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The IT conference went very well. Everyone I spoke to appeared to have enjoyed it, and found it worthwhile.

More to say at some point.

The Tasmanian SAGE-AU/AUUG Conference is on tomorrow, and I’ve spent half the day helping to prepare for it (after spending the first half moving furniture).

Things look like they’ll go well, and we’ll have another successful conference. After the preparations today we ended up having an impromptu dinner with a few of the interstate speakers who’d arrived throughtout the day. Dinner was at Vanidols. Fun Was Had. Wine Was Drank.

All I have to do now is turn up tomorrow in good condition, and then try not to go too crazy at the Official Post Conference Piss-up, followed by the Traditional Post Conference Exec-and-Speakers Pissup.

Thankfully I’m not going to the tute on Tuesday. Let’s hope Tuesday morning is quiet anyway.

Ok, this one is really simple. It’s probably been thought of before.

Australia is set to become a much more arid country due to global warming, after which I think it’s supposed to end up being tropical. Anyway, my plan is this: We build a long pipeline going from the coast deep into inland Australia. The pipeline is broken into sections with valves between them. Tidal water patterns will cause water to be forced up the pipe, but it will be unable to flow back out to sea due to the valves. Once the pipe is full, there’d be a slow pulsing flow of water emerging at the other end.

You could accellerate the procedure by filling the pipe with a conventional pump to begin with.

You would have to be careful the the pipe materials did not contaminate the water during the long (slow) journey.

This is probably not really economically feasible at the moment, but given changing climate conditions it may become so.

One day I’d like to build a house, and I’d like to build in as many alternative energy sources as I can. Individually they wouldn’t generate much power, but all of them together would have to help cut down on the power bill.

Ok, so here’s the plan. From my patchy memory of physics, you can generate an electric current by moving a magnet through a wire coil (or moving a wire coil around a magnet - same thing).

A trampoline seems like a good source of lots of moving wire coils, so if you fixed magnets inside each of the coils and wired the coils all together, you’d get an electric current whenever someone was jumping on the trampoline.

Of course, there’s a lot of maths to be done to figure out exactly how much power you could generate, and whether it’d be worth it. And I don’t particularly enjoy maths. But I think it’d be cool.

I played tennis yesterday.. and other than a few aches today I seem to be still alive!

Actually, I had a ball. I’m absolutely crap at it, but I guess that’s to be expected. I hope to do it again soon. I need to get some sort of exercise anyway.

Watched the Roulettes and fireworks at the regatta from out on the water last night, which was also very enjoyable. The Roulettes are amazing up close.. They were flying right over the top of us so I had a better view than if I’d been sitting in the stands. Those guys definately have guts.

The fireworks were one of the better examples I’ve seen in Tassie.. something to do with the centenary of Federation, I think.

A mate of mine wants to start up a Glam Rock band. I’d be singing (as I can’t play anything for shit), he’d be on bass and another mate of his on ryhthm guitar. We just need a drummer and lead guitarist.

It sounds so tacky, and if my (ex) singing teacher ever found out I’d be hung, drawn and quartered.

I can’t wait - I hope he gets it off the ground..

I finally got around to buying a curry from Anna Purna, the Indian place in North Hobart. I ordered a Chicken Vindaloo because I can’t remember ever having eaten vindaloo except as part of a banquet.

The girl there said (in a very musical Indian accent) “Are you quite sure, sir? It’s very hot.”.

I thought over it for a second, because I’m not really a fan of hot curries - I much prefer a medium curry. In the end though, I figured that I’d come to eat vindaloo, so I wouldn’t back out now. I got some Naan with it as well, just to help scrape off the inside of my mouth if it was too much to bare.

Well, I can say one thing - Anna Purna make a damn fine curry. It was around $11, but I only ate half of it for dinner, as they give you seperate containers of rice and curry. It was indeed quite hot, although the problems I’m having with my stomach made it worse than it should have been.

And at 4:30 this morning I discovered that it burns on the way out, too. Just a warning.

Still, it was so nice that I’ve (perhaps foolishly) brought the rest of it along for lunch. Hopefully my stomach will have calmed down by then.

Well, at last I have a diary up and running.

Hopefully I’ll manage to keep it up to date. I’ve written a facility to alow me to make entries private though, so that I don’t hesitate to write stuff I don’t want people to read.

Still, if anyone other than me is reading this, I hope I don’t bore you completely to tears.