James Purser [INSERT WITTY CATCHPHRASE HERE]

Well it's the end of day one of linux.conf.au here in Wellington and I have to say it's been a pretty good start to the event.

Breakfast, or so it claimed:

I left sleepy Dapto at 4am yesterday morning to make it up to Sydney for my 8:45 flight. Everything went well, and I met up with other lca attendees (Melissa Draper, Michael and Brett Morgan). Check in was fine and we were soon boarding. I took out my copy of LotR and the trip commenced.

Everything was fine, it was reasonably clear so got a good view of the ocean out of the window. Then they announced breakfast. "Hrmm" I thought, "I am a little hungry, I shall partake of their offerings."

Mistake.

When the flight attendants reached my row they had run out of the "cold breakfast". Instead they claimed they had scrambled eggs so I said "not a problem" and received my pre-heated meal. On taking the wrapper off the meal I was presented with what looked like a small mound of oatmeal (which I was to find was in fact meant to be a hash brown), what appeared to be a piece of leather (bacon) and something approaching scrambled eggs. This "delightful" meal was finished off by the presence of some mysterious red liquid with lumps in it (baked beans). Yum

Arriving in UnZud

Well I survived the meal and we finally arrived in Wellington. I have to say the approach to Wellington is very impressive from what I could see. It really did drive home the idea that New Zealand is a landscape still developing and growing as opposed to Australia, a land known for its deserts and plains in which the last million years has passed with nary a change.

Upon alighting from the plane, I discovered that it was 14 degrees and raining. I made this discovery wearing shorts and a t-shirt (yay me). Wasn't that bad though, caught a taxi-bus with Melissa and Brett to UStay where we all checked in and I wandered down to the registration desk at the venue to sign in. Well that was the plan. I ended up exploring half of the Wellington CBD/Foreshore before I finally got my bearings straight :)

The swag bag this year is impressive. It's a nice size and holds everything without issue. Luckily again this year the organisers of LCA were able to resist the urge to go with Slim Fit T-shirts so I might actually wear mine this week. The hand sanitizer was a bit of an odd one, but I believe that it's in response to the swine flu outbreak.

I have to hand it to the network people. This year they've managed not only to get the network running at the venue but through CafeNet, LCA attendees actually network access throughout Wellington. That has to be a first (cough, Sydney/Wollongong city wide wifi is a GOOD IDEA).

First Day

As I was presenting today I had to make that I did not sleep in and miss the first session of the day. Luckily I was able to up, showered and ready to go with plenty of time. 

I walked down to the venue, met up with a few people, and the wandered up to the room where the Google Wave miniconf was going to be held.

Dan Peterson the PM (I think that stands for Project Manager) started the day with an introduction to Federation, which led nicely into my first talk about "Building the Independent Wave". I was nervous as I usually am at these things, and I'm sure I went too fast, however I was reasonably happy with the way it went. It trigger some discussion, specifically my claim that for Iwave to move forward it needs to take over the role of the mail server.

After me came Brett Morgan with his discussion of Operational Transforms as they applied to his custom Gagdet. It was a good talk, however the application he was demonstrating failed to fail which caused some consternation ;)

The talks by Pamela were very interesting. If you don't know who Pamela is, she performs developer support for the Google Wave team, and has been single handedly, filling the Samples gallery with various Gadgets and Robots. If you want to dig deep into the Google Wave Robots and Gadgets API's Pamela is the one to ask.

As the day came to an end we all retired to the Green Man pub, for a drink and a tweetup. After that I went to the shops to stock up, and returned to my room at UStay, where I now await my daily Skype with my family :)