Well, we made the trip here in 9 hours from Ballarat. 10 for me, because I had to drive from Geelong to pick the other guys up. It was a pretty exciting trip, especially through Yass

All roads lead to Yass

We made it to ANU at about 7pm and migrated to our little res rooms. It brings back fond memories of res at Ballarat. Josh got some crazy invitation to a party hosted by a guy named Hugh, here in Canberra. There were plenty of IBM and HP guys there who were real hardcore kernel hackers, and some lowly students too. It was pretty weird rocking up to the house of these guys, not actually knowing any of them, but being welcomed in, and handed beer. Very cool.

We checked into the conference at about 9 this morning, at the Manning Clarke building. When I walked through the door, it was like a sea of geeks with laptops, all using wireless to get their hit of internet access. Plenty of iBooks and PowerBooks too. Makes me very jealous. After registration, Timmy and I went and checked out the Cluster MiniConf. There were some pretty average presenations, but also some good ones. One of the really good ones was from a guy at APAC. It looks like APAC are doing some very cool stuff with Linux clusters. Also met up with Chris and Brett from VPAC, and yes, his hair looks funny short

After lunch Timmy and I met up with Tuddy and Josh at the embedded MiniConf. Some cool stuff there, especially a project called gnuradio. They are doing cool stuff with everything radio.

Nearly ran over a guy at the supermarket who was wearing the LinuxConf red t-shirt. So, as I was driving past, I yelled out ‘We brake for penguins’. He loved it

Right now, I’m sitting on Res in a common room, with some pretty poor wireless signal strength, so i’m trying to make do. It’s the best i’ve been able to get so far. The Gnome MiniConf is on tomorrow, and it’s gonna rock.

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I needed to test thumbnails by image upload. So, here’s a photo of my dad on a scooter

Dad riding a scooter

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I moved the old andybotting.com over to the wiki today. Just used a simple Apache redirect to point from the original index.html to mediawiki. I’m looking forward to that wiki getting plenty of action, and it should also mean that I have no excuses in keeping that thing up to date, and storing all my little bits of information on there.

Also read that LinuxConf.au will have wireless internet access available. Very nice.

One other note: I finally got a phone at work. It only took two months, but it’s a swish Cisco IP Phone. For a good time, call Andy

Andy: Hard at work

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I realised today after reading the paper over the shoulder of someone on the train that I missed the Sahara Hotnights gig in Melbourne on Sunday night. Now, if some clever person had created an RSS feed for such gigs, or even better, ifTriple J had their own for Victoria, maybe I would have known about it. The email updates are not quite the same, because then you’re not exactly getting the info when you want it, but rather when they want to send it to you. After some investigating, I found this. It’s a company called HWW, and by the looks of it, they basically just sell syndication services, and to top it off, they are probably making a killing after looking at their client list. Now, these guys are only packaging up something that is freely available from various sources (e.g. TV guides, movie time, gig guides, weather, etc). Unfortunately, they don’t just hand out RSS feeds to anybody, but wouldn’t this idea be a major cash cow, when you have the likes of big T, Optus, CitySearch, Yahoo, etc paying you money for information that is freely available.

On a side note, I’m meeting up with Jay and Stretch again to have a look at another place in Richmond tonight. Looking for somewhere to live is such hard work!

Update: Place looks ok. We might put an application in. In the mean time, have a look at Jay out the front.

Jay: A piller of our community

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So i’ve decided to make a fresh start with this whole blog thing after installing the awesome WordPress. I’ve been busy playing with some css and themes, and finally decided on the flex theme. I’ve modified it quite a bit and also ported it to theme my new wiki powered by MediaWiki.

So for those folks who I haven’t caught up with recently, here’s a quick run down of what’s been happening with me for the last couple of months:

I started work at ‘The Big T’ about two months ago now, and things are going pretty well. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was going to be like, but it certainly is very different every other job (all of about 2) that I’ve had. There is a huge push for thing like OH&S which is a pain in the ass. Things like workstation checklists are annoying, but you just have to do them. Something else that I am not used to is the sheer size of this place, and with that, you also get lots of levels of politics and red tape and the like, but there are also a lot of grads who started with me. From memory, there are something like 150 new grads, and then half of those are in the technology group with me. Then, about 15 of those are in my business unit (voice and mobility) and then there are Gezza and Jules on my floor. We’ve had plenty of induction days and workshops which were a good base to meet these guys, and there is always beers on Friday night!

They’ve put me on a SOE windows box which is never any fun, but I bring my laptop (with gentoo on it) and I try and use it for as much as I can at big T. The only real problem is that they use Outlook for all the email, calendar, etc. and it’s version too old to use the Ximian Connector plugin for Evolution. Bugger!

More recently, I’ve been on the hunt for somewhere to live in Melbourne. Lara has served me very well (and probably will later on) but for the moment, the hour+ long commute to the big T is becoming frustrating. Stretch, Jay, Bek and I are going to share a 3 bedroom place hopefully within walking distance to big T, but it’s hard work finding the right place. The past two saturdays, we have had about 6 places to look at, and not many of them have been up to scratch. The clock is ticking with only 3 weeks left.

On a more exciting note, LinuxConf.au is coming up really soon. It’s going to be a week full of drinking and geekery! Huzzah! More to come…

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