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Date: 11/05/2010 Views: 59
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Wednesday, November 4. 2009
A Little Trip Across the Ditch
A couple of weeks ago I got one of those little perks of having gone over to the dark side of permanent employment: I got sent over to Brisbane for an IBM-organised conference on Linux on zVM; it was an excellent three day stint; Brian Wade, in particular, was an excellent speaker: "passionate" has become one of those duckspeak terms in the business world thanks to terminal overuse, but it's actually applicable in this case. Here is a man who loves his job, loves what he does, and really enjoys sharing what he knows with the rest of us.
Mario and Susanne were both good, although they needed a few sessions to relax and look like they were enjoying themselves.
As well as the learning—now I've got a bit of time in my schedule at work I'm off to go poke into cpuhotlugd and finally(!) get around to implementing XIP—I got to co-present a paper with John Marshall, one of my BNZ colleagues. It was the first time I've done a presentation outside of small internal settings, and it was an absolute blast. John did the bulk of the work pulling the presentation together, and we make an effective presenting team. So effective, in fact, that no-one seemed to mind that we ran over time, and we got questions, applause, and more questions.
(Pity we got rejected from presenting at linuxconf this year...)
Brisbane itself was interesting: from my brief poke about kind of like an "Auckland done right" from the perspective of being a big, sprawling city that nontheless appears to have a decent city centre, and definitely had some good rail action going on between the airport and the central city (and oh, for such nicely appointed trains in Wellington!). It was a little jarring to see that even the hotel showers had notes about not wasting water, and there seemed to be a lot of material out and about bragging about Brisbane's water saving efforts.
On the culture clash front Brian was taken aback by my clothes, and was genuinely surprised that jeans, a shirt, and sandles would be work clothing for a bank employee. Add conservative clothing to the list of drawbacks to working in (some of) the States, I guess.
I want to have these guys’ babies. Incredibly cool stuff from NTT, who also bought us NilFS. (As an aside: it’s sad that there’s this whole deep geek culture in Japan that throws up stuff like Ruby or company sponsored stuff like NTT
Tracked: Jan 19, 20:18