Tag Archives: travel

linux.conf.au 2013 plans

It’s nearing that important time of year that the NZ-AU open source flock congregate that important and time honoured tradition of linux.conf.au. I’ve said plenty about this conference in the past, going to make an effort to write a lot more this year about the conference.

There’s a bit of concern this year that there might not be a team ready to take up the mantle for 2014, unfortunately linux.conf.au is a victim of it’s own success – as each year has grown bigger and better, it’s at the stage where a lot of volunteers consider it too daunting to take it on themselves. Hopefully a team has managed to put together a credible bid for 2014, it would be sad to lose this amazing conference.

As I’m now living in Sydney, I can actually get to this year’s conference via a business class coach service which is way cheaper than flying, and really just as fast once taking the hassles of getting to the airport, going through security and flying into account. Avoiding the security theatre is a good enough reason for me really – I travel a lot, but I actually really hate all the messing about.

If you’re attending the conference and departing from Sydney (or flying into Sydney from NZ to then transfer to Canberra), I’d also suggest this bus service – feel free to join me on my booked bus if you want a chat buddy:

Depart Sydney, Sunday 27th Jan at 11:45 on bus GX273.
Depart Canberra, Saturday 2nd Feb at 14:00 on bus GX284.

The bus has WiFi and power and extra leg room, so should be pretty good if you want to laptop the whole way in style – for about $35 each way.

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

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On one of our trips down to Circular Quay, we recently discovered the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

It’s a free museum with a range of interesting and unique exhibits and worth visiting if you have a couple of hours time to spare – since it’s right on Circular Quay it’s really easy to get to, plus it’s also right by The Rocks which is worth a visit.

Circular Quay area

This is what happens when you erect scaffolding in a flight path…

Mail order plane anyone?

OCD alcoholism: drunken night of beer bottle smashing followed by having to re-assemble them all again.

This is a visual representation of my inbox.

This is a visual representation of emails pouring into my inbox. :-/

At what stage are artists just really taking the piss?

The colour! OMG!

The best work of art in the whole place :-P

Of course not all of Sydney is as excited about artwork….

Is this sign art itself?

The MCA was a really good visit, well worth checking out if you have time in Sydney – plus it’s free, which is a miracle for Sydney really. ;-)

Based on how much I enjoyed MCA, I’m even more keen to make a trip down to Tasmania in the near future to go visit MONA – I sadly missed it on my last trip as it hadn’t quite opened at that stage, but hearing lots of awesome stuff about it.

Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum

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The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is a science/tech/design museum offering a range of exhibits including space, robotics, history, fashion and other geeky and design related topics.

I went there on a special event day so the usual $12 entrance fee had been halved (yay!) and spent a few hours having a good look around the museum.

No tech museum would be complete without a steam exhibit – the powerhouse actually has some of the engines in a powered state, although there wasn’t a whole lot going on when I was there.

Before data centers, these were the power houses of industry.

Before data centers, these were the power houses behind the world’s industry.

Old destination board from a railway station.

The man walking in front of a steam engine with a red flag to limit it’s speed seems about as hopeless as the RIAA/MPAA wanting to stop digital downloads…. you can’t restrict new technology for long.

There’s also a good exhibit of space technology, including an actual F-1 rocket engine, the most powerful liquid fuelled rocket ever developed and the machine responsible for powering the Saturn V which took humanity to the moon.

(from the left) F-1 rocket engine, a sounding rocket (research), several models of famous space craft and satellites and more.

F-1 Engine! These things are NOT small!

$\m/ squeeeee$

\m/ :-D

Rocket thruster used in command modules.

1/3 scale Soyuz pair coupled together.

Retro computer inside the space station module mockup.

Replica Mars Rover – The Soviets sure made some weird looking hardware.

There are a range of robotics exhibits, including some neat demonstrations of industrial robotic arms that are bit more uncommon to see.

All hail the robotic overlords!

Everyone loves hexapods!

Plus a bunch of other random bits:

Weird looking aircraft

Electrifying Touch

At times the selection of exhibits feels a bit disjointed, things certainly don’t flow quite as well as some of the other science and technology museums I’ve been to and some areas a bit worn and dated – having said that, they are in the process of renovations, so it might be fairer to re-evaluate it in a year or so.

