A couple of the die hard Linux fanatics here at Rimuhosting decided to bribe the boss into letting us go to Linux.conf.au this year, and in fact even managed to get him to become a little blue penguin sponsor. Luckily we have a fantastic employer[1] who was keen to get rid of us. We had fun hacking the name badges whilst registering also (it became office sport whilst drinking beer one afternoon)

Despite John and I booking our flights several weeks apart, we still managed to get on the same flight, and even the same row, which was fine since I had a window seat and was able to take plenty of fantastic photos out the window.

The Waikato where we were located had been in the middle of some amazing weather and 25-30 degrees most days, we were dressed in shorts and shirts when we landed and were informed that they had 30 knot winds and rain and a temperature of 13 degrees.

John grabbed his bags and caught a taxi to the Ustay where we were both booked (I think everyone from LCA was booked in there, 12 stories of geeks!), and i grabbed my bike i had brought with me, assembled it, and cycled the 6km into town.

The weather wasn’t as bad as expected at all, and it was great seeing all the sights and having a bike around Wellingtons down town.

I found the uStay ok, and stumbled over the 1st floor which was a common area/lounge to which there was always some form of geeks hacking, soldering, coding, etc at all hours of the day and night.

The talks were varied and very interesting from a range of subjects. The Keynotes were always the highlight being both informative and interesting to pretty much everyone, all from well spoken and knowledgeable people. I even managed to have a photo of me on the big screen during one of the lightening talks from a computer show back in 2002

There was far too much to see and do most of the time, and often we had to hope that the video stream will be great to watch later on to catch up on what we missed. John and I didn’t see each other much at the actual conference however we did end up drinking together or eating together at more than one place. There were after hours functions pretty much every night, either formal or informal. I don’t think anyone got to bed before midnight the entire week, and I have to compliment Wellington on its excellent Coffee, Beer, and Food.

They ran a Photography competition also during the LCA, however much as I love photography I didnt fancy lugging that around and trying to get photos, I only had my netbook which was unable to open most (i have an SLR) and i prefered to spend my time talking and socializing. However some of the Photographs were specitacular, this one in particularly i loved and came runner up

During the week I met a Busker called David Merritt who wrote his own CopyLeft books containing amazing Poetry & Prose, and one in particular i knew would go down well with the Linux.conf.au attendees so i asked him to turn up at the Open Day. When the Open Day came, there was no room for him to sell, so we shuffled around and did what we do best, and hosted him on our table. This turned out to be brilliant since everyone else had freebies and cool give aways and all we had were pamphlets until then.

Overall, we enjoyed the week, it was fantastic and a total sucess. Unsure about John but I’m pretty glad i took a second week holiday afterwards to recover.

I’ll leave you with a couple of excepts from David Merritts book titled ‘Geek Prayers’ (if you want a copy of the book email him lrfpress at gmail.com – its $5 NZD)

“Lord,

May I never receive Zillions of weird and curious emails extorting me to increase my breast or penis size or transfer funds to bogus Nigerians”

“Lord,

May all my interweb page and backend site code be w3 compliant, not browser dependant and be free of all proprietary operating system kibble as well as be backwards compatible to the very first generation of interweb browsers”

We are now looking forward to  next year in Brisbane http://followtheflow.org/