Tonight I went to empty the garbage, and I find this sitting on top of our recycling bin.

Check out the close-up on the head. Strange looking little ear-ish things.

Very cool.

I got an email on the 17th of August announcing State of Play V was open for registrations. The conference is on… err, well now actually (August 19th to 22nd) - in Singapore.

That’s okay, I guess since State of Play IV was rescheduled from January 7-9 2007, to “June 2007″ - with less than 2 weeks notification (the change notice was sent out on the 15th of December 2006).

Without knowing the background on why such a major change was scheduled, it looks like someone needs to revise their idea of ‘timely notification’.

Ohwell - They didn’t have Neil Stephenson lined up as a speaker, so it’s of less interest to me anyway.

The Gold Coast has put on some great weather - nice and cool at night, warm and sunny during the day.
I’ve taken a bunch of photos during Tech.Ed, I’ll upload them soon. In the mean time - Nick Hodge has heaps of photos on his photo stream.

I’ve attended a bunch of interesting sessions - but there’s a heap of information on offer, so it’s easy to overload.

Next year I think MSFT needs to organise a few more social-networking things around the events. For example, get attendees to put ‘teched07au’ tags on photos on Flickr, and blog posts, etc. Use SMS-broadcasts (possibly through twitter) to inform people of session changes and things like that (link it back to their commnet subcription).
I’ll probably think of a bunch of other small improvements as time goes on.

Overall, it’s been good fun the last few days, and I have learnt things which are relevant to my job, and which will help a little further on too.

I’ve also successfully avoided the vendors who want to steal my information so they can sell me stuff.

Updates - LOLCode.NET, Movieworld, Bye-Bye Developer Guy

Nick gave his LOLCode presentation, to much incredulity by some people who attended.

Yes, LOLCode is a proper Turing complete language. And LOLCode.NET compiles into MSIL as well.

 Movie world was… interesting. About 3,000 people were packed into busses and trundled up to movie world for dinner and some rides.   There was the BatWing, Superman and a few others - we didn’t have access to the full park, but there was a large area open.

  Homeward Bound

Frank’s “Catch Up with Frank” talk was interrupted so he could be serenaded to a version of Don McLean’s “American Pie” called “Developer Guy”.

For anyone who didn’t know, I’d been putting in some pretty long hours at work for most of July. So, when there was talk of a gathing of Sydney Twitter Peeps on the 25th of July, well - that was as good an excuse as I needed to take some time off work, head down to Sydney, and completely get away from all mention of anything related to work.

The “Tweetup” was great - I got to meet a bunch of people I hadn’t known, everyone was friendly and easy to get along with. All up, a great night, and well worth repeating some time. Thanks to Cathy and John for organising the meet. Oh, and thanks to Nick Hodge for the lift (nice red Mini), and listening to me rant a littlelot about some work issues.

I also caught up with Brett for Yum-Cha and went to see The Simpsons Movie too. (Spider pig, spider pig… heh). Spent some time wandering around Sydney Harbour and The Botanic Gardens, caught some random band playing (”innerlight” or “enlight” or something like that) in the park outside Central Station and other things. Got myself a new backpack - this one from Crumpler, and designed to carry both the camera (with lens attached) and laptop.

Spent some time catching up with Mitch (one of my Uncles) - he cooked a really great Roast Pork dinner on Saturday night- complete with crackling and all the rest. Oh, and a Lemon Syrup Cake w/ Lemon Cream Cheese Icing. Yuuuummmm. I should’ve taken photos.

Monday (July 30th) I was back at work as normal, catching up on the things I’d missed, and on Tuesday I woke up with a sore throat. During the day that evolved, and by the time I got home that night I had a full-blown case of something-bad-eritis, complete with coughing, sneezing, shivering and a killer headache. So, I went to bed and basicly didn’t get up until Thursday afternoon. Talk about a knockout bug.

Monday I’m back at work again for a day, before heading off to Tech.Ed on the Gold Coast on Tuesday. The people in the office where I sit must wonder what the heck is going on, because I’ve been away more than present over the last 3-4 months - Google Developer Day, ReMIX, a bunch of remote-working, and now Tech.Ed.

Memorable quote of the day: “Damn you sydney busses, it’s not an alien attack, it’s just rain.” - Warlach