Category: Uncategorized

Librarians, Developers, Steaks, Baseball and good friends

Kohacon 2009 is nearly over, just one day left of the developers conference tomorrow, then just Paul, Nahuel and I will be left.

As far as I’m concerned it has been a resounding success, lots of faces put to names, tons of interesting presentations, and to date a very productive development weekend.

The highlights for me

  • The enthusiasm and excitement of all the participants
  • Galen’s sense of humour.
  • Staying up late chatting with people in the Holiday Inn dining room
  • Baseball!!!!
  • Meeting people I talk to on irc almost daily
  • Catching up with Paul again and meeting Nahuel

A lot of the other attendees have done great write up’s on the individual sessions so I encourage you do check them out.

There are a ton of photos on flickr here.

Kohacon 2009 next week

I’m busy trying to tidy everything up, and to forget there is a small possibility my wife will give birth while I’m away, before I head off to Kohacon on Tuesday.

Today Kahurangi and I went out to upper hutt to Nan and Koro’s house to bake hot cross buns with Donna and Manaia. Kahu and Manaia rolled the buns and helped to put the crosses on the top, they turned out suprisingly edible.

Tomorrow is Dad’s 65th birthday party at Le Marche Francais which should be fun, then I have to go into work to grab all the things I forgot. Like my cellphone charger, headphones etc, yes I am a goober. Then I have to finish off my presentation, get an adapter for the video out on my netbook, and copy it to a usb stick just in case.

Laurel is writing me a shopping list, and I have a baseball game and numerous lunches and dinners to go to, so I’ll be pretty busy, but I’m sure it will be fun.

It’s not OK … but what do you do about it?

So this is going to be a blogpost a bit different from what I normally post about.

This morning I was waiting for the bus on the parade in Island Bay in Wellington. A mother was walking her kids to St Francis De Sales school (the local catholic primary school). The kids were riding bikes, an older boy and a girl I’d say was bout 6 or 7. The boy rode up to the corner and waited, but for some reason the girl was crying and not going very fast. The mother was clearly frustrated (and believe me Ive only been a parent for just over 2 years but I can totally understand that happening).What I didn’t expect to happen was the mother to haul off and slap the kid in the face and yell ‘shut up’

It made me feel physically ill, and all I could think of to do was to yell from the other side of the road “I saw that, you need to cut that out”.

I honestly didn’t and I still don’t know what to do in that situation. I still feel bad about not doing something more.

One of the best movie going experiences yet

If you ever get the chance to watch a movie when you are the youngest, by at least 20 years of anyone in the audience, take it. I saw Gran Torino today at the fabulous empire cinema with about 20 people, all of whom would be at least 55. There was none of the giggling and talking about what you are going to do after, no cell phones beeping, no people walking in and out to get more popcorn. Just people there to watch and enjoy every minute of the movie.

Oh and by the way the movie was damn good too.

Request for photos of Libraries using Koha

Paul Poulain and I are doing the first presentation at Kohacon 09 which is coming up in a few weeks. As part of my part of the presentation I hoping to do a bit of a montage of libraries using Koha.

So far I have some photos from the Cook Islands, Samoa, China, Croatia, India, France and New Zealand.

So this is a call out to you Australians, Americans, Canadians, English, Germans, Polish, Hungarians, Kenyans …. and all the places I have forgotten that are using Koha. I would love to get some photos for use in the presentation. I will put up the slides and the movie online after the conference.