[HLUG] hi

[j michaelson]

hello everyone,

sorry i haven't posted for a while. been kind of busy.

i had a good time in australia. i did the inkscape talk at south
australia linux group and it went pretty well. i'd only got there the
day before and i was heavily jetlagged and fairly disorganized, but i
seemed to do ok. there was quite a bit of interest in graphics based
on xml, because a lot of the coders there could see interesting things
that they could do with it. i gather that their talks are normally
highly technical so my talk was a bit of a change. after the meeting a
load of us went off to a restaurant for pizza and beer. there are some
cool people there.

with the talk out of the way i could relax and get on with my holiday.
the kids were on holiday for the first two weeks so the first half of
my holiday was based around them. after they went back to school i
moved into the youth hostel association in the city centre. highly
reccomended. i spent a lot of the third and fourth weeks exploring
adelaide city. i also met up with some of the people from the lug and
stayed with them for a few days and gained the nickname "english".

i managed to fulfill some of the australian stereotypes. i went to a
friend's place for a barbie and threw some prawns on whilst getting
people to tell me to "throw another shrimp on the barbie". i eat some
kangaroo, had a meat pie floater (meat pie, floating in pea soup with
a splash of ketchup) and i drank a lot of cooper's pale ale, which is
the drink of choice for south australians. i also bought myself a
traditional leather hat (no corks) which did a great job of keeping
the sun out of my eyes, it also works very well at protecting me from
english rain. more people should wear hats in this country.

i enjoyed myself out there, but it didn't work out like i'd planned.
i'd gone out there with emigration in mind, but my daughter's mother
is already thinking about moving on, so that doesn't seem like it's
going to happen. not sure what i'm going to do now. i'm doing a bit of
temporary work to restock the coffers and then i want to move on, i'm
thinking about birmingham initially, but maybe ireland later.

should still be in hereford for a while, so i'll be able to catch a
few more meetings.

john.