This year we have a not-Kiwicon; many of the backroom Crüe are Kiwicon-ers, but with a fresh injection of folks give us all a change of pace. Same awesome content, same friendly feel, but cuter! (And still a fine dose of metal grinding out the Michael Fowler sound system as we get seated).
While Ada and Rosa wait to get into Kuracon, the spin-off day-long con for small people, I sit in the main hall looking down on a fenced-off Tesla coil which promises to play music at some point. It’s been a morning of two breakfasts, one at home and one with friends at the wonderful Leeds Street Bakery, so here’s hoping this doesn’t end up with me nodding off in my seat; something which is unfortunately more likely given that insomnia kicked me out of bed in the wee small hours.
Purplecon started last year to with a relatively small audience that I was too slow at ticket-buying to be a part of, so I’m delighted to have snagged a ticket this year; oriented as it is toward protection more than breaking, it’s very relevant to my interests. This year purplecon has trialled splitting tickets into a general tranche and an under-represented tranche, and it certainly seems to have done a bang-up job of broadening the audience demographic, which is dead cool.
An amble up to the Te Papa function centre for the CloudNative Summit Wellington edition. Apparently you can win an e-scooter if you collect all the sponsor booth stickers; already having an e-scooter of my own, I demurred. Set Your Sites on Tracing Adrian Cole @adrianfcole Adrian works on Zipkin for Pivotal; Zipkin is a distributed tracing tool; distributed tracing tracks requests across the various touch points in your system: web server, DB, cache, app servers, etc.
Once more I’ve gotten a bit carried away with the scheduling, resulting in a lot of dashes across town. The loss of most of the central city cinemas (Paramount, Embassy) is, I imagine, as vexing for organisers as it is for patrons; my schedule is 30 minute windows to get from Petone to Miramar to Brooklyn. Still, the festival organisers are doing will with the limits of the ongoing breakdown of what used to be Wellington’s glory, a strong CBD, as spiraling rent drives and shoddy construction drives leaves more and more empty storefronts; cinemas are no exception.
So today it was me skipping the keynote. I am ambivalent about a tour of the good ol’ days, but it sounds like the folks who attended enjoyed it, so that’s nice.
The tar syntax has been corrected today: while true; do tar zcf lecture_theatres.gzip /dev/{c1,c2,c3,a1,a2,a3} ; done.
We have the first fail on the Chromebook draw; the second person drawn is here though. There have been 564 tickets sold for the raffle.
Tonight’s Penguin Dinner is at the air force museum at Wigram, which sounds pretty cool.
Today’s opening contains a plea for compact seating in the form of shell: while true; do tar zcf /dev/{c1,c2,c3,a1,a2,a3} lecture_theatres.gzip ; done so that’s nice.
As always there is a reminder that the ozone layer is thinner down here than people expect. You can buy accessories for your Raspberry Pi should you so wish.
We’re two for two on the door prizes! And a reminder to participate in the charity raffle.
The usual pleas for huddling are aired to a room full people who can’t bear to sit too close to one another, apparently. We open with minders of the usual business - emergency numbers, evacuation procedure, code of conduct, etc.
Today’s door prize winner is here!
It’s a sad thing that OS shitlording has to be called out.
LCA is in Christchurch this year; the location in Christchurch dovetails nicely with the stereotypes, being flat, open, and full of creeks and nice gardens and parks.
Christchurch scores in the swag department: a hessian sack that smells nice, not full of leaflets that I’ll end up throwing away, and a Raspberry Pi Zero, complete with a pre-loaded SD card, which is both appropriate and neat anyway. It also scores an acknowledgement to Ngai Tahu. Accomodation is close to the conference, and you can also score a cheap week long gym membership at the uni rec centre, which is a nice bonus.