Breezing in to Melbourne

 

It’s been a bit busy since I flew in from Perth on Wednesday – but what a day to fly in!  I landed as the worst storm they had had in years was just building towards full strength.

The Quantas jet was not equipped with a camera on the nose to show you the landing, like Emirates do, but in this case that was probably a good thing. Watching the end of the runway pan in and out of shot, whilst the pilot did his best, would have been most unsettling.  The valiant attempts of the pilot, were matched by the skills of the driver of the hotel [very mini] shuttle bus, trying to mostly stay in one lane on the motorway.

21 floors up in the Rydges hotel gave me an amazing view as the centre of the storm swept cyclone-like through the canyons  between the tall central Melbourne buildings.  It felt as though it deliberately paused outside my window, just to throw some extra hard rain at me before drifting on across the city and away, leaving a trail of fallen trees and power-lines in it’s brown dusty wake.

Looking for something to do, to keep my brain in the right time zone (we lost another couple of hours on the flight from Perth) I spotted the show playing at the theatre over the road.  I’ve always fancied Monty Python’s Spamalot – now was my chance.

Apart from a couple of Ozzy in-jokes and a chorus from “Neighbours”, I presume the show is as it is performed in the West End and on Broadway – very silly, very funny, and a great evening’s entertainment .

Thursday brought two 2 hour seminars, back-to-back, on the Semantic Web and libraries at the RMIT University Library.  The plan was to get back to the hotel eat and get my head down, as I had a recoding of The Library 2.0 Gang to do at 3am the next morning.  Which idiot organises a podcast recording at 16:00GMT, when he knows he’s going to be in Australia at the time? – This idiot!

Anyway so much for the plan, whilst catching up on email, I suddenly realized it was way past midnight and not worth getting my head down at all.  So some more emailing, presentation uploading and the like, got me to 3 am.  The Gang recording went well, connecting folks in the US, Israel, and the UK (one of which was Australian and should really have been up in the middle of the night like me).  The main subject was the new Google Book Search API, our guest was Frances Haugen a Google Product Manager from the Book Search Team – a great guest in a great show which will be published on Tuesday.

As expected Friday was a feeling strung out day……