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

We also did the skywalk half scam, where you can't take your own pictures and only buy theirs, and while there is absolutely no chance of falling unless you climb and jump, you're connected to a harnest, like the bridgeclimb:

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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