Three things you need in a new house:

• doorbell
• fish & chips dinner on the floor
• hammock

Fab – particularly since the current house couldn’t have the hammock (no covered area outside…) so I’ve had to do without for nearly a year. Shocking.

I’m usually pretty good with these things – I get a CfP invite and I blog about it to let more people know. I completely forgot in this case, must’ve been the xmas season. Luckily the CfP is still open for a few more days, so you can still get in a proposal if you’re interested: http://dlw-europe.com/konferenzen/dlw08/cfp/index.html

This new conference is run by my friend Masoud Kamali of S&S Verlag, who is also responsible for the International PHP Conference (Frankfurt, every November) and quite a few other events. The Dynamic Languages conf will be held in Karlsruhe, that’s just a bit further South from Frankfurt – easy to reach via ICE (high speed) train.

This conference is about scripting languages and related frameworks, optimisation/scaling, security and such. So, there’s no specific database topic even. I made one submission which I believe fits well within the conference scope. We’ll see.

A TED talk from March this year, but just posted last month: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/187
Great stuff – take the time to view it!

Open Source Developers’ Conference 2007 Brisbane started today with tutorials, and other speakers and delegates arriving. Wireless working and at speed, all running pretty smoothly, catering okidoki… all appears well in preparation for tomorrows real hords (200+ people). All good!

H and I went to The Whitlams concert yesterday, they were playing together with full Queensland Orchestra. Was great!

Tim Freedman, never short of political opinion, noted:

This country is not an economy;
it’s a society.

So what did I vote? I don’t mind telling. Howard didn’t get it… his party never would, I’m a lefty ;-) I put Greens on top to make sure they get the additional electoral funds, and then through Democrats to Labor.

I don’t believe there’s a balance to be struck between long term environment and economy – you can’t half screw up the environment just to maintain some ugly economic aspects that need fixing. You take the environmental requirements as a given, they’re not tweakable. Then within that fact of life, you work out how to best do things. Well, that’s what I reckon anyway. Vote what you will!

Phoebe, all 2 1/2 years old, does have something to say on this: “Howard’s no good” ;-)