“I’m Andrew, I’m from Port Macquarie, doing my first year of Arts/Science, and, um, I don’t really read books that much, so I can’t actually remember to be honest.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that – we’ll fix that up by the end of this course!”

The above exchange was paraphrased from one of my first year politics tutorials.

It’s been three years since.

I still don’t read books. (Admittedly, I have read one book so far this year – Tim Keller’s excellent The Prodigal God – but that one’s rather short.)

As a highly-edumacated soon-to-be Arts graduate, I see this as a problem. (More pressingly, as a student who has just received, for the first time, a book review assignment, I have to learn to read these book things lest I be left unable to make sensible critique of World War II historiography.)

So, my New Year’s Resolution for 2013 – albeit, a resolution made in mid-February – is to read a book a week. Possibly two weeks, if I’m reading particularly heavy stuff.

My first target is a book I started reading a few months ago, but alas I stopped halfway – Hofstadter’s modern classic, Gödel, Escher, Bach.

We’ll see how we go with this.

The main conference was fantastic:

• Clojure is awesome for concurrency
• Unix party tricks are extremely fun, and rather scary, and now I just want to disappear off teh interwebz
• Schwern taught me lots about Git – I now have a Github account and I feel a lot more confident with it!
• Repent, for the end of the Unix epoch is nigh!
• Pia Waugh can talk very fast, particularly given some sleep deprivation
• bunnie’s keynote provided some very interesting insights into the world of consumer manufacturing, particularly pricing
• TBL can speak even faster than Pia – this was actually problematic…
• Asheesh Laroia and OpenHatch are pretty awesome
• Paul Fenwick can talk very, very fast given a 90 second timeslot…

Anyway, it was awesome. I highly recommend it, and I’m already planning to make my way to Perth for 2014.

Anyway, I’m at linux.conf.au 2013 here in the most wonderful city of Canberra. It’s my first LCA, and so far I’m rather liking it.

Today is Day 2, where we had a most excellent keynote by Radia Perlman, the inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol among many other important networking things. There are a few summaries of the talks already up on Planet LCA so I shan’t do so again.

The rest of today consists of Miniconfs – one-day streams dedicated to particular topics, organised separately from the main conference. For most of today I attended Open Government, which I found rather dry for the most part although there were quite a few interesting insights I heard. Currently in Haecksen, where Jacinta Richardson has just spoken on the topic of conference presentations, and later my good friend and fellow ANU undergraduate Sam Cheah will be presenting on her beloved Robogals. Great stuff!

Also, I managed to get my hands on a free copy of Perlman’s Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols. Some books were given away in connection with her keynote (as is LCA tradition), and one of the winners decided she was willing to give her copy away to someone else who might want it better. It is thus joining the CSSA Common Room library.

In other news, I have an external hard drive now. Time to install Debian on it

Can’t wait for the 3rd of January!

I’m not sure exactly what they do there or whether it’ll be particularly interesting, but, well, what is there to do in January anyway?

Brilliant. Really. Go down to your local library and request it, now. That’s really all I can say. If you ever thought Howard was responsible for the state of the Australian economy today, Charlton proves you wrong.

• Night Watch – Terry Pratchett – I’ve only read one of the Discworld novels so far (The Colour of Magic), which was very good. Wanted to get this read to see if I could use it in an English assessment, but I just haven’t had time.
• The Art of Intrusion – Kevin Mitnick, William L. Simon – Yes, they call it ‘non-fiction’ which might be a bit of a stretch for some of their stories, but it hasn’t been too bad a read so far. The bits where Mitnick explains basic computer concepts can be quite boring.
• Z – Jonar Nader – Endorsements on back look interesting. Read several chapters so far; Nader’s writing skills are certainly a bit less developed, and certain aspects of the story don’t really make much sense, but regardless, it seems interesting enough.

64.14% first preference, 74.38% TCP.

Now for the people of Lyne to get used to having, you know, representation in Parliament.