A week away in Sydney (working)
Spent the last week in Sydney, presenting introductory Perl courses to a mixed class of students. We had nine students, and I believe they were representing eight different organisations. An interesting tidbit from the class is that the boarding passes used by my airline are printed and processed using Perl — I even got a peek at the source code.

Any class over eight students usually warrants a second trainer, and so I was fortunate enough to have Jacinta assisting me.

Normally when I travel for training I find myself with a little free time in the evening; however this particular trip had a busy social calendar. One night was spent visiting some old friends who have recently had a child, and the other was spent with Sydney Perl Mongers.

Syd.PM certainly know how to have a good time, especially judging from my grin in the photo. We had Robert Spier (from perl.org) visiting, and to cap off the evening the New South Wales chapter of SAGE-AU were also at the same pub. When it got too late Jacinta had to almost drag me away, reminding me that I really did have to be up and teaching at 9am the next day.

As always, I'm very happy to be back at home, and I'm looking forward to a weekend where I'm not standing on my feet for 10+ hours a day.

Soooooo busy!
I'm presenting at the SAGE-VIC conference tomorrow, so today has the usual rush of revising all my slides, applying eye-candy (Ascidian photos this time), and rehersing. Then I've got a long weekend, followed by four days of teaching.

That's why, after an otherwise peaceful week, every single client seems to be crawling out of the woodwork to try and push work onto me. Today. My last business day in the office.

The thing is that I don't want to do a lot of the work that's being proposed. It's not that I don't enjoy development, it's all the things that go with it (wrangling specs out of clients, contracts, moving goal-posts, feature creep, lack of closure, maintenance, etc) that I dislike.

Training, on the other hand, is cleanly defined, a lot more social, lot more rewarding, and a lot less stressful. Nobody calls you up at 4am in the morning to tell you that your course notes are broken, and that you've desparately got to fix a poorly worded sentence on page 83. We're doing a good job of increasing our training turnover, and I'm trying to reduce how much I'm involved in commercial development.

It's not an easy task to tell a long-term client that you don't want to do any more development work for them, and certainly not a task I want to try and do in the last stages of conference preparation.

Wikipedia on wild edible plants
Wikipedia is an excellent resource, but seems to perform poorly in the field of wild edible plants. I'm slowly correcting that, with today's entry being a short article on sowthistles. For such a common plant I'm surprised that there was no article already.

As usual, I need a better photo. All the sowthistles of reasonable size in our garden tend to get eaten.

Magic — the reunion
What do you do when a bunch of friends from University haven't seen each other in a couple of weeks, and happen to all have a free weekend? Why, you reach into the dusty attics, pull out long-forgotten boxes of cards, and mumble something about how we foolishly traded away our mox gems in our youth.

Yes, we had a day of getting together and playing Magic — The Gathering, what was commonly known as 'cardboard crack' back in my University days. We even chuckled and laughed at the 'new' cards that one of our players had brought along, until we realised that those new cards were printed seven years ago. Then we all felt just a little bit older.

The day was lots of fun, although being the first time many of us had played in almost a decade, there was considerable time spent reorganising decks. We never ended up having a five-player prismatic game in the end, but that provides us with a good excuse to get together next time.

189th Fastest Jetman
It's official. I am now the 189th fastest Jetman in the world!

Jetpak - Solar Crisis is an extremely well polished, fun, and very British game. A great way to soak up a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.