I’ve blogged about cheese before, but it was in jest. However, the cheese here in Australia and New Zealand has been awesome. It’s like going to Tahiti and eating pineapple. When you come home to the same old stuff, it’s a real let down. Maybe I need to stop making fun of my coworker Earnie (he’s the one who showed me the American Cheese Society annual conference and awards).

My presentations are done. I have one more analyst meeting, and then I am officially on vacation down under for a week. I’m stoked (but don’t expect too much blog traffic around here).

Doing both talks twice in the space of a week really helped improve my delivery. I still think the Data in SOA talk didn’t go quite as well as the Metropolis talk, but the gap narrowed this time. Also helped that they were on separate days this time. I got lots of great questions afterwards. A couple of gentlemen from the Australian government grabbed me for over an hour after my Metropolis talk yesterday – one from Dept of Defense, the other from Dept of Statistics. At the Federal Architect Forum earlier this year, I spent some time with an architect from the US DoD and I’m coming to the conclusion that compared to most government agencies, DoD seems to be ahead of the curve on architecture. Of course, when you measure failure in human life, it behooves you to stay ahead of the curve. We were discussing business process and the gentleman from Aus DoD pointed out that we “mangle business processes in order to fit them into technology implementations.” Very true. We even got into some social aspects. For example, the battlefield leaders of tomorrow are in their teens today, so they are looking at how teens communicate today. They want their battle systems of the future present information optimally for those future leaders. Each generation tends to communicate differently than previous generations. His 16 year old doesn’t read or write well, but he can IM chat 6 people, send phone text messages and talk on the phone all at the same time. How will future battle systems leverage that ability. Fascinating.

We head back to Sydney tomorrow evening. This afternoon and tomorrow, we’re off to find a kangaroo petting zoo and take a tour of Canberra. There’s a big rugby match on Saturday – the Qantas Wallabies vs. the New Zealand All Blacks competing for the Bledisloe Cup. It’s sold out, but it will be on TV. There’s something about the passion of large scale sporting events like this. My parents and brother went to several matches of Euro 04, including the England vs. Portugal game that sent England home in penalty kicks. The parting after went on all night. World Cup 98 in France was the same way every time France won (though we had gone home by the final game that France won – I’ll bet that was quite the party). I know nothing about Rugby, but I’m keen to learn.

I’ve had my Nomad Zen for just over a month now. I’ve loaded almost 6500 tracks from 525 albums and it’s only about half full. However, I did have a slight issue with it. Walking across campus the other day, I tripped over my own damn feet. Luckily, the Nomad broke my fall 😦. I ripped the protective case and scuffed the LCD screen, but otherwise it didn’t seem any the worse for wear. However, when I fired it up on the flight to Sydney it wouldn’t work. It would boot and claim to be playing, but no music came out. If I selected a new song, it would freeze and needed a hard reboot or battery removal in order to shut down. I tried the reset button and reloading the firmware, no luck. Today, I searched Creative Labs’ knowledge base, searched for “zen xtra crash” and found an article on the Zen’s Rescue Mode. This allows you to Clean Up, Format All and Reload OS. Clean Up took a while – around 15 minutes – but it did the trick. I guess the rapid deceleration caused some temporary issue to the internal hard drive, but there don’t seem to be any residual effects. Even the song that I was listening to when I fell is fine.

Of course, no device is perfect. In addition to “Make Rescue Mode Easily Discoverable”, I have two minor quibbles with the device. First, it doesn’t draw power from the USB connection. With Red Chair’s Notmad Explorer, I can play the music from the Zen thru my computer’s speakers. I also use Notmad Explorer to convert my music from WMA lossless to WMA 96k when it transfers to the Zen. In both of these cases, the Zen is connected to the computer for a long period of time. It would be nice if I didn’t have to plug in both power and USB. Second (and more likely to be addressed as it’s a software issue) is that when you’re listening to a song, you can get it’s track details, displaying the artist and album names. It would be nice to be able to jump directly to the artist or album in the music library from the track details screen.

Minor quibbles aside, this is an awesome device.

My presentations at TechEd New Zealand went well. At TechEd US, I was more comfortable doing the Data in SOA talk and it got a slightly higher eval score. Of course, that was the talk that I was expecting to do and that I had spent some time writing new content for. Metropolis was a last minute add since Pat couldn’t go. At TechEd NZ, I was more comfortable doing the Metropolis talk. Pat spent significant time working on Data in SOA for TechEd Europe and I just picked up his updates en masse. It’s a great talk, but I wasn’t as comfortable as I had been doing my version of the talk.

