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.