Today was a good day. Tiring but rewarding.

The day started late, for the second time this week. I slept in a little longer than I should have, which meant I skipped breakfast and grabbed a quick shower before starting the 10 minute walk to the conference from the dorms. I rang Telstra on the walk and got my phone sorted out - I had been banned after forgetting to pay a bill for too long. Bugger. Adam met me on the walk and we hurried off to try and win an IBM X40 ThinkPad. They’re giving away one each morning but you have to be at the keynot to receive it. Sneaky trick to ensure you actually rock up :)

We didn’t win the laptop, but did get to hear a good talk from Tridge.

After morning tea Pia Smith^HWaugh did a talk titled “Code vs. Culture”, which was a refreshing change from the tech-heavy seminars we have had so far, and will get for the rest of the week. She talked about how we’re divided among the coders and the advocats, and how we need to love each other more. She sparked a bit of discussion about the FTA and how it impacts on Free and Open Source projects, which was going to get the crowd talking. I best liked her discussion where she compared the FOSS community to a family, saying that even if you have an uncle you don’t like, or a cousin that’s a pain, they’re still your family so you’re working towards the same goals so you love them.

Bdale gave an almost Linux-exclusive talk about bouncing radio signals off the moon which was really interesting and fun to listen to. At the beginning of the talk he said it was going to be a “Bdale tells a story” kind of presentation so I knew I’d be in for a treat. He did talk about some Python he’s writing to control his dish, so it was kinda related to LCA :)

After this I saw a talk about Asterisk, which did two things. Firstly it made me want to get my cards off Steve, and secondly it made me sad to know that i386 is the only supported platform. I wanted to use either my Qube or the Sun ULTRA 5 as a PBX, but it looks like that won’t work. Maybe I can further justify a super-server in the rack? One server to rule them all?

During lunch we came back home and I wrote about the morning’s keynote. Before this we had some Asian food which was OK.

The afternoon saw Martin Pool talk about bazzar-ng, the versioning software that Canonical are having him develop. I was told I look like him, so I wanted to see what he looked like too :) He has glasses, and I should. My eyes are sore. In this talk I got to see Mark Shuttleworth speak for the first time. I’m really looking forward to his talk tomorrow, and will try to get my copy of the Ubuntu Hoary CD signed for maximum fanboying. He brought a 1000 CDs with him on his jet, Canonical One. Some life hey…

We blew off the last talk and instead did some washing to prepare for Sydney on Saturday. After the washing was dried we went to see Bruce Willis’ new film, Hostage. It was what I expected, and made a change from looking at a screen… hang on a sec…