That being said, it’s worth a visit, just for some of the awesomeness they have there – plus how often can you take a picture of you and your partner standing underneath an F1 rocket engine? :-)

Houston, set engines to snuggly!

Bondi Beach

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Seeing as I’m living in Sydney, I felt compelled to head out to visit Bondi Beach – it’s a pretty famous location, so figured it’s worth getting out there to check it out at least once.

All set up for a day at the beach, geek style!

Getting out to Bondi is a bit of a mission, since unfortunately the rail link doesn’t go the whole way – instead you catch the train to Bondi Junction, and then switch to bus in order to get to the beach.

You can buy a (pricey) ticket at any of the city train station machines that includes both the train and bus fare – costing about $8.80 return at an off-peak time.

The bus is the worst part of the trip, in future I’ll probably consider just walking it as it’s only 3.2km from the railway station – whilst the buses *do* have air con, any benefits are lost with the squeeze with numerous tourists squished into it, personally I’d rather be hot outside than hot squeezed into a metal tin with random strangers….

Bondi Beach. It has sand. Waves. Usual beach things really.

People are really the biggest issue with Bondi – it’s a nice beach in it’s own right, but the volume of tourists and shops around it kind of ruins the enjoyment somewhat, particularly when combined with the transport hassles. In summer the crowds can be massive, as much as 30 thousand+ – and it’s not a particularly large beach really.

The smaller beaches in walking distance to the south like Tarramara and Bronte look more appealing if you’re more of an introverted type, or take the ferry over to Manly for some of the nice beaches over there.

If you’re a tourist on holiday, you’re probably better off spending your time in Sydney to explore the city and waterfront and save the beach trips for when visiting Brisbane’s gold coast.

Having said that, if you’re in Sydney and don’t mind lots of people, it’s a nice beach and looks great for swimming and surfing, plus it’s well patrolled by surf life savers.

One of the perks of Bondi Beach is being able to meet pretty ladies. Although they won’t always appreciate you taking pictures of them. ;-)

Aside from the beach, there are a large number of eateries along the beach and in the surrounding streets – (like Funky Pies for some delicious vegetarian/vegan goodness), as well as a walk up over the rocky cliffs.

Walkway from the southern end of Bondi Beach.

Looking back at Bondi

It was worth the visit, but I don’t think Bondi will become one of my regular visited locations, the transport hassles make it a bit difficult to get there – it’s easier for me to get out to Manly on the ferry than it is to get to Bondi on the train/bus.

It would be a different story if living locally or having a private transport option- some of my colleagues at work get there by bike which seems to work quite well for them.

Light Rail of Sydney

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Ending up living in Sydney rather than Melbourne has brought one unfortunate side effect – a lack of awesome trams spread around the city. Thankfully it turns out one doesn’t have to go all the way to Melbourne just to get a light rail fix.

Sydney has two forms of light rails – the monorail which is to be decommissioned in 2013 and the more recent tram link that runs from Central station, through Pyrmont and out into Glebe.

mmmmmm light rail here, light rail there, light rail everywhere!

I haven’t been on the Sydney trams yet, based on the location of my apartment, central station and my office in Pyrmont, the tram tends to take me away from the direction I want to actually travel in – although that being said it may be useful if I ever want to go quickly from work to Central station and then transit onto the commuter rail network.

I’m hoping that Sydney considers adopting more light rail – whilst the commuter rail network is very effective at linking main centers, there’s a lot of Sydney that’s only linked by buses, which aren’t particularly fast and seem to be at their limits in regards to capacity.

Extending the tram lines out to places like Surry Hills and Bondi would be a huge plus, the linking of commuter rail and light rail has been very successful for Melbourne and there’s no reason why it couldn’t be replicated here as well.

Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk

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One of my biggest annoyances about living in Auckland is that the only way to cross the Auckland Harbour Bridge was via car or bus – so whilst my apartment would have been within feasible walking distance to the city, it was utter impossible to walk it.

Sydney has at least got this right and their famous harbour bridge is crossed by car, train, cycle and foot, which offers an excellent chance to see the bridge up close and get some amazing views over the city and harbour.

Views don’t get much more iconic than this. Amazingly hot dude and some building thingy in the background.

It’s an easy walk to get to if you’re a tourist – you just need to take the Northern Rail line Central, Wynward or Town Hall train stations and depart at the Milsons Point railway station on the North Shore, which is right where the bridge crossing starts for both pedestrians and cyclists.

