Older blog entries for mtearle (starting at number 52)

Crossing the coathanger

Arrived Sydney late Wednesday afternoon into Paramatta.  Visited ringing practice at All Saints.  Lovely bells and a nice band, then headed onwards onto D’s place in Petersham.

Understandably snoozed a lot on the Thursday.    Friday, I first visited a contact who works for AARNet and touched based on a couple of projects that are under way and caught up with D and Q after they got home.

Saturday was catching up with geek friend, M.

A very good evening was had with L and A and their friend M.  M and her friend M also turned up.  Met A?.  A also dragged M along.  Lots of very yummy home made pizzas were made

Sunday was catching up with S and G for lunch, briefly met their son D.   Lots of change in their life with a new house and a change in employment situation.   The Sunday evening was spent with the cousins, who are always great company.

Monday night was ringing practice at St Andrews, and then Tuesday was getting back on the road again.

Crossed the harbour via the bridge and tunnel multiple times and got used to driving in Sydney… not that scary!

Syndicated 2012-08-02 13:19:36 from Assorted musings

The woman from snowy river

This slightly delayed post covers Canberra.   Delayed mostly from not having very much computer time over the past few days to reconnect back into the geeksphere.

Have now done a lot of the tourist things in Canberra – National Carillion, National Portrait Gallery, National Library, Old and New Parliament Houses, Royal Australian Mint and the very solemn Australian War Memorial.   There are still a few left like the place with the miniature things.

Enjoyed wandering around the Parliament Houses and looking at the architecture.   Shall have to visit again when the House of Representatives is sitting.

Rung for service at St Pauls in Manuka.  Nice bells and a sociable bunch of ringers, including a Canberra chorister that I already knew.

Went with S and L to a bonfire over the border in New South Wales for Sunday night.  Was a fun experience on a cold winters night and had lots of yummy Vegan food.

Organised a dinner gathering on the Monday night at a cafe called Cream.  N, K, A, C, G, M, R, P, S, D, L, S all turned up throughout the course of events.  Introduced M to P and I’m sure they’ll enjoy going for motorbike rides and honing their ninja skills.  S came with myself, L and S to get soy fried ice cream elsewhere in Canberra.  It was a great experience to introduce completely (for values of Canberra) separate friends to each other and have them get along.

Departed Canberra and headed off to Jindabyne.  Saw snow again in the distance (I’m progressively getting closer…) and caught up with D.  Had some excellent Indian, chatted about life, IV and floristry     Continued heading onwards to Sydney but that is for another post….

Syndicated 2012-07-30 00:34:55 from Assorted musings

Inland cities….

Continued travel up from Melbourne through Albury, Gundagai, Yass and onwards to Canberra which is where I am currently writing to you from.

Having lived all my life effectively on the coast, inland population centres both fascinate and confuse me.   Why would anyone life so far from the ocean?   What do you do with the extra land that is in one of your four compass directions?

From this visit to Canberra, in comparison to previous ones, the place seems to be going through a bit of a growth spurt.   Talking with the lovely P last night, I was amazed at the comparatively low housing costs compared to Perth.   This is probably making the place attractive to live for some.

Didn’t do as much tourist stuff as I had hoped today.  Was a bit sad when I visited the Telstra Tower to hear that the museum that was there is no more.

Notable achievement for the day was organising a catch up with all my favourite Canberra folk on Monday night.

Syndicated 2012-07-20 11:50:15 from Assorted musings

Walking ’round the rainy city

This was about my eight visit to Melbourne (as far as I can remember/work out) and I’ve finally worked out the zen of the city.  This time was different, I had a car and was able to drive around the city.

Melbournians seem unware of the impact that geography has on their perceptions of their own city and desire to look outside it.   One thing I noticed was that the distances that I was travelling were tiny by Perth comparisons but similar travel times.  Everything seemed close and easily reachable.  Melbourne being a large city also has everything.

Being able to see this is difficult if you are only travelling on foot or public transport.  It is reflected in the nature of the roads and traffic of the city.

I’ve got a lot more rants about Melbourne driving, but I’ll spare you ..

I left today and drove to Albury.  Saw the cultural change the moment I crossed the bridge over the Murray.

Really enjoyed my time at IV.  The Berlioz was special, the Brahams a wonderful challenge.   Looking forward to AIV and the Rachmaninoff Vespers.

I’m onto the next major phase of my trip – the meandering via Canberra and Sydney up to Brisbane.  Looking forward to that too. Need to catch up on some of the administrivia of life over the next couple of days post IV.

Syndicated 2012-07-18 13:41:16 from Assorted musings

Climbed one mountain.

