Pre Linux.Conf.Au 2010

Flying out today, I had to wake up extra-early at 4:30am in order to make the trains to the airport. The night before, I had done my online check-in, so once at the airport all I had to do was check in my bags - and as Qantas has a separate queue for online check-ins, this was really fast. They even printed me out a proper boarding pass (you print your own and bring it with you). Totally going to do that in the future as well.

I managed to meet up with James Purser, as well as some other LCAers who were on the same plane. We had a bit of a chat about Google Wave, its problems, and the cool stuff that people such as James are working on (ie. federation, and the upcoming new Python wave robot APIs).

The flight was mostly dull, as flights are, but I started reading Charlie Stross’ “Halting State”. I figured I should read it soon, as it’s near-future sci-fi, and one of the events described in the books has apparently recently actually occurred. So far, it’s a fantastic book, but I’m not that far into it yet.

Arriving in Wellington, ended up in a shuttle bus with some other LCAers, though while they were only going to the U-stay, I was going further as I was going to stay with friends (i386 and auxesis). There was a hilarious moment where some woman wanted to be dropped off from the shuttle at a particular spot, and the shuttle driver just stopped in the middle of the road! People started honking their horns, and we created a traffic jam that was backed up as far as the eye could see. There was a maori builder in the house, laughing his arse off about it as well.

Once I got to Brandon Street, where my apartment apparently was, I quickly realised that while the apartment documents that i386 had forwarded to me had the code to open the box where the keys to the apartments were held - it did not actually specify the room number. This was on the envelopes containing the keys, which had been picked up by i386 and auxesis (arriving the day before). I never enabled global roaming on my phone, and with no local sim, I had no way to call them to come down - so I stood in the street, found some wifi, and bitched at i386 on IRC, which fortunately worked.

The apartment we have is fantastic, it’s clean, it has a nice big kitchen, bathroom and laundry - and the lounge area is huge, and has very, very comfortable suede leather couches. The wifi situation is a bit poor, we can only access the apartment’s hotspot, which is stupidly overpriced - but we have some ideas on how to fix this situation.

After going to the conference venue to register, we discovered that there was a Belgian Beer Cafe/Bar on block next to our apartment. We went there and had totally delicious beers and food. I had venison sausages, and for desert Belgian waffles. To go with the waffles, I also had a cherry beer (Kreik), which was delicious.

Then we came back to our apartment and talked into the night.