Both the train and driving across the bridge offer views, but it’s nowhere near as excellent as checking it out on foot – and of course driving across will incur you some lovely tolls.

It’s hard to get a sense of scale – for reference there are two rail lines running through the right side tower, each capable of fitting a double decker train though it – or in the case of the left side, a road lane and a pedestrian path.

If I find my current 1 bedroom CBD apartment rent painful, I’d hate to think how much these places would be costing…

Sydney Opera House!

There’s one metric fuckload of steel in this.

It’s also really high!

Circular Quay, the international passenger terminal for cruise ships and the rocks.

I love these apartments at the city end of the bridge for being a neat varying stack of towers and roof gardens, but at the same time hate it’s blocky concreteness.

Interspersed concrete and greenary awaits at the end of the crossing – descend the steps to end up in “The Rocks”, the heritage part of Sydney

The crossing is well worth doing, it’s a real shame that Auckland hasn’t added a walk and cycleway of their own – not only is it a great recreational addition, but it also makes the lifestyle choice of walking or cycling to work from the North Shore feasible.

Australian National Maritime Museum

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As part of my daily walk to work in Pyrmont, I pass the impressive Australian National Maritime Museum – considering they have both a Destroyer and a submarine parked in the harbor outside, I could hardly resist a visit for long. :-)

The museum has the usual range of maritime artifacts, exhibits about life at see, immigration, ship guns and steam engines, as well as a few neat items such as a maritime helicopter and small yachts and motor boats suspended inside.

Weird helicopter – kind of looks like some weird bug when viewed from underneath.

Of course for me, the real attraction was what was parked outside…

Above or below, either way we have your warfare needs sorted. :-)

Nowhere near as large as the cruise ships that now dock at Sydney, but still impressive when looking at them up close.

The best part is that yes, you can board both the destroyer and the submarine and explore them for yourselves! Unfortunately the day that I was there the submarine was closed, but I’m sure I’ll be back at some point and able to go inside it to explore more.

I had a good wander around the HMAS Vampire, a 1956 darling class destroyer built in Australia, and the last generation of warships before weapon systems moved from traditional cannons/big guns to missile based systems.

If you filmed a porno here, the title would be “one shade of gray”.

Military budgets don’t seem to extend towards having normal height ceilings.

Bit obsolete in the age of the drones and smart bombs, but nothing is quite as impressive as some big cannons.

I love the sci-fi look to these AA cannons.

Pyrmont Bridge with the wooden boat festival in the foreground.

Fuck your NBN and your UFB, fibre to the warship is where it’s at!

Server rooms have come a long way since. :-)

More computer users need to keep this in mind.

Early generation Nagios outage notification device?

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

I can’t resist some good thick chains…. ;-)

Sir, we have a firing solution for the Apple store from the front turret!

I love warning signs like these “this shit be bad bro, try not to hang around here”

The rounds fired by these machine guns must be massive… probably tear a small boat apart.

Standing on the deck of the weapon of the 20th century looking out at the new weapons of the 21st century…. mega corporations.

If your target is too quick to move, there’s also the smaller patrol boats you can use to chase them down. They can’t have been too comfortable to spend time on, even sitting at the dock on a calm day the boat had a noticeable rocking to it.

The little offspring of the destroyer?

Whilst I couldn’t get inside on this trip, I got some great pictures of the HMAS Oberon diseal-electric submarine parked up alongside the destroyer. Whilst it’s not hard to find warships at maritime museums around the world, near-operational submarines are a little less common.

Long, hard, black… however now devoid of any seamen.

The little access hut looks a bit out of place compared with the sleek design of the rest of the machine.

Various snorkels and periscopes.

If you’re looking for some less recent history, the museum also has two large wooden ships – replica of the endeavor as well as a restored tallship.

A clone of the ship HMS Endevour, used by James Cook for Britain’s “discovery” of New Zealand, Australia and other pacific locations.

I might have found something even more uncomfortable than economy class for traveling around the world on…

Some excellent views of Darling Harbor

Pyrmont bridge and Darling Harbor

If you have several hours to spare in Sydney, the museum is well worth a visit, especially if you love complex machines such as warships.

