Out of the way

Highlights:

Web Directions South, Sydney (Australia). Excellent conference. 600 people in Australia, great place to listen to great people talking. John and Maxine and their crew put on an awesome conference. But don't take my word for it, Tantek Çelik (who is a famous blogger and also made one of the better versions of IE) says

Web Directions sets the bar...

Webjam, Sydney. Thanks to Lachlan Hunt in particular, and the whole gang who make it happen. A real set of lightning talks held scrupulously to 3 minutes. Interesting people, great crowd, and thanks to the marketing guys at Opera for sponsoring the beers. (Now, if I can just get a reimbursement for those... )

Fundamentos Web, Gijón (Spain). If Web Directions sets the bar, Fundamentos meets it. Good speakers, great crowd, great logistics and fantastic lunch make for a superb way to spend a couple of days. Speaking spanish is very useful to get the most out of a conference in Spain, so if you are going next year, start learning now. Sitting on a round table where we got to sit on couches, have a headset for the simlultaneous translation and a lapel mike each was good - although it does take pratice to work with a simultaneous translation it is nicer to get the practicein comfort. It also worked well as an audience member, with a big screen for people like me who need glasses but had none. (And the speaker present was the best I can remember getting, ever. Thanks Encarna, Andrea, and the whole crew).

Books (I'm up to 56 now, if you are counting):

"The Wintersmith" by Terry Pratchett. It made it to half price at the airport. It's about the Nac Mac Feegles and Tiffany Aching, a 13-year old girl who is working out how to grow into an exceptional witch. It's Terry Pratchett, there's lots of stuff about growing up ad lots of stuff about grown-ups. Now I am waiting for the money book to get to the half-price shelf.

"Monash: The Outsider who Won a War" by Roland Perry. A biography of one of the great Australian leaders, making a strong case for him as the outstanding general of his time. It also describes his career as an engineer and lawyer, and delves into his love life in a way that once was not considered sufficiently respectful for a biographer. The author uses some odd turns of phrase, and occasionally the prose jars. He makes a strong but somewhat uncritical case for Monash as a great modern hero. Given the man was a jewish son of german immigrants to the far-off colony of Australia, to have become the star general for Britain at the end of the first World War clearly was an achievement, so maybe the hero-worship is justified, and it doesn't feel over the top.

"The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright. I guess it was an odd choice of airplane reading. I picked it after about an hour and a half of looking for a book in Heathrow airport. A history of Osama Bin Laden that gives a picture quite different from the one I had - more complete, basically. It also wraps in the history of the people around him, and the people who believed that he was a serious threat. Less scathing than John Baer, it nevertheless makes the point that the US intelligence agencies were incapable of stopping Bin Laden through faults that were entirely correctable. And that it took a long time to create the terrorists and their organisation, but once set in train the author doesn't give any hints about what might derail it.

Lowlights:

Baggage. British Airways, Qantas and Iberia managed to put it all together as One World and lose my luggage again. That means they maintain their record of losing it on every major trip this year. At least this time I got it back - the last lot of luggage that was misplaced, in July, is still misplaced (and it is no longer July...) Once again, no actual compensation or apology. At least they sent an SMS telling me it was in Madrid (so could they get away with not sending it to Norway please). But they failed to leave a return number to call. The automated answering system for Iberia baggage is not only incomprehensible but it turns out that it doesn't actually work as it claims once you do decipher the instructions. Still, at least when I went back to Madrid airport explicitly they could find my bags, so they are still ahead of British Airways by about a nose. Although perhaps that should be not quite last, by a few tail hairs.

Jetlag. Staying in a backpackers' hostel is normally a noisy experience, but somehow I was up at 8am every day - even if it would cost me later in the afternoon. Having to sleep on the floor after lunch at kindergarten was probably a good thing - at least now I don't have any problem doing it when I need to. All I need now is to get to sleep, because I have to be out of the door by 8am.

Laptop problems. My home partition is encrypted. And while I was away, it locked up, leaving me unable to get into any of my data. Fortunately I have a spare admin account on the machine (which I set up for just such a situation) but having to set it up for real use turned out to be a pain. And I don't carry a backup with me of all my data. Perhaps I should come up with a mechanism for backup that has everything available on the web. I'm still a bit underwhelmed by the stability of my MacBook - it has several annoying behaviours (like not sleeping properly) as well as this rare but very annoying feature. (A colleague had it happen on his way to SVG Open, so it is not unknown...)