WA trip
Far out. I barely blink in January and the year is 1/12 over.
I spent 1-11 January in WA - a few days in Busselton, then a week in Perth for my 7th (wow) LCA.
Photos - totally can't find the flickr slideshow embed codes now, grr
Busselton is the home of a famous Ironman triathlon, and also Southbound music festival which I went to. Southbound is a sister festival to Falls. I was feeling nostalgic about music festivals and wanted to see if they were a thing I still enjoyed. It seems like maybe not, especially alone. Three dumb things happened that soured the weekend for me:
- Getting hit in the head with a flattened drink can (that had been aimed at someone sitting on someone's shoulders in front of me) - as well as giving me quite a shock as it hit me quite hard, it hit me just on the eyebrow and I couldn't help thinking if it was an inch lower I could be walking away with eye damage.
- Waiting in a portaloo queue and having someone shout at me as 'Hey lesbian' (even when sharing ostensibly useful/friendly information); pretty much just felt like a reminder that unattractive women have basically no purpose for existing to plenty of men (I told a friend of mine living in Perth who is a lesbian this story and she winced, 'Ah...bogans')
- Lying in the shade with my hat on my face and having someone throw hot chips at my head
The first was bad luck but the second two I don't have a lot of patience for. Time to 'graduate' to folk festivals, or festivals where they sell more red wine than beer, I think.
Well, another factor is that I didn't know heaps of the bands ahead of time. I researched them and found quite a few new ones that I like (especially London Grammar and Big Scary). But I still wasn't super invested in seeing anyone except Neil Finn (Crowded House songs still make me tear up...).
A not-crap part of the festival
The water in Busso was divine, although I swam into some invisible jellyfish/'stingers' and got a huge shock. And also a big rash, for a day.
I went for a couple of runs along the beach - there is a GREAT track that goes for km's in both directions - and on one run I saw dolphins, splendid fairy-wrens and a bobtail skink!
Then I went to Perth for LCA. Staying in the college was pretty good. Nice little room and they backed onto Kings Park, which is kind of like Royal Park cross the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, but better than both those things. I went to Running BoF twice and I organised two Beach BoFs (to Cottesloe) which was really fun. I also went to an unofficial veg*n dinner BoF which was great. Met another vegan from Melbourne that I didn't know before.
UWA is an amazing campus, there was a huge fig tree near our buildings and seemingly a mini tropical garden just embedded in the middle of the grounds. Oh and a resident peacock!
I spent a bit of time redoing Crowdfunded Free Software and then 'launched' it during the lightning talks which was really cool. Immediately got a few suggestions I didn't know about. It got a little bit of attention on Twitter, then a few days later, someone emailed me offering to help add structured data to a Wordpress install for me! This was exactly what I wanted, it was amazing. It hasn't happened yet (it may not happen) but it was still such a nice unexpected offer and discussion.
On Thursday I didn't go to either of the Professional or Unprofessional dinners (not being a BBQ aficionado) and instead walked through Kings Park to the CBD with a guy, whose name I have forgotten, also from Melbourne. He had a mate who was visiting Perth (also from Melbourne) and we met up for dinner. Conversation with the guy was a little awkward but his friend was very sociable and it ended up being a really enjoyable night (even with turning up at a vegan restaurant at 8:50 and them being about to close...)
To be honest there was not heaps at the conference itself that inspired me. I really enjoyed the keynotes by Kate Chapman and Jon Oxer (seriously, his talk was wow - gotta send that to every teacher I know). The major to-watch I have is Katie Miller's talk on Elixir (mp4). My favourite talk was on VisualEditor (mp4), a WYSIWYG-ish (or actually, Google Docs-ish) html editor built by Wikimedia.
Because they had a huge existing corpus to support, as well as 300 languages (!!!), I think it's a super interesting (and difficult) problem. This is actually one of the huge technical problems that I began to believe would never be solved at Wikimedia. Another was template syntax, and that has also been fixed! And another was talk pages, and that still has not yet. At any rate, it's the kind of problem that could definitely sink a project the size of Wikipedia, or anyone else for that matter, so the fact that they have come out with something workable - basically amazing.