Commuting in Sydney

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I’ve now been in Sydney for 5 weeks, settling into a new job, a new lifestyle and an entirely new city. Still very much in the tourist phase, there’s heaps we still need to see and do and only just starting to get settled really.

Sydney opera house!

The first two weeks here were spent staying with some of Lisa’s relatives out in Hornsby Heights – nice suburban area, but it takes a bus and a train in order to get into the CBD, which is a 1.5 hour per-way trip – 3 hours a day, or even more depressingly 15 hours a week just to get to and from work.

Because of this commute we haven’t really done much in the first two weeks whilst here, most of my time was either traveling or looking for a place to live with Lisa.

Sydney residents seem to complain about the train service, but it’s actually one of the best I’ve used, really the only thing that lets it down is the lack of a smart card system like Melbourne’s Myki

Instead it uses magnetic stripe tickets which are purchased via ticket machines at every station. These tickets can be for single trips, returns, weekly, monthly or even yearly – I had enough trouble keeping the paper ticket in one piece for a week, so unsure how well monthly or yearly tickets are going to last. :-/

Buttons! All the buttons!

The trains do vary in quality, some of the ones being run are a bit beat up and graffitied, but they always seem to be on time and pretty reliable.

It’s the first city I’ve been in which runs double decker trains – Sydney tends to run them as two pairs of locomotives, each with 4 carriages – effectively 8 carriages, or 16 if you count the fact that they’re double decker and probably fit about twice of the average carriage.

Inside one of the newer trains – note the upper and lower levels!

The suburban train network has the best views, most city training tends to be underground into subway stations, which do tend to be quite hot and cramped – thankfully Sydney has seemed to learn to build big, the newer stations in some suburbs are massive spacious underground caverns.

Unfortunately this large station entrance is an exception to the rule…

Of course you don’t necessarily have to take the underground rail….

MONORAIL!!! I get to walk past it every day on the way to work, so cool.

There’s an active cycling scene in Sydney, particularly around where I live and work, although I’m not sure how anyone survives cycling in hot Sydney days which are pretty horrific survival experiences at times. :-/

Whilst there are cycle lanes, they can be a bit scary as a pedestrian as a lot of cyclists seem to consider themselves immune to the cyclist traffic lights and will sometimes ride right at you against the red light whilst pedestrians are crossing…. There’s also a few wonderful design failures such as shared pedestrian/cyclist zones that are no larger than 1 bike each way at a time leading to people riding a bit too close for comfort.

Thankfully we have now found a place and we’ve finally settled in somewhat – now living in an apartment on Clarence St, right in the middle of the CBD which makes my job in Pyrmont only a short 20minute walk, meaning I can actually spend time enjoying my evenings.

Tree lined home street!

There’s a few pretty awesome perks to my commute, which takes me over Darling Harbour via Pyrmont Bridge and offers some pretty neat views.

Pyrmont bridge in the evening – note the monorail track which goes over it.

Harbor view – just off to the left is the rear end of a warship and a submarine at the maritime museum – but I’ll post more about these later on….

Generally things are going pretty well here, quite a culture shock compared to NZ, but we are getting out and about learning new places and things to see.

Wellington in New Years

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For those of you back in NZ, I will be flying to Wellington for New Years and will be in the city from 25th Dec until 4th of January. My lovely fiancee will be there for a subset of that with me, as she is spending some time with family visiting Sydney before flying into NZ.

If you’re around it will be great to catch up over coffee/beer/other for a few days whilst I’m there.

Unfortunately there won’t be an Auckland visit this trip, so if you’re up there, why not come down to Wellington for a few days instead? You know you want to. :-)

Whirlwind Month

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Since I left Auckland at the end of August, it’s been a pretty hectic month, with flights all over the place and adventures in Wellington, Hastings, Melbourne and Sydney!

After we left Auckland, Lisa and I enjoyed a relaxed week in Wellington just spending time catching up with friends, having coffee, beer and just basically having a week of holiday.

Wellington wanders <3

After a week in Wellington, we drove up to Hawke’s Bay for one last road trip in my trusty Toyota Starlet and spent the weekend with Lisa’s family, before I departed leaving her there, so that I could spend two weeks in Wellington tidying up affairs down there, whilst Lisa worked on tidying up and reducing the amount of stuff she had stored at her parents place.

