Marc's Public Blog

hing one way or the other, and since Jennifer hadn't been able to go with me last year, it made sense for me to go back to the great barrier reef on a week long live aboard dive boat.
This year, I went with the Spirit of Freedom , mostly because it ended up being the only boat that matched the plane dates I had. Unfortunately, only a quad share room was available for half the trip, and that was kind of tight space-wise, and it wasn't quite the cheapest trip available, but the boat was quite nice and the staff top notch.

giant potato code













a sea snake, which I'm told is friendly, but I didn't get close enough to check :)




the giant cod was about as big as Jennifer
















A shark from the shark feed




The small fish looks out for the blind shrimp which has the job of digging the hole

Of course, the above are just a few samples from the Gallery of Pictures Taken From Great Barrier Reef Flight .
During the trip, I passed the 100 dives mark (to 110), and Jennifer likely quadrupled her number of dives at least, as well as did much better on control and air consumption by the end (from 40-50 bars more than me to about 10 bars less than me), and she also got nitrox rating in the process.

Last year, I had planned on flying over the great barrier reef in a small rented plane, but unfortunately, we hit some bad weather as soon as we took off, and had to do an immediate U-Turn and land back at the Cairns airport.
This year, the weather looked quite suspect too, especially with the bad rain the previous day, but we got lucky: there was a ceiling of 1600ft, which was high enough for a flight over the ocean.
I ended up renting a C172S, along with a commercial pilot/CFI to be responsible for air traffic control and radio in general (I'm not licensed to fly an Australian plane), and flew with Jennifer towards Green Island and towards Port Douglas, before heading back to the Cairns airport.
The views of the reef were quite nice, and flying just 100 feet under the clouds in VFR conditions with no traffic separation from other traffic (including IFR) felt quite wrong, but that's apparently the Australian way from what I'm told.

You can look at more pictures of the flight from Cairns over the Great Barrier Reef

When done with Sydney, we went to Cairns right afterwards, bright and early on Saturday, and as soon as we arrived in Cairns, we took the Skyrail up to Kuranda, seeing the rainforest from the top, and visiting the Bird Sanctuary, the Koala and animal Sanctuary, and the Butterfly Sanctuary.
After the day finished early (Kuranda closes down early for some inexplicable reason at 15:30), we took the scenic train back to downtown Cairns and called it an evening (it was an early morning and all)

You can look at more pictures of Kuranda, and the animal sanctuaries

The next day was an early wakeup for a bus tour of the Australian coast, visit of the rainforest under soaking rain (well, I guess it's called the rainforest for a reason).

You can look at more pictures of the Outback/Daintree River/Australian Rainforest

That was it for Cairns: a condensed 2 day trip before a flight over the reef the next morning, and boarding the boat for a one week diving trip in the Great Barrier Reef, and the Coral Sea.

It had been 6 years since I had been in Sydney. My last time and also first time in Australia, was when I got invited to linux.conf.au in 2001. It was nice to be able to go back, with Jennifer this time.

A couple of pictures from the Amp Tower


These common birds are more fun to have around than common pigeons





Chinese Gardens in Chinatown
















We got to see a brand new show from Stomp in the 2000+ main theatre of the Opera House




Yeah, so they have bats instead of pigeons :)

You can look at more pictures of Sydney here

Besides visting Sydney, the surroundings we saw were the nearby Blue Mountains (which are a 2H train ride away from the city center. Unfortunately, it was a rather short trip, partly due to a train operator denying us entry to a leaving train, and making us wait 1H for the next one. Bastard!
Anyway, Blue Mountain was nice, including the skyrail ride across the ridge, up from the valley, and the quite steep old mining cart ride down to the valley (used for coal back in the days)

For more pictures with green stuff, and mountains and blue and all, follow this link :)

We also used the opportunity to visit the local zoo (unfortunately, not a free roaming, petting zoo), but it was the first time I saw a Wombat that was actually awake and roaming, as well as some Platipus (aka errors in evolution), viciously attacking small crabs that were given to them as food.

See more pictures of Taronga Zoo

Last, but not least, we visited some famous local beaches: Manly, Bondi, and Coogee. We also used the opportunity to take some first timer surfing lessons at Manly beach. I only ever got up on the surf board for maybe 5 to 10 seconds, but considering that I had just recovered from being sick with a cold, I considered that good enough :)

More pictures of Sydney Beaches

Of course, I was primary there for Linux.conf.au 7, and to give my talk about disk encryption on linux.

One of the evening parties with fellow hackers



Jim Gettys, one of the creators of X-Window, and a prototype of the One Laptop Per Child Laptop

The conference went fine. It was quite compressed in time (they dropped the saturday, and only had a half day on thursday), but quite enjoyable as always
A few more pictures of linux.conf.au 2007

We didn't spend as much time visiting this time because we had seen a lot last year already, but amongh other things, we visited the Louvre, well portions of it that is.
Of course, there was still the opportunity to get some good shots of Paris too ( the other pictures of Paris and the Louvre )

Jen and I spent about 5H in the Louvre, and as I knew, it's a huge museum, it would probably take a week to go through it. Either way, it was impressive to see how many floors and displays above ground and underground, were packed in there..

They even had a few props from Stargate SG1 :)