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Hugh Blemings's Blog, A Diary and Miscellaneous ramblings
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Mon, 28 Jan 2008
Arrived in Melbourne Sunday afternoon for linux.conf.au in time to see Rusty and Kelly do their Newcomers to lca session. Really worthwhile - I dunno why we didn't think to do it earlier. The group of 50 or so then retired to a nearby bar where Rusty kindly bought a round of beers (no, really!) to kick things off
Bumped into some familar faces which was nice but also met some new ones including Johann who had come from Iceland to attend the conference. Ended up having dinner with him, Chris, Matt and a few other folk - most agreeable.
Monday wandered up to the rego area to get a few things organised - we'd sent a couple of POWER6 boxes down for the guys to use for video transcoding. Unfortunately after much poking around we had to conclude one of them had been trashed in transit as it wouldn't go past the first level of initialisation before the management console said no dice. Service call placed...
Sat in on a bit of the Wireless Mini-conf sessions, few interesting things there, then spent the rest of the day remonstrating with the broken server and chatting with people - the latter was lovely :)
Took off from the conference late afternoon to meet up with Debbie, friend of the family that stayed with us for a while and is now living down here. Pretty much Rachael's de-facto older sister. Was great to catch up with Deb and hear how well things are going.
Dinner was noteworthy - Deb's a vegetarian so we went to the Vegetarian Nirvana Cafe in Richmond (Stop 21 on Tramline 75 IIRC) We ordered Samosas for entree, Shari Paneer, Navaratan Kofta, Garlic Rofi Chanai and Basmati Rice for mains then finished up with Gulab Jamun and Halava for dessert. It was one of the most delicious meals I have ever had. Indian cuisine, friendly service and I-am-speechless, wonderful wonderful flavours! Go there before you leave Melbourne.
Been nice to be back in Melbourne, I'd forgotten just how nice it is down here, much more my cup of tea than Sydney if I were to choose big cities.