Amazing video of Chris Sharma, via the allclimbing blog.

Some of you will know I love heel hooks, don’t miss the series of them at about the four minute mark

They may be a bunch of nut balls, but I can’t help loving the new album from The Mars Volta.

If you haven’t got it, it’s called The Bedlam in Goliath – I have no idea why – but it’s awesome.

Phew. If you haven’t seen or heard from me in the past few weeks, it’s cause I was flat out preparing for linux.conf.au, aka LCA.

I foolishly chose a talk topic which is entirely open-ended, it can never be finished, leading to me spending endless days and nights working on it, always thinking of “just one more thing” to investigate.

In the end the talk went down fairly well, I had more material than I needed – preferable than the opposite situation. No one walked out, and everyone I’ve talked to said they enjoyed it, so that’ll do me.

If you weren’t one of the blessed few there, there’s a movie available here (or here), and my slides are here – though they’re not that useful on their own.

I’ve also uploaded the demo movie, if anyone wants to scrutinise it.

The rest of the conference was a bit of a blur personally. I had a fair bit of real work on leading up to it, and during, and also spent a lot of time working on my talk. Lesson for future LCAs, finish the talk before going!

I still managed to have a good time though, blur or not. The Penguin Dinner at the Queen Vic markets was good fun, followed by beers on top of some office block, and the PDNS was good fun as usual. The Google party was a pale imitation of its former self, owing to there being no beer after 8:30pm, I guess they ran out of cash?

The hackfest (programming competition) was a success, with quite a few entrants and some pretty solid efforts by both the winners and some of the non-winners – winning a Playstation 3 is obviously worth an all-nighter for a few people – good to see.

Next year should be awesome, Tasmania is amazing, who’s on for a “Riding up Mt Wellington” BOF?

I teased you all a few weeks back with a glimpse of this year’s Woodford, I’ve finally got all my photos uploaded so you can see it in all its glory.

Ange, Meg and I drove up on the 26th, and although it had rained it wasn’t raining as we put the tents up which is a blessing. It didn’t rain much on the 27th, although my memory is blurry. On the 28th the nearby Beerburrum weather station recorded 42.8mm, the wettest day since August. The next two days we got patchy sun and showers, followed by another 24.4mm on the 31st. In short, it rained a lot.

Having said that we all still had a great time. In fact it was almost fun to survive the conditions and still enjoy ourselves, a future dry Woodford will seem like such bliss!

Even better was the spirit shown by our Woodford newbies, Rohan, Sonia, Nick and Rhiannon. It was good to see that Woodford is still amazing to people who’ve never been before, even when it is covered in mud.

We, or at least I, didn’t take many good photos. In fact it didn’t even occur to me to take any until new years eve – I was sort of waiting for the rain to stop before taking any shots.

The highlight for me, and I think a few others, was Angus & Julia Stone who played twice. They write quality songs and perform them well, and they obviously loved the crowd and so the crowd loved them back.

New years eve was different, owing to the mud and the rain the Amphitheatre was 90% empty. We opted instead for the Grande, which had a bigger crowd and shelter as well. It was still great, but not quite the same as seeing the amphi bouncing with 10,000 folks under a starry sky.

To top it all of the fire event fizzled a little. The lead up was all gorgeous as usual, if not indecipherable. But the finale, where the lighthouse burns down, well it didn’t burn so well. After all it had been soaked all week. Apparently it eventually smoldered to a heap, but only after a half hour or so, we were already at the bar by then. They’ll just have to burn something extra big next year.

On the way home we stopped in Brisbane at Meg’s brother Dan’s place. They very graciously let us in and didn’t even hose us down first. Luckily they had tiles so we didn’t ruin any carpet with our mud encrusted feet. We had a lovely spag bol and played Trivial Pursuit until we all conked out.

The next night we stopped at Nambucca Heads after originally trying to get a place in Coffs, everything was booked out solid. Nambucca Heads was actually pretty nice, if not a bit built up, they had a cool break water that everyone paints things on.

ps. Rhiannon has better photos on facebook if you’re that way inclined.

View the photos »