news is that income from our investments and hobbies does actually cover our yearly expenses, which is much more than I had hoped or expected. That in itself is pretty incredible.

The bad news is that they cover it only barely, and with no real safeguards against inflation. So while we could stop all work tomorrow, we'd be struggling to remain asset-neutral, especially as these income streams can be quite variable in nature. While it's nice to know that I could stop working for a decade or two, that's not my goal. Discovering that I need to return to work at fifty is certainly not appealing.

Regardless of this, I've certainly reached my goal of working as little as possible. I'm doing no more consulting (which was a huge time sink), and instead we're just running courses every few months. I got to more-or-less take October off, I'll be doing the same with December and January, and many more months next year. I'm not calling conference presenting work, since it doesn't really pay, and I do enjoy it.

Overall, I'm calling this a win.

Booking Hotels
If you're booking a hotel in Australia, and you're asked if the booking is for personal or business, say business. I don't know why, but it's always cheaper, sometimes much cheaper.

Speaking at linux.conf.au 2007
Every year I do an excellent job of getting my talks rejected from linux.conf.au. That's not surprising, the LCA competition is tough, and lots of people want to speak. This year, rather than just submitting a few talks, I instead took a shotgun approach. I submitted six, ranging from Perl, to mind control, to presentation skills and business management. To my great delight, my talk on starting an open source business was accepted. As it happens, I discovered that I knew a few people on the review committee, and I have no doubt this helped somewhat.

According to the acceptance letter, 80% of all proposals were refused. Since I submitted six, I guess that makes my acceptance rate "typical". ;) I'm going to have to remember this trick for next time.

Screen repaired
A few days ago the techniction from Dell arrived with my new LCD screen. Everything went just fine, and there were no complications in replacing the display.

Turns out that the tech lives in just the next suburb, and happens to be an anime fan who wanted to learn more about Unix operating systems, so we had lots to talk about. Having recently attended Software Freedom Day I had a big bag of live CDs and other goodies to help him along.

Seems that I'm not the only one who has had problems with the Inspirion E1705/I9400 display. The tech claimed that he had already replaced three of them before my visit at 11am.