For some time I have been aware of local skeptic groups such as the Australian Skeptics and the Victorian Skeptics I had not become actively involved. Instead of was content to follow the science from a distance via blogs and the books that I read.

That changed when I found out that an Amazing Meeting! would be held in Australia for the first time. I had to go, but while waiting to see if it would conflict with OSDC2010 I missed out on a ticket. But when I heard that a lottery would be held for the final few tickets I entered and was lucky enough to be offered a ticket. I jumped at it, even though I would have to miss the final day of OSDC2010.

So how was it? It’s in the title: Amazing.

Although I struggled a bit, I did manage to make my 8AM Friday flight to Sydney which got me there in plenty of time for the 1PM start. From then on it was a rush. I am not attempt to detail everything that happened, but the obvious highlights included meeting and hearing speak: James Randi, Dr Karl, Dick Smith, Simon Singh and Rob Morrison.

I also met many other people, some of who I expect to see again as next year I intend to go along to some of the local skeptic events. Of course that may even include a Melbourne based TAM.

While most of the talks were great, they had the issue of repeating things I had already read. The discussion panels were more interesting as they depended on the questions people asked. But the largest surprise of the entire event was a talk on management pseudoscience.

It had never occurred to me that management was a psuedoscience, but now that I think about there are plenty of management theories, but very little evidence to back them up. Think about it, businesses are wasting money and time on unverified theories, often on theories that in practice fall down.

Seven years ago I did start to write about work processes and I have been meaning to get back into it. Realising that much of management training is pseudoscience if hopefully the trigger I need. (we are also undergoing major organisational change which was the first trigger)

Instead of writing more here about the event, I will simply link to my messages from during the event. When I do get around to sorting through the photos (mostly from the dinner cruise) I will try to provide some more detail.

That clash caused me to miss the last day of the conference. Unfortunately that was the day that Damian Conway was giving two talks. I am glad the the talks were recorded, but I have yet to find time to watch them. (1, 2)

Before I run through my highlights of the first two days I will touch briefly on the biggest negative of the conference. It was held in Melbourne. This is bad because I live in Melbourne.

For the past three years the conference has been in Brisbane, Sydney and then Brisbane again. I enjoyed the conference much better at those places as I was able to immerse myself in the conference. In 2007 I stayed in the hotel that was the venue, so I just had to stumble downstairs, in 2008 I stayed just around the corner from the venue, so it was a short work, and in 2009 I stayed in the city so it was a bus ride to the venue, but I knew others who were staying in the city as well.

But with the conference being in Melbourne I had no hotel to stay in, I travelled home each night. Since I had the option of driving (instead of 1.5 hours on public transport each way) I drove which meant I didn’t stay back for the social drinks as late as I wanted to. If it hadn’t conflicted with TAM, I wonder if it would have been worth the expense of finding somewhere near the venue to stay…

Looking back at the program (there seemed to be a higher number than usual of last minute changes) there are only two sessions apart from the lightning talks that jump out at me:

• C’Dent, the Acmeism and Everyone / Ingy döt Net
• Development on Open Source platforms with a billion dollars at risk / Adam Kennedy

Of these three sessions, the highlight was Adam’s talk about the scale of the environment that he works with and how it is structured. I may go into that later in another post.

From the second day, four sessions (again excluding the lightning talks) were memorable:

• Baby Steps into Open Source – Incubation and Mentoring at Apache / Noirin Shirley
• OtherSkills Lightning session / Arjen Lentz
• perl5i: Perl 5 Improved / Michael Schwern
• Git For Ages 4 And Up / Michael Schwern
• Lightning talks

Arjen’s session was lightning talks of a non technical nature, the highlight being Noirin getting us all to stand up and try to learn the Charleston. This was so popular it was repeated during the standard lightning talks session later in the day.

While Noirin’s talk on the Apache community was interesting as we Schwern’s perl5i talk, Schwern’s demonstration of Git revisions using Tinkertoy’s was the standout.

So, overall it was a great conference and I intend to watch Damian’s two talks, plus any others that I missed such as Rainbox House v4.

I can’t wait for next year.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter, identi.ca or Facebook would have seen me commenting as the conference unfolded, but here is a pictorial summary of what I consider to be the highlights.

OSDC2009 – Day 1

The conference began with a talk from Karen Pauley on Understanding Volunteers:

Richard Jones discovered issues with MacBooks an some projectors:

Paul Fenwick told us about the awesome things we missed in Perl:

Adam Kennedy brought us up to date on Padre:

With the day closing with lightning talks:

OSDC2009 – Day 2

On short notice Marty Pauley gave a great talk on simplicity:

Then later in the day Arjen Lentz let us know that failure is not an emergency:

With the day concluding with lightning talks:

OSDC2009 – Dinner

At dinner a certain someone garnered lots of attention by dressing up for his dinner talk:

While everyone else was challenged to illustrate in Play-doh how removing something can be a feature:

OSDC2009 – Day 3

On the final day we heard about Google Wave:

contained more lightning talks:

Before being closed by Pia Waugh talking about open source in government:

It was again a great conference, that I really need to speak at again next year. My only regret this year was that I had to fly back on the Friday night. It would have been better if I had hung around and flown back on the Saturday like I did last year.

