This afternoon we had a Debian meeting in Melbourne (Australia) arranged through the Debian-Melb mailing list.
We met under the clocks at Flinders St station, had lunch at a good Japanese restaurant, decided not to play LASER games (like paintball but with LASER guns instead of paint guns) due to the queue. The LASER games are at the Crown Casino, some people object to it on principle, but when you only use free tickets… One noteworthy thing about the casino is that they have a free cloak-room that stores bags (back-packs etc are not allowed on the gaming floor). I expect their cloak-room to be a little more secure than most places that you might stash your stuff (they have a reputation for security to uphold) so I felt safe leaving a back-pack containing a laptop in their care (it didn’t have any secret data and was a really old one).
After leaving the casino we had Gelati/Gelato ice-cream (Gelati is the plural of Gelato and either word may be used to describe Italian style ice-cream).
The general plan for the next meeting is to meet in the city at about 10AM on a weekend, play the LASER games, and then have lunch. Of course that would make it a greater requirement for people to arrive on time. ;)
While at the meeting we discussed in concept the idea of a Bug Squashing Party (BSP). I can get a free venue for up to 12 people outside business hours which is not far from the center of Melbourne and which has good net access and a good supply of keyboards, monitors, and other misc computer bits (even possibly some PCs that can have their hard drives temporarily replaced to test Debian stuff). One guy who is rather keen on this idea asked if it would be possible to bring sleeping-bags and sleep on the floor. I hesitate to ask the guy who owns the office about that, it might make him reject the idea entirely. So probably starting at about 10AM and going to 10PM would be enough. We could do that both Saturday and Sunday on some weekend or maybe even start on Friday night.
I’ve been planning to run a similar meeting to play Linux games which may end up as a games hacking party. I might get around to running that soon.