Greetings from down under!

Yes, I am a horrible blogger. I have not updated the blog since the contest and yes I am quite ashamed of myself.

So certainly time for an update. I am writing this update from a hotel in Melbourne Australia where I am attending Linux Conf Australia. My manager urged me to submit a proposal to do a talk about Rockhopper to LCA a few months ago which got accepted. It is pretty cool that HP sent me here to talk about something that was not HP related (although I did talk about a lot of HP specific stuff with various people during the week).

The talk itself went very well and was voted one of the best in the conference. I was asked to do an encore of the talk today during what they call "Open Day" where members of the public can attend. I didn't think today's talk went quite as well as the first one but still not bad. The best part of the talk was the demo of the robot itself. I was not able to bring the robot itself but what I did do was set up a webcam in my workshop and run live streaming video. When I came up with that plan I gave it a 50/50 chance of actually working (it is from the other side of the world after all) but it worked perfectly. Special thanks to Paul for helping out on the New Hampshire end. He powered up the robot and lit the candles and most importantly he was there in case I ran into network issues (luckily there were none).

I plan on posting my slides and code for the robot online soon (yes, should have done that months ago). Hopefully that will happen in a week or so. I am staying a couple more days in Melbourne to do the tourist thing (have not done anything but the conference since I got here).

The video of my talk can be found on the LCA web site.