Talk like a pirate
Avast m'hearties. It be talk like a pirate day, the one day ye can swig grog on the poop deck, play on yer hornpipe, and go sailing with ye mates.

If ye be looking fer others to be piratey with, ye may even drop into Puzzle Pirates. I be Tarrlox on the Sage ocean, if ye wishes to say ahoy!

New screen from Dell
Dell seems to have a policy that one cannot transfer a 1 year USA warranty to another country, although one can update it to a 3 year international warranty. If I go to the USA for laptop service, then everything is fine. Otherwise, I'm out of luck.

I had a chat with Dell to say that it's not really fair that they reveal this only after I make a warranty claim, especially when there's no indication of this on their warranty transfer page, nor did they say anything when I completed the warranty transfer form.

Dell, quite graciously, agreed with my argument, and while they're not transferring the warranty, they are replacing the screen. That's a great resolution for me, since the screen is probably worth more than the warranty, and it's all I really want out of this entire matter.

While I can't say that everything is hunky-dory until the screen is replaced, I'm certainly happy with how things have progressed so far.

Judging from the feedback forwarded to me after the conference, my presentation was very well received. I was given a 98.2% effectiveness in presentation style, and an indication that I'd be welcome back next year.

I also have the primary conference organiser learning Perl. ;)

Kennedy
After the CMGA conference I met up with Adam Kennedy. Adam was kind enough to travel out to the airport with me so I wouldn't have to worry about missing my flight. We talked about many things, including just how long it takes to put together a good presentation, and a very large project that Adam's been working upon. While I'm not at liberty to say more about that project, I can say that Adam has some extremely entertaining stories to tell. ;)

Cars
In my last journal entry I mentioned how a number of events that were pure luck provided me with a nice financial advantage. Last Tuesday, the joy that is variance has swung the other way.

We had loan of Jacinta's parents' car while one of them is interstate. It's mostly sat in the driveway, since we prefer to use bicycles for transport, but it's been used a few times. Tuesday was the first day of our Programming Perl course in Melbourne. Since the first day always involves moving a lot of books and course materials, we decided to drive into the city, rather than wrestle with moving it on and off trams, or hiring a taxi.

Unfortunately, on the way to the course, we had a bit of an accident. Jacinta performed a head-check at the exact same moment the car in front decelerated. The whole thing was a testament to modern crumple zones, I was completely unharmed, and Jacinta suffered only the most minor of bruises. In fact, the impact seemed so soft that I expected to see only scratches on the front of the car, not the more extensive damage which occured.

We're not sure if the car itself can be repaired for a reasonable cost, so we're looking at buying Jacinta's parents a new car. There are also insurance excess costs, towing costs, and sundry expenses, but they look like they'll be much less than what I had expected.

Thankfully, none of this will cause us any real financial problems, since we plan for unexpected disasters.

Freedom
Saturday was Software Freedom Day, and I helped out by MC'ing at the Melbourne event. More importantly for me personally, Saturday also marked the start of me having six weeks with no fixed plans. While there'll be a little bit of paperwork and other minor work in there, most of that's going to be spent doing whatever I damn well please. That's going to be a very refreshing change from the last few months of course-writing, paper-writing, and presenting that I have been doing.

Dead Pixels
Today "whatever I damn well please" is unfortunately chasing up warranty claims. Last night I discovered a cluster of dead pixels on my otherwise outrageously nice laptop display, and today I contacted Dell to see what I can do about having it replaced.

The laptop itself was imported, since it's much cheaper to buy an American laptop than an Australian one, however Dell has informed me that the warranty on the laptop is only good in the USA. That's not something I had expected, so after providing a few complimentary words I've asked if they could be so kind as to transfer the warranty, even if that means a small compromise on its duration.

Ironically, even in the worst case scenario (I pay for an Australian warranty), I can still heartily recommend importing laptops rather than buying them locally. The cost savings easily covers the warranty cost, so I'm still winning in comparison to a locally purchased unit.

Lucky++
I've got a half finished journal entry that covers the last few weeks of time, and it will be posted soon. In the meantime I want to discuss just this week, during which I've bumped into a large amount of good luck. This isn't the garden variety good luck, like finding a few dollars in the street, or rolling doubles in Monopoly. This is the really agressive type that calls persistently and leaves you reminders to make sure you're taking advantage of it.

The first bit of luck was getting Perl Training Australia to accept Amex cards. It wasn't pure luck, since I used some very gentle techniques to help move along the paperwork (thank-yous and recommendations up to managers), but I got an incredibly fast response time on our application. That includes one customer service representative travelling to my house to fill in paperwork, despite it being her day off and having a flight to Hawaii leaving in a few hours.

Luck number two involved a small side-project of mine changing their conditions to be about $75 USD/month in my favour. Small, but nice.

However the really big hunk of luck is with our facilities providers. I don't know why this week was special, but they've decided to start a price-war for our business. We're not talking about a few hundred dollars here and there. We're saving thousands of dollars. In fact, there are two prices wars in different cities. Competition is a truly wonderful thing.

In praise of AnnoCPAN
I've become increasingly fond of AnnoCPAN, an annotated version of the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. AnnoCPAN has rapidly become my scratchpad for writing down notes, explanations and reminders regarding modules.

AnnoCPAN is automatically linked to from each module on CPAN, so I'd think that more people are aware of it. However my experiences at conferences and user-groups may suggest otherwise.

Tidyview
Perltidy is a fantastic tool for reformatting Perl code. I'm impressed at its abilities, even when I think my code is beautiful, perltidy can often make it more beautiful. Whenever I've been called to help maintain code that was written by the style impaired, perltidy has been an essential tool.

Leif Eriksen has recently released tidyview, a graphical tool for adjusting perltidy options. This allows one to see visually see what all the perltidy options do, without having to go through the manual process of run-and-compare yourself.

I understand that tidyview is still beta, and has a few dependencies that Leif expects to remove for final release. However it's still impressive in what it can do so far.

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.