It was a memorable visit to melbourne to give a talk for Semi-Permanent design conference. First off the trip getting to Australia was very, well.... LONG. Usually it is a long trip, but this one was made a bit a longer all because of a single bird....
Shortly after take off from LAX our Qantas 747 struck a bird, right in the nose cone of the plane. No only did it cause a huge crater in the nose of the craft, but internally it took out the planes weather radar. So once the plane got to cruising altitude the pilot announced, "we struck a bird after take off, unfortunately it damaged our weather radar and we can't fly across the ocean without it, so we'll need to return to LAX and assess the damage, but first we need to dump our fuel over the ocean, that will take about an hour. Also you'll need to stay overnight in L.A. until we can get a new plane into service..." D'oh!
here's a photo of the damage one little bird caused to a huge 747.....
But once we finally arrived in Melbourne we had a great time. The conference was held at the brand new Melbourne Convention Center which was pretty cool in it's self!
I had a great time talking with LA artist Jeff Soto, the guys from Three Drunk Monkeys, and the rest of the speakers as well as Murray Bell and Andrew and the crew of organizers. I also had a chance to speak to some of the attendees at the after party.
It was a great event and I hope to be able to speak at future events!
-Alx
