The video of the talk is available as an ogv movie file, alternatively, the YouTube version is embedded below.

See you in January, Ballarat!

So on the off chance that you subscribe to my feed and haven’t read this:

Hey all,

Reader sharing starts dying today. I’m pretty sad about that, I’ve loved reading the things all of you have shared over the past few years — I’ve discovered new things, built up new interests, learnt a lot and have had a lot of fun doing it. I’m going to miss reading what you have.

So what am I going to do? Well, I’ll be seeing if the ‘plus’ features actually replicate reader sharing in any useful form. Who knows, it might actually be a useful feature.

If not, we’ll see what manner of useful *external* sharing appears (share by e-mail looks particularly useful) — shared feeds don’t seem too hard to re-implement, and we could theoretically have something useful up and running over a weekend. I’m seriously considering doing this. Let me know if you’re interested!

So yeah, if you’re not already following me on twitter, that’s probably the most useful place to find me: I’m @chrisjrn. My blog is at http://chris.neugebauer.id.au. Keep in touch! I still want to read your stuff!

Thank you, and goodbye!

–Chris

 
Wandered around San Francisco, looking at the awesome architecture…

Had fantastic coffee, brewed with SCIENCE^w SIPHONS! (Thanks to @bluebottlemint for that…)

 
Caught the Caltrain between San Francisco and Mountain View far too many times.

 
Visited clichéd tourist attractions (actually, the bridge is pretty spectacular, and I’m very glad I went to have a look at it!)…

Other things not featuring photos:

• Doing a cross-city trek to a Best Buy to purchase some Nexus S phones for friends back home.
• Getting an Uber cab to pick us up from this Best Buy (LOL!). Actually, Ubers are pretty damn cool — it’s a mobile app used to hire private town cars (think private drivers for expensive hotels). The cars are all Lincolns (high-end sedans), and the service is incredibly convenient.

Since then I’ve been based in the lovely city of Mountain View, which appears to be the epicentre of much of the tech industry — it’s home to such notable companies as Mozilla and Google, and the coffee shops are full to the brim with people sporting laptops… and there’s ubiquitous free wireless internet provided thanks to Google. I’m spending a lot of my time at Red Rock Coffee, who I’m eternally grateful for, as they helped me to discover that the variety of espresso drink known as “Caffe Latte” in Australia is known as “Cappucino” over here [1]. They have an OK rotation of single origin espressi here, though they taste a bit over-roasted at times… it beats the crap out of everything else in the area though…

Downtown Mountain View, including Red Rock (on the right of the shot).

So that’s the short wrap-up of what I’ve been doing of lately. Hopefully I’ll have some more to report on in the next week or so. Or earlier. I’ve no idea.

Oh, and thanks to Paris Buttfield-Addison for showing me around the area, and also to Jon Manning, who occasionally emerged whenever Paris would let him

Until the next post,

–Chris

[1] Ordering a “Latte” here appears to get you three weak flat whites served in a bucket.

So since then, I’ve been doing various bits of development work for my benevolent mad scientist overlords at Secret Lab; this Thursday I’m off to the San Francisco Bay area to do three weeks of onsite work with my next client, which should be thoroughly enthralling.

I suspect the most reliable place to find any evidence whatsoever of my recent activity will be my Flickr stream, though I may take Jethro Carr’s lead and just post regular blogs with lots of pictures every other day (at least it *looks* like he’s had regular activity…).

Until the next post, whenever that may be!

–Chris

Linux.conf.au 2011 starts tomorrow, which means that today is the fun day of hanging around at the conference accommodation and watching the comings and goings of LCA people, and registering for the conference. Registration opens from 16:00 at the QUT Kelvin Grove Campus*, I personally intend to get to the venue sometime around 17:00.

As I understand, Rusty Russell’s usual newbies’ session is being held today, and that’s on at 18:30, also at QUT Kelvin Grove. If you’ve not been to LCA, this session comes highly recommended — I should know, I’ve been to all of them! (wait, what?) The session helps explain what LCA is all about to people who haven’t been, contains important advice about what sessions to show up to, and how to read the schedule.

Well, that’s it for me. Maybe another update later today?

–Chris

*Kelvin Grove being the QUT campus where the conference was originally scheduled NOT to be at. The conference organisers have done an awesome job at making sure that the event is going ahead at a new venue, especially given the conditions in Brisbane of late. Kudos etc!

Well, I completed my Bachelor of Science with Honours degree in June, from which I graduated with First Class Honours in August. Just on two weeks ago, I received a further letter, suggesting that I attend another graduation to collect a University Medal. The University Medal is the highest award that can be awarded to an Undergraduate Student at the University of Tasmania, and my friend Josh Deprez did an exceedingly thorough writeup of the dimensions etc of the Medal itself when he won his last year.

I note with some amusement the comment that I wrote on that post:

Hmmm. Not so convinced I want to aim for a uni medal now. Really really worrying about the number of opportunities the dean would get to mispronounce my name.