...and then I flew back to Melbourne and did my second Olympic-distance triathlon the next day - but that's a tale for another post. :)
I spent 1-11 January in WA - a few days in Busselton, then a week in Perth for my 7th (wow) LCA.
Photos - totally can't find the flickr slideshow embed codes now, grr
Busselton is the home of a famous Ironman triathlon, and also Southbound music festival which I went to. Southbound is a sister festival to Falls. I was feeling nostalgic about music festivals and wanted to see if they were a thing I still enjoyed. It seems like maybe not, especially alone. Three dumb things happened that soured the weekend for me:
- Getting hit in the head with a flattened drink can (that had been aimed at someone sitting on someone's shoulders in front of me) - as well as giving me quite a shock as it hit me quite hard, it hit me just on the eyebrow and I couldn't help thinking if it was an inch lower I could be walking away with eye damage.
- Waiting in a portaloo queue and having someone shout at me as 'Hey lesbian' (even when sharing ostensibly useful/friendly information); pretty much just felt like a reminder that unattractive women have basically no purpose for existing to plenty of men (I told a friend of mine living in Perth who is a lesbian this story and she winced, 'Ah...bogans')
- Lying in the shade with my hat on my face and having someone throw hot chips at my head
The first was bad luck but the second two I don't have a lot of patience for. Time to 'graduate' to folk festivals, or festivals where they sell more red wine than beer, I think.
Well, another factor is that I didn't know heaps of the bands ahead of time. I researched them and found quite a few new ones that I like (especially London Grammar and Big Scary). But I still wasn't super invested in seeing anyone except Neil Finn (Crowded House songs still make me tear up...).
A not-crap part of the festival
The water in Busso was divine, although I swam into some invisible jellyfish/'stingers' and got a huge shock. And also a big rash, for a day.
I went for a couple of runs along the beach - there is a GREAT track that goes for km's in both directions - and on one run I saw dolphins, splendid fairy-wrens and a bobtail skink!
Then I went to Perth for LCA. Staying in the college was pretty good. Nice little room and they backed onto Kings Park, which is kind of like Royal Park cross the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, but better than both those things. I went to Running BoF twice and I organised two Beach BoFs (to Cottesloe) which was really fun. I also went to an unofficial veg*n dinner BoF which was great. Met another vegan from Melbourne that I didn't know before.
UWA is an amazing campus, there was a huge fig tree near our buildings and seemingly a mini tropical garden just embedded in the middle of the grounds. Oh and a resident peacock!
I spent a bit of time redoing Crowdfunded Free Software and then 'launched' it during the lightning talks which was really cool. Immediately got a few suggestions I didn't know about. It got a little bit of attention on Twitter, then a few days later, someone emailed me offering to help add structured data to a Wordpress install for me! This was exactly what I wanted, it was amazing. It hasn't happened yet (it may not happen) but it was still such a nice unexpected offer and discussion.
On Thursday I didn't go to either of the Professional or Unprofessional dinners (not being a BBQ aficionado) and instead walked through Kings Park to the CBD with a guy, whose name I have forgotten, also from Melbourne. He had a mate who was visiting Perth (also from Melbourne) and we met up for dinner. Conversation with the guy was a little awkward but his friend was very sociable and it ended up being a really enjoyable night (even with turning up at a vegan restaurant at 8:50 and them being about to close...)
To be honest there was not heaps at the conference itself that inspired me. I really enjoyed the keynotes by Kate Chapman and Jon Oxer (seriously, his talk was wow - gotta send that to every teacher I know). The major to-watch I have is Katie Miller's talk on Elixir (mp4). My favourite talk was on VisualEditor (mp4), a WYSIWYG-ish (or actually, Google Docs-ish) html editor built by Wikimedia.
Because they had a huge existing corpus to support, as well as 300 languages (!!!), I think it's a super interesting (and difficult) problem. This is actually one of the huge technical problems that I began to believe would never be solved at Wikimedia. Another was template syntax, and that has also been fixed! And another was talk pages, and that still has not yet. At any rate, it's the kind of problem that could definitely sink a project the size of Wikipedia, or anyone else for that matter, so the fact that they have come out with something workable - basically amazing.
...and then I flew back to Melbourne and did my second Olympic-distance triathlon the next day - but that's a tale for another post. :)