New toys make me happy ;)
Adam and I received thankyou gifts from our employer yesterday for the good job we did representing the company in Canberra and Sydney - 1GB iPod Shuffles! They work under Linux using gtkpod, and an iPod HOWTO is available on the Ubuntu wiki. Now with my new shoes I really have no excuse for not exercising.
Luke's started playing soccer for our team on Thursday nights which is great. What's even better is that after the game (we were thrashed 11-0; our goalkeeper didn't do much keeping) I had a chat to Luke in the carpark and he asked me if I'd be his Best Man at his wedding. Ofcourse I said I'd love to and I'm quite honoured that he and Nic would want me so heavily involved in their special celebration.
April 15th is the date they've set, which means I have 49 weeks to plan the Buck's Party ;)
Update: 29/04/2005 09:07AM
Freakily, it appears that both Adam and myself will be Best Men on this day. His mate Daniel is getting married on the same date!
Yesterday I bought a new pair of running shoes:
Online they've received great reviews for both trail and road running, so I thought they'd be a great pair of shoes to get me going. My pair has slightly different colours, with some of the light grey on mine being orange. I wore them to soccer last night and they performed well even if we didn't as a team :)
We got into Sydney, grabbed a taxi and met Mark at the hotel. A quick bite of japanese and we went off to 360 was good but not great. The Scratch Perverts rocked pretty hard, along with Ben Benassi. I thought not much of Derrick May, but Craze was good. I saw Jamie from Infusion in the crowd, but we didn't talk to him. He was being swamped by fans and I've done enough fanboying so far ;)
We slept fairly well on Saturday morning and went to see the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge. Both were impressive but really what I expected. We caught the train which became the bus into North Sydney to see Infusion play. The venue was nothing short of amazing. Imagine raving on the roof of a building in the middle of the city, with massive towers around and no regard for the volume. Some cool Irish chicks took a shining to me, which was good for the ego. They'd not heard of Infusion before so I was happy to enjoy their first Infusion experience with them. Adam's got some wicked photos of us with the boys after their gig. Jamie was especially cool, and took photos of us three in our shirts on his camera. I hope they end up on their website. We grabbed a taxi back after their gig and hit the sack after a few cheeseburgers from McDonalds.
Adam left for Danel's place in the morning, and Mark and I went to the new hotel. I checked out some Ubuntu stuff (basically the improvements they're making on NetworkManager) and Mark played Freeciv v2.0 for a while. I downloaded it and have played a little bit too. It's kinda fun. We battled an Ubuntu install into Mark's VMWare for a while (it was his CD drive chunking discs) and grabbed some lunch. After lunch I checked out a BOF on LTSP in Ubuntu. I was hoping we'd get to discuss using Sun's SunRays on Ubuntu, but I'll have to chug through that myself later I think. There are instructions for Debian/Sarge, so we're kinda there.
That night Mark and I got some wicked Thai, and cleaned the casino out of 700 bucks between us. Score! We took a walk up to King's Cross and saw all the neon and dodgy gansters. I want to go back later tonight.
Today I slept in until midday, which was a refreshing recharge opportunity. We caught the train out to Bondi Beach and grabbed some lunch. I ate a huge pizza and we checked out the beach. No topless women to report Hale... I guess it was midweek. We did a bit of shopping and I got some new socks and a T-shirt. We grabbed a bite of Indian for dinner and gave the casino a 100 of their 700 back. There was a lot of idiots at the table playing poorly, so we should have let them throw their own money away, but we hung around for a while.
I'm now back at the Vibe Hotel watching a bunch of the Canonical boys and Pia play some game with crazy rules that seem to be changing. Nerds! :)
Tomorrow we're off to the Blue Mountains and then it's home time.
Maggie can't get me from the airport which is upsetting. She has school the next day and I get in at midnight so she'll be fast asleep. I hope Steve can grab us.
I had a page of text written yesterday before I suspended my machine and it didn't come back. Argh! As a result, you'll get abridged versions from now on in :)
LCA Day 5: Andrew Morton opened the day with a talk on what he does as kernel maintainer. Surprisingly involving. Elizabeth "edale" Garbee (daughter of Bdale) talked about Tuxracer and I enjoyed it. I think she got lots of attention because she was female. Mark Shuttleworth is a king. His stoies of the experiences leading up to launch and finally reaching space were fantastic to hear. Meeting him has made me a better person. After lunch I saw a talkby Michael Davies on C# prototyping under Linux. He uses Boo (Python derivative) and Java too, so it's a real mix of hacks. The boys had a few beers in the tavern so I met them there. The formal dinner sucked badly because there was no alcohol included in the ticket. We got stiffed. Adrian snuck some booze into the dinner but it got snaffled by the hard bitch running the show. A bunch of us went to a strip club afterwards and looked at some nice boobs; some of them had a closer look at more than boobs.
LCA Day 6: Eben Moglen (say that three times fast) gave the best keynote speech I've ever seen on freedom and software. It was recorded, so I hope it gets made available soon. He got a double standing ovation, which was thuroughly deserved. After him, we blew off the rest of the afternoon and went to check out Parliament House. I got to learn about our government, which I missed at primary school (along with long division and what a verb is). We got back to LCA in time for the panel discussion which I'm disappointed we only got to see 15 minutes of. Left for the plane to Sydney and waved goodbye to Canberra.