Last week the first Mongolian Network Operators Group meeting was held in Ulaanbaatar. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend but I managed to get a list of the attendees and added their organisations to the IPv6 Survey. No great surprises in the list. Most of the local companies only had IPv6 access through their email systems and only because they were using Google.

Techs in Paradise is the joint “Joint Techs” and “APAN” meeting held every couple of years in Hawaii. It’s a pity that it has to be Honolulu but that’s where the main campus of the University of Hawaii is located. Anyway it gives me the opportunity to take photographs of the sunset when I can escape the meetings & the bar 🙂

Third visit to Mauna Kea and it seemed like it was going to mirror my first visit when we heard that the road to the summit was closed due to icy conditions. Fortunately subsequent messages were more promising and so we set off for lunch at “HP” and would evaluate the situation after lunch. By the time we arrived at the visitor centre conditions looked good and so we were on for tours of both Gemini North and Keck.

The guides at both Gemini North and Keck were excellent and the tours were quite comprehensive. At Keck we disappointed a tour group, who were only allowed in the visitors’ gallery, when we were escorted past them into the observatory. At both facilities we were allowed to check out the primary mirrors close up and Keck even moved the telescope around and allowed us (one at a time) into the mirror barn to have a look at the recently coated mirrors.

Congratulations are in order for Steve Baxter, David Hughes and James Spenceley for organising the first AusNOG (Australian Network Operators Group) conference. An amazing 150+ people attended the two day conference in Sydney. Let’s hope that they continue.

I was asked to present on IPv6 and my slides are available under Presentations.

The Joint Techs meeting at Fermilab (just outside of Chicago) has just finished up. A few interesting talks (and some fun ones too, check out Alan Whinery’s lightening talk). I got a chance to tour the Collider Detector Facility. The Detector itself is installed in the Collision Hall (behind some serious blast doors) but in a brilliant stroke of PR the Fermi folks took a photograph of the Detector just before it was installed and then got a company that makes billboards to produce a full size image of it which hangs in the Assembly Hall.