Luckily for me, they paid attention to this and solved the problem by awarding two other Medals in the same ceremony (one to a Maths/Physics student, Paul Stack; the other to my colleague from Computer Science, Theo Wadsley, both of whom thoroughly deserved their awards). This resulted in the script detailed in Josh’s post being altered to something resembling:

Naturally, my name still needed to be read out, so I made the requisite alteration to my card in the hope of something resembling the correct pronunciation appearing (this is primarily due to the Dean at my BSc graduation in 2009 pronouncing my surname as ‘Nee-ge-boa’):

The result wasn’t that bad (Something along the lines of ‘Neu-bauer’, which I’ll accept as a pass ).

Since Josh’s graduation last year, they’ve made slight variations to the process of handing out Testamurs, instead of having blank scrolls handed out, the testamurs are now handed out in envelopes at the ceremony. In this case, like every other student, I was handed an envelope reading “Your Graduation Certificate”, bearing a large UTAS Lion on it. Unlike every other student, mine did not contain a testamur (I collected mine at my proper graduation in August), but instead a blank piece of cardboard — this naturally led to jokes about the worth of my degree…

Finally, here’s a photo of me with the medal, and its obverse, just in case you were at all interested:

I’d like to tell you about one of the worst times in my life. The year was 2006 — it was early January (early enough that I was still coming to terms with the fact that it was 2006…). The last term of school in 2005 was fantastic — I’d had one of my most successful periods academically, was successful in programming competitions, and I had a number of excellent friends who I shared many interests and experiences with. In the new year, that changed. I had a massive falling out with a very good friend, which caused me to question every aspect of the identity that I had built up over the past few years. I became unsure of personality traits, which I though were an important part of who I was, and which I thought were endearing to those around me. I questioned my interests in life. I questioned the validity of every relationship I had come to value over those late years of my schooling.

It is one of two times in my life that I had seriously felt suicidal. I guess this is one of the inevitable results of constantly questioning one’s identity. With each aspect of my personality that I felt needed to be changed to be worthwhile to people, I questioned the effort that would be needed to make that change. Thought after thought permeated my brain, and the weight of it all brought me to the conclusion that faced with the mounting “evidence” (in that state of mind, burden of proof is extremely low) that it probably wasn’t worthwhile to make such changes. At the end of it all, and after all of the changes that I would have to make, the person that I would have had to have been would have been unrecognisable to the person that I was then.

I still have no idea why I survived that week.

I made it through to the Sunday of that week, and was welcomed with open arms onto a flight to Sydney to attend that year’s National Computer Science School. It was during that week I properly discovered Python for the first time — it’s since become my favourite programming language. More so than that, it was a week of hanging around with geeks from all around Australia (and one from New Zealand), each of whom had different areas of interest and inclinations, and each had different skill sets. The tutors were smart uni students apparently studying interesting thing. The week gave me an insight in what it meant to be involved with IT and Computer Science. By the end of the week, I’d made heaps of friends (some of whom I still keep in contact with) who I shared interests and abilities with, and it was a fantastic revelation that there could be so many people around the country who I could just talk geek with. By the end of the week, things had resolved themselves back home — I’d forgiven and forgotten whatever it was that caused my friend and I to fall out, and I had a renewed drive to be awesome with my life.

I have no doubt, however, that I was saved by that week at NCSS. I’ve never had severe depression since, and I’ve been proud of my identity as a computer science-loving geek ever since.

Two years later I returned, this time as a tutor of the group that I had taken part in two years earlier — partly because I wanted to pay back a debt, and partly because I really really wanted to. Returning in 2008 led to me forming even more lasting friendships with people, not only tutors but students as well. I communicate with many of them every day, in one way or another. It’s where I first saw a Google office and decided that I really really wanted to become an intern there. Just afterwards I attended my first LCA in Melbourne, and have found, both there and in other geeky circles around the country, that my ties with NCSS are shared with geeks around the country — the line “I saw the girl on the hill with the telescope” is a wonderful calling card (if you ever hear James Curran lecture you’ll know what I mean by that).

So thanks to James, Tara and Michael (and everyone else from that week in 2006, you are too numerous to mention) — you have made something to be truly proud of… You may even have saved a life

LCA is a great conference because it gives people in the broader FOSS-using community in Australia (people like me) the opportunity to meet the people who put together the software that we used on a day-to-day basis. It turns out that they’re an entirely friendly bunch of people, who are all too willing to share their experience: in 2008, Andrew Tridgell spent 20 minutes one-on-one with me explaining how a particularly awesome piece of code he’d written worked.

In 2010 I ran one of the short single-day conference streams (known as “miniconfs”), on the topic of Open Programming Languages. This was a fantastic opportunity to give back to the LCA community, and help bring more of the topics that I was interested in to LCA — we had a fantastic lineup of presenters, and the day went awesomely. I’m glad to have the opportunity to do this again: I’m running the Open Programming miniconf at LCA2011 in Brisbane, and along with my friend Peter Lyle, will be running the Research and Student Innovation Miniconf. Both of them are shaping up to be excellent miniconfs.

So yes, LCA is in Brisbane this January, and I thoroughly recommend you get along if you can!