After my presentations, I attended an architect dinner with local architects. I had some fascinating discussions with some of the attendees, saw a presentation on EDRA (i.e. the project formerly known as “Shadowfax”) and participated in a great panel discussion.

Yesterday, we flew to Sydney, met up with my mom, and took the train to Canberra for TechEd Australia. The train was nice because Patrick could get up and run around as much as he wanted, plus we got a great look at the country side – we saw several kangaroos. Canberra is very cold – though the sun is out now – and walking to find a place for dinner last night was quite chilly. The cab driver who picked us up at the train station was a hoot. We asked her what had been here before the capital moved here and she replied “What should be here now, a sheep paddock”. I wish I had gotten her name so she could give us a ride back when head back to Sydney. The hotel is underwhelming (the perils of late registration) but the event hall is pretty cool. I spent a morning with a Meta analyst this morning, lunch with the local field architect and my Metropolis talk is about two hours.

TechEd New Zealand is at the Sky City Convention Center – part of Sky City Auckland which includes casinos, shops, restaurants and a hotel where we are staying. Feels sort of like a Vegas hotel, as if they don’t expect you to spend much time in the rooms. For example, there is very little dresser space – I’m guessing the typical guest comes for just a weekend. But it’s very nice. Sky City Tower is the highest tower in the southern hemisphere. There’s a restaurant at the top where we went last night for the speaker’s dinner. You can also jump off the tower in a rig similar to what stuntmen use. It’s the tallest basejump in the world – 192 meters straight down. I have no interest in that whatsoever, but Jules wants to do it. I think the only thing keeping her from trying it is the fact that I don’t think I could watch, which means I couldn’t videotape it.

Yesterday, we rented a car and drove across the New Zealand countryside, even though they drive on the left side of the road here. It took me a while to get used to it, but I think I did OK – no accidents, no near misses and only caught myself on the wrong side of the road once. I’m glad we upgraded to an automatic – I can’t imagine shifting with my left hand! Hardest thing was staying in the lane, since everything was backwards. I kept wanting to have a car width between me and the right edge of the lane, which meant I kept ending up half in the next lane over (or on the shoulder). Jules almost yanked the door handle off – she said it was very unnerving to sit in what back home is the drivers seat and yet have no control. By the end of the day, however, Jules and I had both adjusted quite well to driving on the “wrong” side of the road, thank you very much.

We drove two hours to Matamata, which is where the Hobbiton sequences of LOTR were filmed. Matamata itself is pretty small – 6,000 city residents with another 7,000 in the surrounding “suburbs”. I’m fairly sure that more people work on MSFT’s main campus. Sort of gives you a different perspective of scale – Matamata doesn’t even have a stoplight – just a series of traffic circles along their main drag. In fact, in five hours of driving around NZ, we saw exactly one stoplight outside of Auckland – controlling traffic across a one lane bridge! Many of the shops in Matamata were closed, seemingly for the winter. I’m guessing there are a lot more tourists in the summer – Matamata has it’s own KFC and Subway is “opening soon”. We ate at a local bakery where you can get a wide variety of fried food – fish, chicken and crab. They sure like fried food here – at dinner last night, we were served fried mashed potatoes.

While most of LOTR was filmed on the southern island of New Zealand, Hobbiton was filmed on a 500 hectare sheep farm just outside of Matamata. The owners of said sheep farm run official tours where you get to spend around an hour and a half wandering around the remains of the set. “Remains” is the operative word here as over half of Hobbiton was destroyed after filming was completed. All of it was scheduled to be destroyed, but the production company only got half done before the weather forced them to stop. They were going to come back and finish the job, but the farm owners petitioned New Line Cinema for permission to keep the rest up and run tours. In fact, of the 150+ locations used in LOTR, only Hobbiton was not completely returned to its natural state. Most of the locations used were national parks and the like, so keeping the sets up wasn’t really an option. New Line also seems to be very concerned that no one “leverage” the sets. For example, as you can see from the pictures, the hobbit holes are pretty much holes in the side of a hill now – all of the set dressing has been removed. The tour guide indicated that they would like to return the set to as it appeared in the movie, but New Line won’t let them. The legal aspect of the set is interesting – the land belongs to the farm owners, but the sets on that land belong to New Line. Their control of the sets seems a bit draconian to me – it is absolutely forbidden to record any sort of story reenactment in the remaining set pieces – but hey, it’s their IP. Regardless, it was awesome. We stood under the Party Tree, “danced” on the Party Field and stood inside Bag End.