Spending so long apart really sucks, but we both needed to do so in order to get stuff done, and there’s just not enough space at my parents place for us to stay for much longer than one night.

I ended up managing to sell off my beloved Toyota Starlet and a number of other items including my gaming computer, lots of computer cables, software, old flat stuff and other bits and pieces – it’s amazing how much stuff you collect over time, but I’ve managed to get it down so that I have two suitcases plus one cubboard at my parents place only – essentially only storing anything that will have use once I return to NZ in a couple of years.

After packing two suitcases, I flew out of Wellington on the 15th of September on a one-way ticket to start my AU adventure!

Kitty wants to come too!

I arrived in Melbourne looking for work and managed to spend a few days there doing job interviews, getting some basics like my bank accounts and cellphone sorted out and generally tripping around a new city and trying not to freak out at the fact that I’ve just moved country and in a single step changed EVERYTHING in my daily life.

I ended up booking and staying at the Miami Hotel, a 3.5 star place out in West Melbourne near a friends house, since I wanted a bit of my own space – it’s somewhere I’d happily recommend to anyone traveling on a budget, thanks to it’s around $90 a night

Thankfully I do have a number of friends in Melbourne, plus some Twitter friends I had not yet met in person, who helped take me around the place and to get some new sights.

It’s not a hipster bar, until you sit on crates drinking organic beer and watching a DJ in baggy pants wearing a cap with ears designed to look like a horse re-mix popular tracks.

Melbourne CBD, from up on Rooftop Bar

More Melbourne!

There’s no better introduction to Melbourne than starting my first day by visiting a hipster bar, followed by a rooftop bar looking out over the city and catching up with all my Melbourne Twitter friends. :-)

I also spent some time wandering the Victoria Markets, huge amount of stalls and fresh produce – even a meat hall which my friends had great delight dragging me into. :-/

Fluffy kittens! And a fuzzy kitten adventure tube!

I did a lot of walking whilst in Melbourne, I was staying up in West Melbourne, so ended up walking through the CBD almost daily and getting a feel of the city and learning new places.

Tanqueray tram, just for @pikelet

Trams! Tower blocks! Melbourne!

The Yarra river – I personally wouldn’t go swimming in it any time soon, looks a bit murky. :-/

Rain clouds moving into the city.

Misty walking bridge.

I also ended up training and tramming around the city lots, the transport system in Melbourne is amazing, so rapid and easy to get around, I got across town in about 15mins by jumping on a train, then a tram and using the Android Tram Hunter and Train Tracker applications to check schedules and routes.

Woot, trains!

Melbourne at night, when coming out of Flinder’s Station

It’s a pretty amazing city – it took me a few days to get settled a bit more, but keen to spend a lot more time there.

Sadly my plans to get work there were interrupted, I had only been in Melbourne for a few days before I got the sad news that my grandfather in Wellington has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has less than 4 weeks to live. :-(

I decided to take the time to fly back to NZ sooner rather than later, so that I could spend some time with him whilst I still can, so booked a flight back to Wellington at short notice – sadly this meant that I had to pass on a couple interesting opportunities that had arisen, but I guess there’s never really a good time for this sort of thing to happen.

After having booked my return flight, I then got a call at short notice from a contract recruiter, who had a position for a 3-month contract in Sydney for a Linux engineer – I managed to re-arrange my travel plans, and instead of flying directly back to Wellington, ended up flying into Sydney, spending a day there to interview and then flying back to Wellington from there.

Doesn’t get much more iconic than the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Unlike Auckland, they were actually smart enough to put rail, walk and cycle crossings on it.

Circular Quay Panorama

Sydney CBD from the botanical gardens down by the opera house.

Sydney CBD viewed from Pyrmont.

I will have to make some time to actually go on and explore these awesome machines – looks like it’s possible to actually go and tour inside the submarine!

Fuck yeah Monorail!

After all this crazy tripping around Melbourne and Sydney, I flew back to Wellington for a few days to spend time with family and then flew to Hawke’s Bay to spend time with Lisa.

Meanwhile the job interview in Sydney returned good results, so this weekend, Lisa and I fly to Sydney to start my new 3-month contract in Sydney from the 1st of October!

Going to be a lot of fun and will offer some new challenges in a whole new city, 3 months will give us a chance to sample Sydney and figure out if we want to stay there for longer term, or we can shift to Melbourne at a later stage.