• OSDC2008 – Day 1
• OSDC2008 – Day 2
• OSDC2008 – Day 3

Almost all of them are of people in between the talks or in the evening at the dinner or at various pubs.

The photos I took of presenters as they were presenting didn’t come out the best, the 50mm f/1.8 would have been very nice. Despite this I am glad that I resisted the impluse to go and buy one as I ended up being the winning bidder for a secondhand one, at half the retail price.

Of all of the photos, this one requires to be singled out:

I have a lot more other photos from Sydney. I should be able to sort through them soon.

After checking out of the hotel and putting my bag in a locker I headed down to and then up Sydney Tower. It was a very different perspective of the city that I had seen so far.

My next stop was back at the bridge, but this time to the lookout on the south east pylon. I didn’t even know about this until I got a complimentary pass when I did the bridge climb.

From there I continued walking across the bridge to the northern side where I walked under the northern approach and then down to Luna Park. I didn’t actually spend long there as the next ferry over to Darling Harbour was only a few minutes away.

Once I got to Darling Harbour my first priority was something to eat, and then I headed into the Maritime Museum. As it was quite warm outside I decided to only visit the air-conditioned museum, but that was quite interesting.

Time was moving on (as it usually does) I spent another hour or so wandering around Darling Harbour before heading back towards the hotel for my bag before heading to the airport. But I had more time than I thought so I went back to Hyde Park and St James for some more photos, specifically of the fountains that I saw on Tuesday.

Which brings me to right now. Sitting on the train from Central to the airport.

Despite my plan I didn’t end up making it to the breakfast as I ended up sleeping in a bit By the time I arrived I had also missed the keynote, which by all accounts was quite good.

Of the talks that I did get to, Adam’s and Paul’s were excellent as usual. I also went to one about a CMS originally written for a local government and I caught the end of one about code reviews. The content of that one wasn’t anything new to me, but the questions/discussion after it have me some ideas about how to get buy in for our processes at work.

The closing keynote from Pia Waugh about the OLPC in Australia gave me a better understanding on how the project was going and also how it is related to Australia and Oceania.

But that wasn’t all as Adam revealed the sekrit that he had been alluding to. Which was actually two things:

• at 5:30 that morning he had managed to build perl6 for windows and a beta should be (hopefully) out for Christmas.
• during his recent tour talking about Strawberry Perl he was offered assistance from Microsoft. They will me running virtual instances of all the current versions of windows for testing purposes. Which will be available to anyone with CPAN account.

So that was the end of the actual conference, but that wasn’t all as many of us adjourned to the pub next door. As that was crowded and didn’t serve food (at least in the bar), we moved to the nearby RSL. At least thirty of us.

I am now back at the hotel and have a rough plan for tomorrow:

• get up as early as I can
• figure out exactly when and how I’m getting to the airport
• check out of the hotel
• find somewhere to leave my bag
• head up to the Sydney Tower observation deck

This should take until midday. Only another six hours to fill…

After the lightning talks session (the usual mix of good and bad) there was a Perl BOF. Twenty five of us (including Larry) headed up the street to a pub for drinks and then dinner. All sorts of things were discussed only some of them Perl.

Tomorrow there is a late addition to the schedule with one of the sponsors putting on a breakfast. That could be interesting.

These talks were memorable more for their delivery rather than their content. These two guys are skilled enough to make any topic entertaining. (which isn’t to say that their talks weren’t also informative)

On the other side was this mornings keynote from Larry Wall which was way more informative than entertaining. It was still excellent and Larry talked about regular expressions under Perl 6.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to best appreciate it because after the dinner (with its free drinks) we went to the bar next door…

I have been taking a few photos but I’m finding that this is another situation where my 17-85mm isn’t fast enough and my 28mm is too wide. There is a Ted’s down the street and they do have a 50mm in stock. I’m tempted.

Tonight is the conference dinner and the 28mm will be better for that.

Then I started walking … and didn’t stop until 10PM.

I had a bridge climb scheduled for 5PM so I first spent a couple of hours walking down there. Via parks (eg Hyde Park and the botanical gardens) to the opera house, taking photos as I went.

Then there was the actual bridge climb which is 3.5 hours long.

As it was dark by the time I left the bridge climb I spent some time taking night shots with my tripod around Dawes Point (under the bridge) and Circular Quay.

This was topped off by walking back to the hotel.

My feet aren’t quite happy. But the climb was worth it and I’ll find out about the photos once I get then off the camera.