When I lived with my parents years ago, I was blessed to have an oven with a stable temperature and a working fan. I didn’t realise it at the time, but moving out of home marked the start of more than five years of walking through a culinary desert. Cooking just wasn’t fun any more – and eating out was so much more adult and sophisticated!
Last August I moved into a house with an amazing kitchen, and slowly my desire to cook has come back. It’s not a desert I’m walking through any more, it’s a dessert. Here’s a selection of the things I’ve made, just in the last week:
Apple and Rhubarb CrumbleChocolate FudgePumpkin Pie
Amazingly, despite the above evidence, I’m actually fitter and healthier than I was – I’m exercising more, and I’m eating out far less than in the past.
So far this week I’ve been at linux.conf.au, held in Geelong. As usual, it’s been the insane mix of seeing awesome talks by awesome people, hanging out with old friends, meeting new friends, and not getting quite enough sleep.
Of the awesome talks, a few stand out:
Bdale Garbee’s talk on whole-house audio, where instead of buying off the shelf hardware, he built his own USB to 30w stereo amplifier module and hooked nine of them up to an embedded PC. Mostly because he could.
Casey West’s two talks on cloud anti-patterns and twelve-factor apps, outlining a large number of good and bad practices in application development, containers, and clouds.
Steven Ellis’ talk on ManageIQ, which is a tool for managing cross-provider VMs. It looks like the perfect tool to manage my mix of Rackspace, Azure and AWS VMs and other tools, but I haven’t been able to check it out further yet (the downloadable image won’t work in VirtualBox, so I’ll have to wait until I get home).
Tammy Butow’s Site Reliability Engineering at Dropbox talk filled me with inspiration to work harder at getting better at systems administration. It was essentially a talk on Kaizen applied to engineering and how to achieve that.
The UnPDNS in progress…
Of course, LCA isn’t just about talks – if it was, I probably wouldn’t bother going. It’s about people. It’s been great to meet new people over dinner, and discuss talks with strangers after they end – it’s been fun to get some new views on what I thought were uncontroversial topics. I ended up playing Ingress late at night with a few people, and had great fun (and a lot of exercise, which I probably need). And there was of course the UnProfessional Delegates Networking Session, a barbecue organised by my friends Adam Harvey and Chris Neugebauer, which despite getting rained out was great fun – and then we all adjourned to the pub.
Geelong seems like a lovely city. I visited roughly fifteen years ago and I was fairly unimpressed at the time – it was dull and grey and seemed devoid of anything interesting. That can’t be said now. The waterfront is a lovely place to be, the weather is perfect (at least in summer), and there’s plenty of good food to be had (not on the level of Hobart or Melbourne, but that’s a tough standard to meet).
I’m looking forward to what the rest of the week brings!
This is just a quick blog post to get something off my chest. It’s about the open-source conference I’m currently attending, linux.conf.au. The thing is this: I run a Windows 10-based laptop, I’ve brought it with me to LCA, and I’m proud of that.
I use Windows for work. I’m a .NET developer. It’s how I earn my cash to attend this conference. That, apart from anything else, is why I don’t run Linux on the desktop.
A lot of people run Apple Mac OS X, another closed-source operating system. I don’t understand why people don’t discriminate equally against that.
Speaking of Apple, nobody directs ill thoughts their way at LCA. Microsoft does attract this discrimination, despite them actually releasing a large quantity of open-source software (including most of .NET) over the last couple of years.
I write open-source software. I write this in C# on .NET, because it will make it easier for the end users of this software to install and use, since they will be Windows users for the most part. I consider myself to be doing a lot of good by writing this software, giving users options apart from closed-source and cloud-hosted software.
In my mind, when somebody makes fun of Windows at an open-source conference, they’re buying into an anti-Microsoft herd mentality, forgetting that Microsoft does a lot of FOSS stuff, that Microsoft users do a lot of FOSS stuff, and the Apple laptops and Android phones that the majority of delegates have all contain a lot of closed-source software too.
Six years ago to the day, I wrote a bit of a rant about Hobart. At the time I thought nothing of it, my blog only has three readers (Hello!). Of course, there’s Google.
Over time, this one post has attracted more visits than any other post on my blog (I haven’t done the hard numbers, but my guess is that it would be more than all other posts combined). Which annoys me, since over the last six years Hobart has become an amazing place to live. So let me address a few points:
Hobart is no longer boring. Thanks in a large part to MONA, Hobart has a huge art and events scene. Apart from the dead of winter, Hobart is a live and happening place.
The public transport system is largely fixed. It goes where you want to go, and unless you’re trying to get from one satellite suburb to another (Tranmere to Kingston for example) it won’t take forever. It could still have improvement (most public transport systems could) but it’s better than it was.
The roads are better too. We’ve had a lot of capital works done recently, and a lot more coming up. Bypasses and on-ramps are being constructed at an amazing speed. Intersections are being improved.
We got the NBN, Australia’s fibre to the house/node/something network, before any other states. I have a solid fibre connection to my house, and bandwidth is almost never an issue any more.
Thanks to a few by-law modifications in the CBD area, walking through a haze of cigarette smoke while shopping is much reduced. The CBD is a lovely place now.
I won’t comment on TV (apart from the cricket and ABC News 24, I hardly watch it any more). We also still get a few two-headed-Tasmanian jokes from mainlanders, but I think they’re jealous these days. All in all, it’s a pretty good place to be.
It’s that time of year again. This year LCA is being held in Geelong, and as such will require train travel, which is awesome. 😀
I’ll be flying in to Melbourne on Sunday the 31st of January, on flight VA 1321. I’ll arrive in Melbourne city just after midday, and my plan is to catch the 14:10 VLine train to Geelong. While in Geelong I’ll be sharing an apartment at Vue Apartments with a couple of friends. I generally stay in the university accommodation (where there is likely to be a high density of fellow LCA attendees), but this year the university accommodation is well out of the CBD, making it much less convenient than Vue.
Returning from Geelong, my plan is to catch an afternoon train from Geelong to Southern Cross on Saturday the 6th. I’ve pencilled in the 12:52 service, but this will probably depend on who else is travelling that afternoon and when they’re going. My flight back to Hobart is that evening, VA 1332 at 19:40. I love that flight this time of year; with the late sunset and generally good weather, you’re almost certain to get amazing views.
I’m already looking forward to a number of the talks:
