Airport Season
Today I fly to Canberra to teach Perl Security.

Tomorrow night I fly home from Canberra for the weekend.

On Sunday (two days later) I fly back to Canberra to teach Perl for System Administration.

On Monday night I fly back home again.

On Wednesday I fly to Canberra a third time for third time for the SAGE-AU conference.

After the conference I fly back home again.

I will then have a whole month in Melbourne, before flying out to Canberra again to teach Web Development with Perl.

After the web development course I'll be flying home, turning thirty, flying to cities that are not Canberra, and taking the rest of the year off.

This entry contains media elements which are only visible on my main site.

Fenwickus of Borg
As part of preparation for an upcoming talk my brother-in-law (James Dominguez) prepared a disturbingly realistic photograph of myself after borgification. It looks like something that you really would find on a Star Trek episode.

Ironically, I'm looking at making it more "obviously edited" for my presentation, so the audience will realise it's me, rather than just assume it's just another borg photo.

This entry contains media elements which are only visible on my main site.

Fenwickus of Borg
As part of preparation for an upcoming talk my brother-in-law (James Dominguez) prepared a disturbingly realistic photograph of myself after borgification. It looks like something that you really would find on a Star Trek episode.

Ironically, I'm looking at making it more "obviously edited" for my presentation, so the audience will realise it's me, rather than just assume it's just another borg photo.

system() made simple
In preparation for an upcoming tutorial I'm presenting on using Perl for system administration, I'm looking at ways to make system() more simple to use. Presently most developers have to go to quite a bit of work to check any command ran with system was successful, or worse yet they don't check at all.

The discussions regarding this matter can be found on the modules list, and on PerlMonks. I'm presently seeking as much feedback as possible, on the API, on names, and on ideas.

My overall goal is to make the easiest choice also the most correct choice for the vast majority of cases. That means easy not only easy to write, but also easy for a developer to learn and comprehend.

brian d foy has already provided feedback on possible names via the modules list. As much as it made me laugh, IPC::JFDI is probably going to be non-obvious to much of my target audience. ;)

Feedback via the PerlMonks node is preferable.

Web Standards Group
Melbourne has a Web Standards Group, and they have cool people, and free food! Best of all, last night they even let me present to them, and laughed at my jokes. I'm really amazed that I've been ignorant of their existence for so long.

Spoken Wikipedia — Larry Wall
Last night I discovered an old microphone, and today during my lunchbreak I thought I'd try my hand at Spoken Wikipedia.

My ideal "first article" needed to be short, easy to read, and on a subject that I was interested in. I considered Perl, but it's rather long, and reading programming examples can be challenging. So I settled on Larry Wall instead (audio).

Apparently my Australian accent is rather pronounced, most notably the Australian tendency to drop vowels, syllables, and sometimes entire words when it suits them. Still, it was a fun thing to do over a lunchtime, and I've now got some experience in sound editing.