Canllaith.org

Monday I woke up when the sunlight and birdsong flooded through the window of my room at dawn. The campus grounds are simply beautiful, with green lawns, tall trees and lovely old buildings. The weather has been stunning, hot clear skies and a light cool breeze.

I fronted up to the registration desk on Monday morning to get my name tag and loot bag, and was amused to be asked whether I was here for the partners programme. Because obviously women at conferences are someone’s wife or girlfriend, naturally!

The loot bag is really quite nice this year - a nice large light-weight bag with a laptop sleeve and a lot of pockets, and some nice things inside:

I then ventured into the city in search of some ethernet cables and had some unintentional transport adventures. It turns out if you don’t have any coins, you can’t get a ticket on the tram. It also turns out that one gets on and off trams in the middle of the street, dodging cars to do so.

I finally tracked down Aaron who’d been MIA for 24 hours. We all went trooping off into the city in search of something vegetarian to eat and a store that sold alcohol. One thing I’ve noticed about Melbourne is that really great food and wine is really cheap here, and there’s a really large selection of great places to eat.

I hadn’t attended any talks on Monday - the miniconfs on the first day didn’t seem as interesting to me as those on the other days so I decided if I was going to go sightseeing and check out the city, Monday was the day to do it. So far LCA is a heck of a lot of fun, and seems to involve a lot of red wine.

In three days I fly to Melbourne to attend linux.conf.au. It’s the first one I’ve been to in a few years and I’m really quite excited about it.

There are LinuxChix, Gaming and Systems Administration miniconfs that I’m very keen to attend, as well as talks on security and networking. Of course I’ll have to attend Aaron Seigo’s talk on creating user interfaces with plasma, and catch up on various KDE gossip with him over a drink or nine.

I’m taking a decent camera & lens with me and my long-suffering KDE laptop so with any luck there should be a lot of blogging about the conference. There’s going to be internet access in the conference accommodation which should help - during the conference talks I’ve discovered I rarely have the time or concentration to actually write anything useful, and really rely on being able to go back to my room with some notes to write things up properly there.

I’m looking forward to being back in Australia for a week - the temperature looks to be getting as high as 35 degrees Celsius. I’m packing t-shirts, shorts and sandals - don’t let me down Australia!

If any other KDEers are going to be at LCA don’t hesitate to drop me a line if you want to catch up.