More freebies! This time a pile of DDR RAM sticks I have.
You can either collect for free from me at my office (Lambton Quay) or home, or you can pay $10 for my time and postage and I’ll ship it to anywhere in NZ.
As far as I’m aware, all these sticks work fine as I pulled them from running systems.
Whilst at was at linux.conf.au I got interviewed by Steve from the Coding by Numbers podcast series, along with @LGnome about PHP, some of it’s background, future and general thoughts.
For my final day in Melbourne, @MissNickiBee had organised the greatest tour of all time – a visit to CISRAC at Melbourne Museum and then to Monash University’s computer museum.
After starting the day with coffee, we headed off the Melbourne Museum on foot through the mean streets of Melbourne suburbs.
Melbourne architects seem to love sticking turrets on their brick buildings.
Exhibition hall thingy
It took a bit of effort to find CSIRAC since Melbourne Museum had moved it out of the main area to a separate public area.
CSIRAC! :-D
Lots and lots of wring in this thing
Diagram of the components of CSIRAC in horribly bad photography by yours truly
Sadly the Cray Supercomputer and Mainframe mentioned on their website are not available for public display :-( So I spent a couple hours looking around their general exhibits at the museum, which are quite interesting.
There’s a very large geology section with just about every imaginable rock type, if you’re a geology geek you’d probably have a lot of fun.
The pyscology and Melbourne history sections are also very interesting and it would be easy to spend a lot of time there.
After the museum, we headed off to the Monash University’s Museum of Computing History, a very impressive range of machines from early prototype era through to mainframes and through to the early microprocesser generation.
I took a lot of photos, here’s a few specific ones, but there’s a lot more to the collection:
Early digital calculator
Early IBM System 360 mainframe (this is just the console, actual thing would be about a room full of refigerator sized units)
VT100 console! We still refer to terminals as being "VT100 compatible" even now in the UNIX world.
Early microprocessors - recognise any famous models? :-)
Large early generation machine - memory bank visible
Delay Line Memory (I belive these are Nickel Relays)
A VAX, one of the early machines that UNIX was written on. Much fanboy squeee ensured.
Paper tapes. Yes, this did actually exist, it's not a tale to scare young geeks.
That’s some of the pics, I’ll upload others when I have more time one day – huge thank you to Monash university for putting this display together so professionally and making it open to the public, really made my day. :-)
Kind of a shame that the Melbourne Museum’s publicly assessable “Technology Collection” only consisted of CSIRAC, when there is so much more amazing technology they have in their collection.
After Monash, I headed back into the city for coffee before heading out to the airport on the skybus for my return to Wellington NZ – had a great time in Melbourne and many thanks to @MissNickiBee for the personal tour. :-)
Had a bit of a sleep in on my first full day in Melbourne, eventually @MissNickiBee came and looked at me disapprovingly till I got up off the floor.
Start off with coffee and breakfast in a cafe down some side street, before wandering into the city via the streets of Melbourne.
I love all the old buildings and how much historical feel that Melbourne has – despite being an uber geek, I appreciate the older architecture and tend to find that it’s more interesting than many modern constructions.
Large brick constructions - wouldn't survive in welly with all our quakes! ;-)
More detailed look
Ideally I’d like to buy something like a 1900ish villa for myself, and renovate so it has modern ethernet, power, bathroom, kitchen, etc inside, yet still retain the classic hard wooden feel.
Of course in Wellington this wouldn’t be cheap, so clearly I need to marry rich/moonlight as cougarbait/sell hacks to dodgy types/something to boost my salary to support the half a million price tag. Or stop buying computer kit for a bit :-/
Unfortunately I didn’t take any pictures of the cute Melbourne houses, but they look amazing with their iron trellises and cute picturesque gardens.
Of course, Melbourne has large modern towers as well :-)
Towering tower blocks of toweringness
Our first proper stop was the Melbourne Aquarium, @MissNickiBee had some discount tickets which helped.
Was an amazing visit, it’s far larger than Kelly Tartans (although they might have more penguins) and lots and lots of detail about different species.
I took a huge number of pics and videos that I’ll have to upload at some stage, for now here’s some penguins, since penguins are awesome:
squark squark! splash splash!
Aside from penguins, they had a huge number of different fish, sharks, jellyfish, stingrays and many other fishy critters – well worth the visit, kept us occupied for several hours.
After visiting the aquarium, I headed out to St Kilda with @MissNickiBee for drinks, cake and beach fun.
St Kilda
This is cake. It is most delicious.
One of the things I’ve noticed most about Melbourne is that everything is very compact – there’s a huge amount of people, traffic, trams, etc all trying to fit into tight streets – it’s not uncommon for people to be squeezing into trams, randomly joining you at your cafe table since there’s no free ones and for trams to be whizzing by closely through tight gaps.
I took a rather bad video when I was out in St Kilda of a tram going by the cake cafe where we were seated which shows just how close they sometimes get.
