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A Geek’s 4.5 Days in Perth

By Nick Hodge | August 14, 2007

perthaug07 001

Whilst driv­ing from Perth air­port to the Hotel on Sunday, I determ­ined that I haven’t been in Perth since late 2005. Nearly 2 years. Perth is greener now.

My first visit to Perth was in 1993. I think I’ve been here at least 27 times through my last 4 employers.

The Dux­ton Hotel’s high-speed inter­net access is wire­less only, and keeps drop­ping VPN con­nec­tions to work. As a video-blogger, I am con­stantly mov­ing around multiple-hundred of Mb files around the world, and the lack of net­work sta­bil­ity is frustrating.

This danah boyd video is killing me. Note to self: choose a dif­fer­ent hotel. And one that doesn’t think I am a Ms.

Duxton Perth gets Creepy...

I’ve already cap­tured two videos: one with Gary Barber and one with Stephen Price.

Stephen is the car­toon­ist who cre­ated my new avatar, and Gary is the geek-father of Perth.

My dis­cus­sions with Gary revolved around “why Perth?”. Is it the tyranny of dis­tance that forces Perth people together; which is like Aus­tralia. Why then do humans seek like minded people out and see a need to get together in meat­space? There is no doubt that Perth people have this innate drive to help each other in a way that you do not see in other cit­ies. Maybe Mel­bourne at little. Adelaide should learn from Perth.

By strange coin­cid­ence, I ran into Nick Ran­dolph and Brian H Mad­sen (and a bunch of .Net dudes) at the centre of Perth Sil­icon area, Tiger Tiger. Thank­fully, they didn’t ask me some obscure .Net tech­nical ques­tion. If they had, I’d prob­ably called Joel Pobar.

On the return walk to the hotel, Stephen lead me astray into the Hay Street Border’s Book­store. Yes, my book col­lec­tion +1. And friendly staff. The geek-girl behind the counter loved my “geek” t-shirt. rscpt.

perthaug07 002

Tomor­row is more than another Wed­nes­day for Perth: its Web­Jam day. Lach­lan Hardy and Lisa Her­rod land to get the Perth exper­i­ence. I hope that Web­Jam is a two-way exper­i­ence for all con­fer­ence people in Aus­tralia, espe­cially in the online space.

Topics: .net, technology, thegeekstories | 11 Comments »

11 Responses to “A Geek’s 4.5 Days in Perth”

  1. Mike Minutillo Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 10:29 pm

    Hoo­ray for Perth. We are the greetest [sic].

    Ser­i­ously, glad to see to at Tiger Tiger and I’ll see you at WebJam.

  2. hodgenick Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 10:59 pm

    Mike– good to ran­domly meet you guys, too. Flew in just for that cof­fee :-) Nick

  3. Mike Minutillo Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 11:32 pm

    Well it is good cof­fee ;) Tiger Tiger even has an Appe­ci­ation Soci­ety on FaceBook

  4. hodgenick Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 11:35 pm

    re “Appe­ci­ation Soci­ety on FaceBook”

    I face­booked ur cof­fee shop LULZ

  5. Kat Black Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 12:14 am

    Doh! I was at Tiger Tiger all day today, in the only corner with a power-point (laptop bat­tery has less stam­ina than human + 5 cof­fees) — would have said hi if I’d known what you look like :)

    Hope to meet you while you’re in Perth, and get you back here in Decem­ber for Byte Me! Fest. Although I warn you, the drive from the air­port then will NOT be green. And it will prob­ably be 40 degrees. Ack!

  6. Gary Barber Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 12:45 am

    Geek-father!!.. HA HA .. now don’t you go get­ting all uppity you young wip­per snap­per, you! Or I’ll be forced to clob­ber you with my zim­mer frame. :)

    You know I have NEVER been to the tiger-tiger. We have FUDO, round the corner Free WiFI, good Coffee.

  7. Lachlan Hardy Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 6:54 am

    It’s far too early in the morn­ing for me to grok what you meant by ‘two-way exper­i­ence’, you’ll have to explain it to me this even­ing over beers.

    But we’re utterly pumped to be doing this. It is going to be grand!

  8. hodgenick Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 8:58 am

    Kat– I saw you in the corner on your Dell laptop and men­tioned to Brian Mad­sen I should intro­duce myself. But a dude wear­ing a “geek” tshirt intro him­self I thought may have been a little creepy.

    ByteMe looks great, by the way.

    Nick

  9. hodgenick Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 8:58 am

    Gary– I think you’ll find our ages sim­ilar :-) Nick

  10. hodgenick Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 8:59 am

    Lach­lan– “two way event”; learn­ing from Perth and tak­ing that exper­i­ence back to the nar­ciss­istic east. Nick

  11. Kat Black Says:
    August 15th, 2007 at 11:34 am

    lol… if I wasn’t so intently star­ing at the laptop screen and looked up, I’d def­in­itely have admired your shirt! In fact, at one stage I was look­ing up the binary-solo ver­sion of FotC’s “The Humans are Dead”: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=uLr3Ppz_Uxo

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