Sydney is nice. It’s nice how people drive on the correct side of the road even if they have silly power socket designs. The opera house is nice too as is the bridge in the middle of the city. And it’s fun seeing sky scrapers for the first time I can remember in my life. The surf and beaches are nice and the ferries are really nice. Being able to take a random late night ferry and sleep out under the stars on a beach is really nice. Then there is the national park, real forrest for as far as the eye can see, we rented a canadian canoe and went paddling into the jungle.
But it’s not for me. The sun is nice but there is a hole in the ozone layer there and everyone has to go for checkups every 6 months and get their skin cancers burned off. You would think this would make them environmentally concious but no they all drive 4×4 cars and don’t bother to sign the Kyoto treaty. The city is based around what’s called a CFD, central financial district, how very cultureless. And the opera house and harbour bridge are about the only interesting bits of architecture in the country. The city is huge, bigger than London, because everyone lives in wooden flat packed suburban homes with large gardens. That’s all very luxurious but it does take about an hour to get from most homes to the city centre (that’s the CFD to them) and you can’t walk to the corner shop to get a litre of milk. Then there are the people who buy houses just to knock them down and build new ones because the existing one is a bit shabby, talk about wastefulness. So nice, but no my thing.
Got my first fan mail today. “How do you manage to fit in a living and find time to commit to free software projects? Do you only sleep 5 hours a night or something?” Well I started by going to a university with a stupidly easy course, then I made free software my dissertation project so I could work on it, then I worked freelance and if I can earn 100 pounds a day and only need about 500 pounds a month to live off that leaves a good three weeks every month for playing around with free software. Easy.