From open source to open country

During the last day of the Linux Conference Australia, I and Colin had the choice between joining the crowd for the open day, or meeting a semi-private invitation from Greg Lehey a well known icon in the open source world. He organized a hackers barbecue in his very isolated place, and we could not resist. In his original invitation, Greg said that he lives "down the road", without specifying how long the road is. It turned out that it's a 90 minutes drive, which is an indication of the relative sense of distance that you get in Australia.

In the Australian bush, Greg leads a quiet life with his wife, his horses and dogs, and a few not so distant friends, dealing occasionally with stray kangaroos invading his fields, and brewing open source beer.
The barbecue met everybody's expectations, and so did Greg's famous home brewed beer, thus stimulating that sort of hacker talk that only good food and good company can generate. The subjects ranged from the origin of the hacker's word to the openness of languages, touching virtualization, databases, operating systems, embedded libraries, and user interfaces in the process.

After lunch, we were given a demonstration of the damages kangaroos can do, along with a visual recognition of their dumpings. The peek of the visit, however, came with the open source brewery, which is controlled by a FreeBSD box, in action since 2001.

On our way back, we stopped at a wildlife center, where we had close encounters with kangaroos and koalas, before reaching back to the civilized Melbourne, where Colin gave me a crash course on "how to have fun on weekends," but I won't disclose any of its contents. Suffice it to say that Colin approaches this matter with rare professionalism, and if you need advice, you must contact him directly.