That’s pretty much my one complaint with Melbourne, there’s a lot less personal space and it can feel a bit dirty and chaotic at times, particularly some of the stations and streets. – especially compared to Brisbane with all it’s huge open spaces!
I guess it’s kind of the problem of trying to fit four million people into the limited space available. :-/ On the plus side, this population means there’s so much selection available for everyone.
After cake, we went wandering along the St Kilda waterfront, probably the only place I’ve seen in Melbourne that’s not squished with a million people running about – although there were certainly a few sunbathers around, even for a business day.
I turn my back on this burning sun!
I'm outside. Note my uncomfortable expression at the burning heat.
Melbourne CBD viewed from St Kilda beach.
Tour guide leading me out onto a pier, to what I suspect can only be her plan to dump my corpse off into the sea.
Boats and city!
To wrap up the St Kilda visit, we headed back into the city for dinner – sadly the vegetarian only pizza place was just closing when we arrived (around 21:45) but VegeBar (IIRC) was open and doing a roaring trade.
They managed to find us a table and much delicious vegetarian pizza was consumed – I’d have to go back, there’s a huge menu of awesome sounding vegetarian and vegan foods – they even have a menu for raw vegan diets O_o
Me attempting to photograph at night.
I arrived in Melbourne on Wednesday afternoon from Hobart – despite being full of coffee I managed to end up sleeping on the plane, but woke up in time to watch the plane fly over Melbourne on a very clear day, which is always awesome – seeing the CBD towers in the distance.
My delightful tour guide for Melbourne is MissNickiBee who meet me at Southern Cross Station and proceeded to take me back to her dungeon flat via tram.
Tour guide plotting my fate
Despite having been in Melbourne about three times before, this is the first time I’ve actually gone and caught a tram – was a pretty neat experience, they’re basically like thin trains but going down the middle of the street – much speedier and less annoying that Wellington’s buses since they don’t need to pull in and out every few minutes, they have mostly straight runs and primary right of way for all traffic.
One of the older trams, the newer ones are articulated into four sections and ride lower to the ground. If you're lucky, they have aircon and if you're very lucky, there's not too many people on it. :-)
After dropping off all my junk at her flat, we headed out for dinner at an awesome vegetarian only restaurant just block from her flat.
The thing I love most about Melbourne is it’s food – there’s a massive amount of selection, it’s like taking Cuba St and scaling it up by a factor of 20x whilst still retaining that small and cosy feel.
Whilst I was there, I must have passed about 4 different vegetarian only restaurants, including one particularly large one on the Thursday evening which was extremely popular and large enough to justify about 6 staff.
Didn’t get up to much as I was pretty worn out from Tasmania, so we had dinner, went along to a pub for a few drinks with a flatmate and then headed home to plan the next couple of days.
Looking out over part of Melbourne from a pub
My third day in Hobart is more of a half day, as my flight to Melbourne was scheduled for early afternoon, which did limit what I could get up to.
Ended up spending a good 1.5 hours at The Cupping Room, a very excellent cafe and coffee roastery.
To give you some idea of how much this company loves it’s coffee, there’s a bit blackboard showing the “family tree of coffee”, how different styles have become derived from one another.
OMG coffeeeeeee
And there’s a menu for the beans you’d like today….. @chrisjrn and myself went through the menu – my favourite is undecided, they are all quite different, yet all of them delicious.
So much awesome
And of course, the tasty, tasty cup porn:
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Certainly beats the “flavoured milk” airport coffee I had at Brisbane Airport which left a terrible aftertaste and breath. :-/
Aside from coffee, spent the morning getting shown around Hobart at high speed before heading to the airport to depart to Melbourne, all in all, a great trip. :-)
Many thanks to the awesome Chris Neugebauer (@chrisjrn) for acting as my personal guide for the three days I was in Tasmania. :-)
Wow, been so busy socialising and being outside I haven’t had time to blog post for the last few days… the horror! Currently sitting at Melbourne, waiting for NoFlyAirNZ to arrive 40mins late so catching up on posts….
My second day in Hobart was actually really a trip over all different parts of Tasmania – started off in Hobart, but headed up into the highlands, visited hydrodams and took a long scenic route to get to Launceston to meet my twitter friends IRL.
We started the day with a visit to the Cupping Room, a very excellent coffee roastery that I’ll blog about in more detail in tomorrow’s post. After filling up on delicious caffinated fuel, we headed off into the wilds of Tasmania.
@chrisjrn planned a route around the state that involved taking me through the hydroelectric dam areas, the highlands, many dirt roads and the reservoir lakes used by the dams.
The hydroelectric power stations themselves are actually not that large compared to the huge pipes running to them – I managed to get a picture of the pipes running down the side of a valley to one of the many stations:
My pipes are bigger than your pipes!
After seeing the dams, we headed up into the highlands where there are heaps of large lakes feeding water to the dams – I believe most of the lakes were originally around, but extended and enlarged for the needs of the dams.
It’s pretty barren up there, but a number of holiday homes/batches around, apparently there’s some decent fishing to be had.
