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.

This time next week, I'll be 30,000 feet over the tasman sea, winging my way to New Zealand for this years linux.conf.au.

I'm going to be presenting two talks at the Google Wave miniconf:

• Building the Independent Wave
• Harnessing the Wave

On Tuesday I'm going to be flitting between the Open and the Public Sector (yay scheduling changes has removed that particular conflict) and the Multimedia miniconfs.

During the conference proper the first talk I'm going to definitely hit is going to be Bdales talk on Flying Rockets with Free Hardware and Software.

Thursdays stand out for me is Drupal - Under the hood. Mind you I'm then conflicted. Do I want to catch half of Silvia Pfeiffers HTML 5 Video talk and then switch over to Jon Oxers FOSS In Spaaaaaace presentation? Decisions, decisions.

Fridays fun project would have to be FOSS Fun with the Wiimote by Rusty Russell. Of course this occures at exactly the same time the Open Source Assistive Tech which is an area I've recently become interested in.

All in all it's going to be a great conference by the looks of things.