I’ve returned to Brisbane after a week spent in Sydney and Canberra. My presentation at ICON’03 went well. The questions at the end were very tame, thank goodness. Sasi’s talk also went very well. He shouldn’t be so nervous in the lead-up because he’s really an excellent speaker.
I spent last Saturday (27/9) evening with MM. It was his birthday, so I shouted him dinner at an Italian restaurant down the road from my hotel. The food was good. I especially liked the gelati! Then on Sunday my two cousins Annette and Charlene showed me around Sydney. We saw Darling Harbour, where we sat and chatted for a while because we had a lot of catching up to do. They are both in the process of getting their law degrees. Annette has almost finished. Charlene still has a couple of years to go. Had lunch at the Star City casino, and then headed over to the Opera House. We did a lot of walking. We headed back to Darling Harbour for dinner at a place called Blackbird Cafe. It has nice views out over Darling Harbour. Very cool.
The conference itself was OK. There were only a few papers I found really interesting and relevant to my own work. There was a paper on multi-space distributed hash tables and another one on a service discovery protocol. There were a few papers on peer-to-peer protocols and analysing their topology and so on. The conference dinner was on Tuesday night. It was a dinner cruise which left from Darling Harbour and went up Sydney Harbour before doing a U-turn and coming back. I sat at a table with some RMIT people and guy from Taiwan who has a degree in nuclear engineering, but decided he like computer science better.
As soon as Sasi had finished delivering his presentation on Wednesday I hailed a taxi and went to the central station coach terminal in the city. Getting out of Sydney was a nightmare. I assume there were some accidents. Anyway, it took over an hour to get out of Sydney city on the bus. We arrived in Canberra about 45 minutes late. But BJK was waiting there to pick me up. Whilst in Canberra I saw the National Museum, the National Gallery, Old Parliament House, New Parliament House and the War Memorial. Everything was very, very interesting. The guided tours around the two parliament houses were great. Old Parliament House was fascinating because everything was open to the public. The Prime Minister’s office is exactly how Bob Hawke left it when he moved to the new Parliament House. The Prime Minister’s Office had a peep-hole in it so the secretary could see if the Prime Minister was "busy" before interrupting him. I saw the cabinet room, which Gough Whitlam once called the leakiest room in the country
. He meant this in more than one way: the ceiling was not water tight, and the press sometimes climbed onto the roof to eavesdrop on cabinet meetings. Presumeably, some of the cabinet members were also eager to leak information to their buddies in the press, too. The War Memorial is fantastic. Not something you can enjoy because of the subject it deals with, but very interesting. It’s not only a memorial. There is also an extensive museum, and this museum is great. You can spend hours there. You get a free guided tour through the place, and our guide was very knowledgeable. Actually, most tourist attractions in Canberra are free. The only thing I had to pay for was Old Parliament House, which cost a whole $1! It’s $2 if you don’t have a concession of some sort.
Canberra was pretty much as I expected it to be. Lots of people don’t like it because it’s kind of quiet, and not busy and bustling like other capital cities. But I think that’s precisely the reason I do like it. I could live there and like it.
BJK gave me a tour through the engine of his 1982 (?) Mazda RX7. I know a little bit about rotary engines now, but I’ll never be the car enthusiast that BJK is! Hopefully his car becomes a classic in a few years, which means he can sell it for much more than he paid for it. Ben and Marice were excellent hosts, and I enjoyed my stay very much.
I will publish all the photos from my trip shortly. Now it’s back to uni work.
