Chickens += 4
Jacinta's parents were kind enough to buy us new chickens as a birthday present. We now have four more, named Coffee, Chocolate, Mocha, and Latte.

Puzzle Pirates
Shiver me timbers! Puzzle Pirates is a fine time-waster for an old salt like myself, and what better excuse to talk like a pirate to ye friends? My pirate is Tarrlox on the sage ocean. Feel free to drop me a message if you're also playing.

Win32::Screenshot
I've just discovered Win32::Screenshot, a Perl module that not only allows one to capture the entire screen, but more importantly makes it easy to capture individual windows, or portions of windows.

Installation of the module was a bit of a pain. Even though there is a ppd file at http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/Win32-Screenshot.ppd it depends upon PerlMagick, which under more recent releases is properly named Image::Magick and can be selected as part of the windows ImageMagick installer. I quickly hacked together my own ppd file that simply omits the dependency section. Besides from that, the whole thing worked like a charm.

So why is Win32::Screenshot so useful? Well, a lot of Windows programs have no command-line interface. If you want to communicate with them, you have no choice but to use the GUI. That's fine for humans, but what if you want to perform automated testing, or automatically watch a window for a particular event? Then Win32::Screenshot, especially in conjunction with Win32::GuiTest, really shines.

I've been joking with my friends that I'm going to use all this to play Puzzle Pirates automatically. In reality I have a much more interesting (but unfortunately secret) project at hand.

Conference talks
I'm pretty fond of conferences, a fact that's fairly well known. However I sometimes get questions asking "Why aren't you attending XYZ?" To answer this, we need to look a little more closely about why people attend conferences.

When applying for funding, everyone says they wish to visit a conference because it's educational, or because they'll be exposed to industry experts and valuable new ideas. While that may be true, conferences also represent a holiday away from work for many employees. Conferences mean a paid time away from work, with groovy people, and often excellent food and free drinks. Sounds like a holiday to me.

The reason that conferences are holidays for many people is because their employer pays for them. If they were paying for themselves, then attendees may consider saving the money and going scuba diving in the tropics. If you're self-funding (which ultimately I am), then the conference rapidly loses holiday value. That leaves the networking and education.

Now, here's the rub. While I find many conference presentations interesting (and some... less so), the main reason I attend conferences is the same reason I attend user-groups. It's to meet people. People are so much more important than the latest tech-tool or newest way of doing unthinkable things with XML.

However meeting people is hard work. There's all these wacky social protocols and handshakes in order to open communications and find a common topic, and even then you're not even sure if any useful information is going to be transferred. Conferences often provide very little time to actually talk to others, since talks and presentations take up so much of the day. Luckily, there's a simple trick that turns all that around. You give a presentation.

When presenting a wonderful thing happens. You get to provide an idea to hundreds of people. Now anybody you meet for the rest of the conference has something to talk to you about, meaning you can immediately skip a lot of the more difficult parts of the opening protocols. Even better, people you meet will tend to self-select for ideas and interests similar to your own. By presenting, one gets the most bang-for-buck out of a conference.

Now I can finally answer the original question of why I don't attend conference XYZ this year. It's probably because I didn't hear about the Call For Papers (CFP). Some conferences tend to only send their CFP to a very narrow band of people, and in those cases I don't even have the opportunity to present a paper. That's a real shame, because inbred conferences are often prone to repeated content and poorer presentations.

Sometimes I'll catch the CFP, but not actually be accepted as a speaker. This primarily seems to be when the conference is very technically focused, and I submit papers that are on non-technical topics, such understanding social APIs, or practical mind control. While this is a shame, I don't blame the organisers. Picking speakers for a conference is hard, and if you haven't seen them present before then it's only sensible to go with the on-topic ones. All it means is that I simply haven't met enough people yet.

So, if I'm not at a conference, it's usually because I've missed the CFP or otherwise don't have an opportunity to present. Occasionally it's because I'm just plain busy. After all, I do have a life around here somewhere...

I think it must be on a backup tape.

Some views of my journal do not allow back-dating of posts. This entry should be dated 2005-10-11.

