I am at linux.conf.au this week, along with a few hundred other people (glynn, jdub, hypatia, jamesh, mrd, havoc, ... the list of familiar faces is endless).

Gave my first (of four) talks (paper here) at the Linux and OSS in Government mini-conference this afternoon. I managed to avoid embarassing myself and some people stayed awake long enough to ask questions. One cannot ask for more.

The government mini-conference is really quite impressive. All day, it has been one speaker after another giving case study style presentations about the succesful use of Open Source software and ideas at both the state and federal level. Mine was the only talk all day that was not about a existing government installation or project (I was doing an advocacy talk). Normally, I suspect this kind of stuff would drive me up the wall, but the presentations have been very interesting and the between-talks talk (during coffee breaks) very motivating and intelligent.