At the beginning of this week Jeff and I travelled around the North Island of New Zealand with John and Silvia for a bit of sightseeing in the lead up to linux.conf.au 2010 as we drove down from Auckland to Wellington.
It was a lovely few days seeing the Rotorua mud baths and Mitai Maori culture, the amazing Art Deco towns of Napier and Hastings, and Te Mata Peak, where John surprised Silvia by proposing on the highest peak. It was a lovely moment, and one that I luckily (and accidentally) caught on camera 
Some photos are below. I’ll upload all the Art Deco town photos later (when I have decent bandwidth tomorrow).
We got into Wellington Tuesday night as Silvia and John were organising and going to the Foundations of Open Media Software (FOMS) conference from Wed - Fri, so I’ve been helping the lca2010 team out with their final preparations. It has been great to be in the action again, even just as a helper (I was on the organising team for lca2007) and I think this lca is going to be great!
The other great thing about an lca in Wellington is the opportunity to catch up with some friends in New Zealand, and also to do some Martial Arts training with friends and mentors. We are having a Martial Arts BoF on Monday night for anyone interested I’ll be taking a pole and some chain fire-twirlers to play with.