Days 5—7; Magnetic Island, Townsville, Home
Spent the day hiking to The Forts, a (now disused) military base and artillery emplacements errected on Magnetic Island during WWII. The guns on the base could cover a significant number of bays and waterways, protecting the approach to Townsville. It's said that the guns were never fired in anger, but were fired once in 'mild surprise' when a United States warship arrived unannounced.

All up this was about a 12km walk through undulating and sometimes uneven terrain. Most of what remains of the forts are just concrete slabs and other foundations, however the more permanent structures including the ammunition stores, gun emplacements, and command towers have survived, although much of their 'fake rock' camoflague has not.

The walk, combined with Magnetic Island's hot tropical weather, had both Jacinta and myself feel very glad to arrive back at our hostel, at which point we had dinner and quickly fell asleep.

The next day had us travel back to Townsville. This provided a much needed chance to establish a proper network connection. The second half of the day was spent in the aquarium, which while as not as large as its sisters in Melbourne and Perth, was nonetheless very educational and gave us a chance to identify and learn about many of the critters we had seen and photographed on the reef.

In the evening we undid much of the good work from the previous day of hard exercises and healthy food, and instead had a number of pints and tasty-but-unhealthy pub food.

Today (Tuesday) is the day of our flights back to Melbourne, with our shuttle bus arriving in about 80 minutes time. Jacinta is exploring the nearby Maritime Museum, while I'm taking a break to catch up on my mail, journal, and plans. Our travel arrangements, once they start, are hectic. We're flying from Townsville to Brisbane to Melbourne, where my very kind sister-in-law and her husband are picking us up and whisking us away to a friend's surprise 30th birthday party.

Tomorrow it's back to work, catching up on a week's worth of things that will have landed on my desk.

Some views of my journal do not allow back-dating of posts. This entry should be dated 2005-10-07.

Day 3 — 4 Yongala; Magnetic Island
Woke at around 5:45am in order to make a 6:00am dive on the Yongala wreck. The Yongala is a ship that was tragically lost in bad weather near Townsville in 1911, with no survivors. Sitting in 28 metres of water, the wreck now forms an artificial reef, with an incredible number of species living on and around the debris.

The dive was indeed something special. Unlike many wrecks, the Yongala is incredibly well-preserved, and is easily identified as a very large ship. Masts, cargo holds, portholes, dining rooms, and other areas are easily visible. But one of the biggest attractions are the wildlife. On our first dive I was investigated by a bull-nose ray. We saw giant maori wrasse that were easily 150cm long. Friendly (and incredibly venomous) olive sea snakes lived about the wreck, and a large shovel-nosed ray passed us by with curiosity. There were more huge pelagic fish in and around the wreck than I could possibly look at.

After our first dive we had a modest surface interval before our second. Due to the depth and time of our first expedition, our second was limited primarily to the upper parts of the wreck. I would have loved a longer surface interval and a deeper dive, but unfortunately time constraints (and the very modest speed of the boat) did not allow this.

Having said that, the boat (the Sea-ester) overall was good, and the crew (from Pro-Dive Townsville) and food were excellent. I think that us vegetarians ate better than the rest of the passengers, and our two crew members with degrees in Marine Biology seemed to never tire of me asking them to help identify fish and other wildlife we had photographed.

Upon returning to land in the afternoon we caught a ferry across to Magnetic Island. Magnetic is a large island, with many permanent residents, shops, supermarkets, and other facilities one would expect in a moderately sized town. That's good, because it means we don't have to put up with the typical island-monolopy prices.

Unfortunately, it appears that Magnetic Island still thinks that "Internet" means "Web", which means that it's impossible to plug in a laptop anywhere; not unless you happen to carry around cable-cutters, a crimping tool, a long extension cord, and a small switch on your journies. That's a bit of a bummer when you need to send off some files to international clients, or want to catch up on e-mail securely.

We've spent some time in the island's bays snorkling, and found it disappointing. Perhaps we're going at the wrong times, but the visibility has been awful, at only 1—2 metres at most. I'm sure it gets better than that, as I keep hearing lots of good stories about how good the snorkling can be.

This afternoon we're going to be heading out on some walks through the rainforest, and enjoying some of the island's quite striking geography. Our plans for tomorrow include catching the ferry back to Townsville in the evening for a nice meal, more acceptable network connections, and an easier trip back to the airport for our flights.