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.

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.