Look upon my camera oh lakes and tremble as I convert you into pixels
Look, I'm being a posing tosser by some lakes!(pic by @chrisjrn)
I'm king of the highlands!! (pic by @chrisjrn)
We made it to Launceston in the afternoon, to meet my twitter friends @stumbeline, @kestra and @Wordy_Anansi for the first time IRL, which was awesome.
There was some time to kill, so we detoured to Cataract Gorge which seems to be a very popular swimming area – probably helped by the 30 degree sunny day :-/
It's got a bridge that's bouncy! *insane glee*
After crossing the mighty bridge of almost certain death, I headed over to meet with @Wordy_Anansi, who had made a huge amount of vege food deliciousness for us.
With the addition of wine, we had a fantastic evening and it was awesome to meet so many great tweeple IRL for the first time. :-)
Me with @kestra
Some additional pictures from yesterday’s excursion into the wilds of Tasmania by @chrisjrn:
Photographic proof that yes indeed, I can sometimes go outside.
Hehehe, I got a dirty txt! ;-)
I'm going to twitpic these rocks!
I have conqured nature!
These bars can't restrain my awesome!
hmmm maybe they can actually.....
Come maul me babe..... ;-)
I was a little tooo naughty so had to go spend some time there.....
That’s all the dodgy pictures for now – come back soon for more blog posts as I tour AU :-)
Whilst I did technically land in Hobart yesterday, I only started looking around Hobart and Tasmania in general with the native @chrisjrn today.
We started the trip by going up Mt Wellington, but sadly were impacted by a lot of low-lying cloud making the views difficult.
Here’s a view from about half way up the mountain down onto Hobart:
With all the cloud instead of the amazing views I had been promised, I just had lots and lots of white, which whilst kind of charming in it’s own way, is clearly false advertising ;-)
After visiting Mt Wellington Fog, we headed onto the road around to Port Arthur with detours to interesting places along the way.
Always an excuse to stop for random self-camwhoring.
Chris took me to some really interesting natural rock formations at a cove, the geological activity forces the rocks to break in straight lines, they look like man cut blocks!
Check out those rocks!
@chrisjrn checking out the rocks
Following mystical rock cove (maybe not not real name) we decided to go checkout a blowhole.
Sadly it turned out to be a natural geological formation rather than some dodgy deviant makeout facility.
Natural tunnel formation - watch the water coming in before it splashes up
Splash! It's pretty hard to capture on camera really :-(
Of course the best part about the blowhole action was the salty salty deliciousness:
Fresh from the deep fryer, all chrispy and nommmmm
After refuelling at the blowhole, we headed to Port Arthur, where Tasmania had it’s convict colony to look at all the historical buildings:
Main prison block in the foreground
I can never say no to exploring a dungeon....
There’s some more dodgy pictures involving bars and chains that I’ll have to wait for Chris to upload at a later stage.
Meanwhile, here’s Chris looking dodgy and being reminded why long hair may be cool to look at whilst being very annoying to actually have:
Also, we went on a boat:
Boat View!
Captain Jethro!
After the boat trip, we headed back home – although did get interrupted by an (amazing for me) sight of a bridge being swung to allow a sailing boat to pass through the bridge.
Note the mast!! O_o
Also, today’s WTF moments:
Um, historical laptop anyone? To be fair, that model is probably about 10 years old...
Oh what the fuck, is that comic sans ms?!!?
And on that note, I’m off to bed for more adventures tomorrow. :-)
OK, technically there is no LCA day 07, but seeing as it was the last day in Brisbane I figured I could get away with it, without needing to create a separate heading. ;-)
Firstly, I found an awesome pic of me by Andrew McMillian aka Karora on Flickr which clearly demonstrates my need for a haircut:
Me at the Professional Delegates Networking Session (pic by karora)
I spent the morning catching up on sleep and then after packing, I headed into Brisbane Times Square to attend a Fedora meeting at the library.
After that, I headed back to Urbanest by walking from the library, across a bridge and then along southbank back to the accommodation.
Hai Gais! (pic by @chrisjrn on a very awesome high quality lens)
Photoshop the bottle & caption if you dare ;-) (pic via @chrisjrn)
I then caught the AirTrain with @chrisjrn and another guy to the Brisbane Airport – I have to say, I love the AirTrain – it’s fast, easy, comfortable and cheap to get to/from the airport or any station along the gold coast.
I'm on a train!!! (pic by @chrisjrn)
Fast train is fast!
Travelling in style!
Brisbane Airport is pretty decent, didn’t take long to get through security, although I got explosive tested *again* which I find somewhat amusing, since they test for explosives far more often than drugs and I’d bet good money as to which one 20-something European males typically carry….
Flight was delayed a little, but made it to Melbourne with 30mins to spare to connect to the Melbourne-Hobart flight.
One oddity from arriving in Hobart was the way they advertise their seal touristy things:
Baggage seal watches you get security scanned!