Recently, Meredith and I spent a few beautiful days in Bali, Indonesia. I did have all intention to write a mini travelogue and publish it here, but in the weeks we’ve been back, it’s been crazily busy at work and in life.

We arrived late Monday evening, sans children (who had Meredith’s mother staying with them). My brother Charlie happened to be in town, so along with his friend, Rani, they were kind enough to pick us up from Ngurah Rai Airport, and in the middle of the night, we made our way to Nyuh Kuning, a small and quiet village just south of Ubud town center.

Our chosen hotel, Saren Indah, is tucked away on the southern end of the Monkey Forest, near the top end of Jalan Nyuh Bulan.

Replete with beautiful gardens, an inviting swimming pool, outdoor Bale style restaurant (open 7.30am – 10.30pm), and two story buildings housing the sixteen rooms, the place was fantastic. Either side of the property were rice fields, and although we stayed in one of the Garden rooms (lower floor), we’re assuming the views from upstairs would be great.

We ate and shopped, practised our Bahasa, and rode our two hired motorbikes, for the next four days, before sadly heading back to the airport early Saturday morning for the trip home. If you are considering a few days of downtime, you couldn’t go wrong with booking one of the many cheap flights to Bali, and relaxing in Ubud for a few days.

I’ve uploaded two videos that I took from the handlebars of the bike, using a loaned GoPro camera, designed for the purpose. This video shows a quick ride around Nyuh Kuning, and this video shows our ride from Jalan Hanoman in Ubud, over to Goa Gajah (Elephant Cave).

Terima kasih (thank you) for reading this post; I trust you’ll enjoy the videos!

Image: Photo of the reception Bale at Saren Indah Hotel, Ubud.

I was honoured to speak on day one of Edge of the Web 2009. My presentation, You Too Can be a Successful Freelancer, contained both personal stories of my freelancing years, as well as some of the material from my book, The Principles of Successful Freelancing.

I had a great time preparing it, and then delivering it to a enthusiastic audience (a huge thanks to you if you were there!), and have uploaded the slides to my SlideShare account. You can see them embedded below. The slides were featured on the SlideShare front page the day after I uploaded them – thanks SlideShare!

You can see a number of the presentations given at Edge of the Web 2009 on SlideShare here.

Image: Photo by Richard Giles. Original photo here.

There is less than two weeks until Perth’s second ever web conference; Edge of the Web 2009 gets underway, and the excitement is building!

One large element of the social aspects of web conferences is the ‘twitter back channel’, you know; the thoughts and musings of people who are attending the conference posted on Twitter.

With this in mind, I thought it worthwhile to go through the impressive speakers list, and link those who are on Twitter so you can also watch what the speakers are saying, before, during and after the crazy week we have planned.

Derek Powazek @fraying
Anil Dash @anildash
Alex Payne @al3x
Dmitry Baranovskiy @DmitryBaranovsk
Gary Barber @Tuna
Ruth Ellison @RuthEllison
Lachlan Hardy @lachlanhardy
Simon Pascal Klein @klepas
Kevin Yank @sentience
Miles Burke @milesb
Ash Donaldson @ashdonaldson
Matt Balara @MattBalara
Matt Didcoe @mattman
Scott Gledhill @gleddy
Nick Cowie @nickobec
Myles Eftos @madpilot
James McCutcheon @jamesmcc
Justin Mclean @JustinMclean
Darcy Laycock @Sutto

Remember, if you are attending Edge of the Web 2009, you should use #eotw09 as the hashtag. It’d probably be a good idea to also follow the @eotw Twitter account too!