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.

Linux.conf.au, Day 1
I've got a number of journal entries prepared to continue the report on my dive adventures, but I haven't finished of the processing of the photographs to go with them. They'll be posted when I have a spare moment.

I've arrived in Sydney for Linux.conf.au, which is huge, and allegedly has 700-800 attendees. Every session I've been to, including the keynote/welcome, has been packed, with numerous people standing or sitting on the floor.

The regular conference-goers are here, as well as Nat Torkington, whom I didn't expect. I also shared a mini-bus from the airport with Andrew Tanenbaum.

I'm planning to spend much of the day in the hallway stream, although I'm attending a few of the presentations here and there. I'm also posting what few photographs I take to flickr. I daresay that I'm both a poor photographer and a flickr newbie, so don't expect anything too amazing.

Tonight is the speakers' dinner, which is on a boat. Tomorrow night is a party which I believe is sponsored by Google, Wednesday is the professional delegates and speakers' "networking session" (booze-up), and Friday night is the conference dinner. I'm planning to sleep Thursday night in order to be awake before 6am for the "speakers' adventure".

Away diving - Day 0
Today (Tuesday 2nd January) we left for our big dive trip, and discovered that sometimes just getting places can be a little too exciting. It started with a late taxi (that's fine, we plan for such things), a huge queue at the airport (still okay...), our airline telling us that they'd overbooked the flight(!), and a free upgrade to Business Class for Jacinta. So far, so good.

Where things started to get exciting is that our flight to Brisbane was running late, and it connects with a second flight to Bundaberg where our boat leaves. At this time we discovered two notable facts: 1) even though we're booked for a connecting flight, there's no guarantee it will actually connect; and 2) the flight we're trying to connect with is the last one for that day.

Since our dive boat would be departing that evening, and would not return until a week later, we were rather concerned that our holiday wouldn't even start! Important lesson learned: when booking connecting flights, make sure you're not connecting to the last one.

After some worried phone-calls and significant time spent ingratiating myself with as many flight staff as possible, we were informed that the plane would be held for us, and we could all breathe easy. So we got to the boat with plenty of time to spare (the last flight still arrived many hours before the boat departed).

On the boat, we were told that the trip to our first dive site overnight would be rough, and indeed it was! I was prepared with sea-sickness medication, and was surprised that it did nothing whatsoever to help. I spent most of the early hours of the morning "feeding the fishes", as the local saying goes. Important lesson learned: bring really strong sea-sickness medication for the first night. Luckily, I've had not even a hint of sea-sickness since then.

Day 1
We had five dives today, from early-morning to night. We've seen some pretty cool things, the most notable being a huge olive sea-snake searching for food, and about four turtles that were bigger than me (as well as many smaller ones).

The down-point of today was that our back-up torches flooded during the night-dive, and are certainly not in any condition to be taken underwater again. Instead of them failing in the obvious way (a bad o-ring seal), they failed at the switches, which are not even mentioned in the maintenance manual.

The real failure with our torches was our own; as every good sys-admin knows, you should always test your back-ups. Dropping our secondary lights in a bucket of fresh water would likely have revealed bubbles, and alerted us to a problem with minimal damage to electronics. Important lesson learned: even when you're on holidays, you're still a sys-admin.

The high-point was seeing a beautiful olive sea snake, a thick as my leg, and twice as long! It was extremely active, searching for food in all the coral nooks and crannies. It also seemed to be completely unworried to have a couple of divers watching it. Unfortunately our camera batteries were flat, so no photographs.

OSDC Wind-up
It's been a week since OSDC finished, so I thought it best I tie up a few loose ends. On Sunday Jacinta and I took Randal and Cog to the Melbourne Aquarium. This was very well received; it seems that our unique aquatic life are just as interesting as our land species.

In addition to the aquarium, books were autographed, gifts exchanged, drinks consumed, and stories were told. Unfortunately were weren't able to find any pajamas with kangraroos on them; cog was looking for them "for a friend". ;)

Thanks to Jacinta's hard work, a summary of the conference, including a list of blogs is on PerlNet. Please feel free to add to the list, you don't need an account to make changes.