And after booking flights to Thailand, I followed up with flights to Sydney for Christmas – arriving 20th December, leaving 5th January. Nothing like spending money travelling when you’re down.
After a real shitty month, I decided that I badly needed a holiday. Booked flights to Krabi for 12 days of sport climbing, massage and chilling out on the beach in November. Everyone has said it’s an incredibly awesome place to go climbing and hang out, so I’m looking forward to it immensely, and being able to catch up with Patrick, and climbing with a cool group of people.
One slight bugger, is that I need to move out of my current place by 30th November, so will now spend between now and then searching for places to live – an utterly miserable experience.
Went and saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tonight – surprisingly enjoyable and well, Johnny Depp stole the show again with the various one liners. Had some curious departures from the book, but so did the old one which was abysmal. Really like the disco songs from the Oompa Loompa. Tim Burton got it about right I suspect, so hopefully Roahl Dahl has stopped rolling in the grave for a while.
Arrived safely back in New Zealand after a several hour flight. Nice to be back after such a crazy week, but felt a bit down due to the lack of a welcoming party at the airport. When I got unpacked at home, I figured I needed some treat to take my mind off things. I had scoped out the new PSP while hanging around Singapore airport. I had nearly bought one there, except for the fact that all they had were the white models. Dick Smith had a good range, and was soon walking out with a combo pack including ‘Underground Rivals’. It’s a really sweet handheld, and I especially like the wireless feature and web browser. As tberman said, the screen is fucking unreal.
Had an excellent night around town with Patrick being our host. Had some delicious food at a muslim restaurant, then a nice coffee, then a quick dash by his apartment before some more food. Then it was time for a foot massage. After being led to a rather seedy looking massage parlour which we decided to skip, we eventually ended up at a wonderful place just around the corner from the office. A good 70 minutes [of mixed pleasure and pain] for only 50 RMB. Fantastic – think I might have gotten the best one out of the four of us. A nice way to end off the week. One more day of this place place, and then I’m out of here again and back to NZ.
I gave a presentation to the university students right beside the Sun offices in Beijing. Hard to know at what level to pitch the talk, but mostly just went through the goals for the desktop community, why OpenSolaris was important, and what our plans were for JDS.
Hopefully I sold them on the ideas of creating Solaris packages from spec files using pkgbuild, and that I’m swamped with mails telling me how they’ve packaged their favourite desktop application using the build environment I explained. Here’s hoping anyway. The slides are here.
Patrick’s trying to convince me to come to English corner this Friday evening where I can sit and talk random stuff with people who are trying to learn English – just not totally sure I’ll have the voice for it after this weeks sessions. It’s been fun time during this trip, and I think pretty productive. These guys rock, they’ve just been sheltering under one for too long, and now it’s time to shine!
Met up for lunch with Phil and a bunch of people from effusion, a small community of people that came together around OSS stuff. A really interesting bunch of people – I’ll avoid naming because I’ll invariably end up being embarassed by forgetting most of their names. Nice to get out for lunch, and some interesting conversations. Then later in the evening, some of met up again for a Chinese and some more tech talk – cool people, doing cool stuff.
Darn it, maybe I should have organized to go out a little early. It seems that Java China is being held this week, and a whole rake of superstars are out in Beijing at this very moment.
I just wonder who’s going to be out there next week. It seems Beijing is a popular place at the moment.
I finally got around to buying a car – a 1995 Nissan Primera Camino sedan. It’s silver, clean looking and expect it to get me from A to B. As part of the process, I also applied for an NZ drivers license. Since I already have an Irish drivers license, it was pretty much just a case of answering 35 easy multiple choice questions. However, the eye check was a bit more challenging. Either I’m getting blind, or the machine they used to test it was really not configured right. Had real difficulty seeing 3 columns of letters, and my left eye is definitely weaker than it was previously – must really get that checked.
But at least I have wheels now, which gives me an entirely new level of freedom over here.