Had the concert for the 63rd Intervarsity Choral Festival peformance of the Berlioz Requiem on Saturday night.   It was a great sing and it did literally feel like I sung my lungs out.  It will go down in my memories as one of my favourite concerts ever.

Dragged C along to the PCP where he provided medicinal cider for my vocal chords and was told to join MonUCS by one and all.

Attended the AIVCC meeting on Sunday.  Why do I keep doing this to myself?   Apart from that, the meeting went well.

Monday, I, like the rest of the choir, have hit the wall of exhaustion.  Rehearsals for the Brahams is going to take a lot of willpower to climb that next mountain.   I’m knackered so I’m going to try and get what little sleep I can.

Syndicated 2012-07-09 13:34:35 from Assorted musings

The Big O

Had the first orchestral rehearsal with the orchestra for the Berlioz last night.

At one point, the hairs on my neck stood up and my knees began to melt. A truly special musical moment.

Any folk in Melbourne who miss the performance tonight in the Town Hall are going you feel sorry fit themselves. (More details about tickets at http://www.miv.aicsa.org.au/

Anyhow, off to the dress rehearsal.

Syndicated 2012-07-06 22:01:12 from Assorted musings

Congratulations guys!

Vending Machines - Spent the majority of Saturday at UCC working on our Snack and Coke Vending machines. The Snack machine now has a RJ-45 socket on the back so we can speak serial to it's controller board with our custom ROM built by Bernard. (I built an evil simulator of the ROM UI in PyGTK to help people develop the server software for it). The Coke machine is now clean inside from many years of exploded coke can gunge and is now riced up with two new 12v fans so it actually cools drinks now. Hopefully Cameron will post the photos of the day soon.

Work - Politics: stuffed, Planning: crazed, Staff Development: hah!

Linux Australia - Making progress, much rantage about the GST.

Help is on it's way - Saw Farenheit 9/11 last night at the cinema. Watched it taking a critical view given the reportage that I listened to during the past few weeks, it still convinced me of it's argument. For our American listeners, do go see it even if you hate Michael Moore, be informed rather than ignorant - and ask why these arguments and accusations are even possible.

PS. Just saw JibJab. Where has all the Australian political satire disappeared to?

Pdub and Jefka - Congratulations dudes!

Linux Australia -

STATUS: MOVING FORWARD

- things are happening (FTA, Media Training) overall, Treasury slowly appears to be coming together (although I spend too much time in spinlocks waiting on others presently)

Debian - The local reaction to the recent Debian GR has been interesting, mostly, Death of Debian, News at 11. At work, the largest common fear is that the GR will basically result in an even more out of date stable release and we'll have to migrate to a different platform for our various servers for up to date software with the features needed for the various systems that we support (for example, later versions of php)

With the usual synchronicity of my life things at work have highlighted the link between strategy, policy and implementation with each needing to support the other to make effective progress. The GR and AJ's subsequent post highlights the schisms between all three in the Debian project. GNOME seems to have tackled this (taking examples) with an organised release schedule (Strategy), freezes (Policy) and documented release planning and bug days (Implementation).

Of course, things are much easier for a desktop environment than a software distribution ... okay, now taking a step back and looking at Debian. Release is determined by the number of bugs (specifically release critical bugs, but the number of other bugs has impact too) in the "stable" set of packages (with the number of packages growing at an ever increasing rate). The disconnect here lies in the criteria for a release and how a package is chosen to be pushed into the release with the DFSG and number of bugs being absolute criteria for that; I don't think it's being viewed as a process from the creation of a package through to DFSG compliant bug free goodness with the community being able to take snapshots along the way.

On a related note, another observation that I noticed being made about the GR and recent election of the DPL was the low percantage of Debian Developers that voted. The Debian Project reveals it's American heritage here with non-compulsory voting (this is being written from an Australian point-of-view), developers are not meant to be uncontactable by email and are meant to be active, so why can they opt out of voting on things such as GRs that affect the whole project?

Governance - have being thinking about this in relation to the half dozen committees that I have been on and other projects that I have observed, why is it so hard to get it right?

shiny new work desktop - 2.8Ghz goodness, hopefully, I'll get the opportunity to actually getting around to doing some dev work on it before it becomes hopelessly slow :)

Barriers to entry... - It's good to see the Evolution guys giving ways for people to help out their project; however it's not the itch for me ... I wonder what ways there are for us with low attention spans to help out projects.

Thank $DEITY - Scored a HP Laserjet 4 for $5 AUD, it even works - sweet. Some days you'd have to agree $DEITY is smiling at you....