I’m currently sitting in JFK AA club, syncing up mail before I head off to Helsinki. Bleah. Ted Is Travelling Too Much.

The good news is that I have a trip to Minneapolis in March, and then Monterrey (for Usenix) in June, but that’s all the trips I have scheduled for the moment, and hopefully, it’ll stay that way!

… is very pleasant. Last night, I went out to dinner with a bunch of OzLabs guys. We went to a Thai restaurant, and had a very nice meal, for $15 dollars — Australian! — each. It was a very reasonable price in U.S. dollars, but with the exchange being 2 for 1, at $7.50 USD, it was an absolute steal. This morning, I woke up, ate breakfast at the hotel, and then wandered over to a Newsagent, where I picked up another book by the Dalai Lama (“The Transformed Mind: Reflections on Truth, Love and Happiness”), and two chocolate croissants and two chease rolls for the princely sum of $4.

Five other IBM’ers and I flew into Canberra from Brisbane yesterday evening, at the end of the linux.conf.au conference. The last time I was in Canberra, it was two years ago, and they were working for LinuxCare, and I was working for VA Linux Systems. How things change, and yet how they stay the same…. it was so much fun spending time with them, as we traveled as a gaggle through the Brisbane and Sydney airports, geeking about Linux kernel internals, terrorizing Quantas Club attendants, etc.

So here I am with a few spare minutes in the linux.conf.au terminal room in Brisbane, and feeling compelled to do an LJ update, so here goes…. Pulled an all nighter on Saturday (2/2) trying to finish up everything critical that has to be done at home before I leave for Australia. Showed up at church on Sunday at 7 a.m. to make sure that our supply priest didn’t need any help with the early service (Linda, our rector, was in Florida dealing with her mother’s funeral who very suddenly and unexpectedly passed away last week), and to install a new printer in the church office (since the 3 year old HP printer also suddenly but not-so-unexpectedly also passed away last week).

I goofed; I missed the last couple of LSB conference calls due to my being terminally busy, and it turns out the LSB meeting was moved to Tuesday (tomorrow). If I had known that, I could have taken the train down to NYC today, instead of getting into the City one day earlier. It also would have made my weekend much less stressful. Oops. On the other hand, it did mean that I got a lot of chores done on Sunday that I otherwise probably would have otherwise procrastinated, so it wasn’t all bad.