Adelaide ended the season on top of the ladder and so they got to host the major semi-final against the Sydney Uni Flames. Adelaide never seemed to be in the hunt after half time and as the game progressed the shot selection got worse and Sydney punished them for it. getting into a 3pt shoot out didn’t help. Sydney get to host the grand final while Adelaide hosts Dandenong on March 1st to earn another shot at Sydney.

More photos from the game are available in the Sports photography section.

The Chinese national men’s team was in town and they played a few games against the Adelaide Hotshots (Australian Hockey League). Grant Ward and I went down to the hockey centre to see their final game on Sunday. There was a small crowd in the grandstand. I don’t know if this is typical of a hockey crowd or that they had just had enough hockey for the week.

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.

Volcanoes National Park is a surreal place even without flowing lava. I flew in direct from Australia (via Tokyo and Honolulu) to Hilo and was picked up by Paul and Hollie and after a very nice pizza for lunch we headed up to the national park. We had booked in for Thursday night at Volcano House and while it was very tempting to just crash I decided that a drive around Crater Rim Drive would be interesting. This turned out to be an excellent idea since it was fairly quiet and the following day Rangers were recommending that people not get out of their cars near the Halema`uma`u crater due the sulfur level in the fumes. When we were there it was pretty bad, made worse when the wind picked up an blew them at us.

On Friday we visited the Thurston Lava Tube and then headed down Chain of Craters road. After an earthquake last year the flow of lava has changed and it is no longer visible but there are plenty of scenic lookouts down the road and the “end of the road” is quite an interesting area.

I’m now the proud owner of a Nikon D3 digital SLR and it is an awesome camera. My big problem now is dealing with the images. A 12 megapixel camera creates enormous RAW files and then you have to convert them into JPEGs so I have a storage and catalogue issue.

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.

Grant Ward and I went to see the Adelaide 36ers play their first game of the 2007/08 NBL season at the Distinctive Homes Dome against the Wollongong Hawks. Andrew Walton was unfortunately heading for the US so had to miss the game. The 36ers ended up winning the game 108-101.

I’ve been surprised that there actually are people out there using IPv6 (or at least can reach an IPv6 only web site if they want to 🙂 At last count there were 17 unique IPv6 accesses (and 120 unique IPv4 accesses), one of which was from Telstra access space, to the IPv6 page.