(apparently I don’t have a picture of her doing anything particularly nerdy)

I first met Alice[1] not too long after she was hired by Google, as the sole female engineer in their Sydney office. Happily, that doesn’t seem to be the case any more, but she continues to do a lot of great work as an IT evangelist. Along with Pia Waugh, Alice works with school-age girls encouraging them to get involved with computing, most recently at the Go Go Girl for IT event. She’s also been involved with local Aussiechix events, helping run the micro-confs in Sydney and Melbourne last year, as well as being involved in Linuxchix miniconfs at recent LCAs.

I’m always impressed by her encyclopedic knowledge of the issues women face, both in the professional IT sphere and elsewhere, and the passion and clarity she brings to defending her rights and the rights of other women. I listened in on Alice’s group during the Evangelising IT workshop at the Linuxchix miniconf this year, which came up with some excellent strategies for trying to keep girls (and boys as well!) interested in computing. It was one of the highlights of LCA for me this year.

On a completely unrelated note, Alice is a very talented photographer who shares my love for old-school picture making. Having a chance to learn from her both behind the camera and in the darkroom is just another reason for me to feel inspired by her work.

[1] For the record, I believe this happened shortly after my then-housemate, Jamie also started work at Google. I arrived home one afternoon to find half the Google office in our pool.

So, LCA charity auction. Last night I had the sheer pleasure of being part of the chaotic mayhem that ended in a $10600 winning bid (earlier claims of $10500 were circulated before we knew for sure how much we actually had) for Karen Garbee’s beautiful award-winning print. Rusty informs me that’s the highest bid for an LCA auction, which I find slightly surprising but awesome if it’s true. All proceeds from the night are to be donated to tassiedevil.com.au, funding valuable research in to the Tasmanian Devial Facial Tumour Disease, which is slowly wiping out these unique and ridiculously cute creatures. If you haven’t already, please go and visit the site, read about the plight threatening these creatures, and give what you can.

Tasmanian Devil, by Darren Leal

Ironically, I’ve been on the verge of buying another print in aid of this fund for a little while now. For LCA attendees who’ll be hanging around in Tasmania post-conference, I strongly suggest visiting the Cradle Mountain park. And while you’re there budget a couple of hours to see The Wilderness Gallery. Amongst half a dozen exhibitions of gorgeous local flora and fauna, you’ll see this little guy. A couple of limited runs of this print are being sold as a fundraising exercise. I’m completely and utterly in love with this picture, and if I regret anything it’s not winding up with a copy hanging on my wall.

There’s been a lot of other coverage of the auction, but I thought I might offer my point of view of the proceedings. Bidding got off to a good start. Early standout was Jamie at my table, bidding $1000 and promising to donate the contents of his wallet if he was outbid — dropping quite a lot in to the bucket when the inevitable happened. The price continued before stalling at $2000. An attempt by Rusty to end the auction was stalled at the last minute by a Linux Australia rep, and after a hasty conference they came to the table promising to match a bid over $2500 (to a limit of $10k). At that point it seemed logical that somebody raise the bid to $2500, so I did.

It sat there for a very long time, resisting all sorts of incentives. After Linus promised to include Tuz (the LCA logo for this year, see the photo at the start of this post) in the next kernel release I started seeing a couple of offers of financial assistance. But it was going very very slowly until some wag joked about Bdale shaving his beard. Not long after that the Collabora guys turned up at my table, offering to add $2500 to my bid if Bdale actually did shave. So, again, I stood up and offered $5000 in exchange for the beard.

At that point, the auction exploded. Caveats were added. Conditional donations appeared and were matched. Buckets passed around the room and filled (the casino offered to count the contents, which apparently made the organiser’s jobs much easier). Every time it looked like things might be dying down slightly, somebody else would come to my table and basically open their wallet. I personally completely lost track somewhere around $8k. But I do know that at one point during an internal audit we realised that we were bidding considerably lower than what we had in hand, leading to some spirited bidding against ourselves.

The final consortium, in approximately the order they joined, were:

• Neil (sorry, I didn’t get your last name)
• Daniel Stone
• Collabora (hah! corporate sponsorship!)
• David Woodhouse
• Matthew Garrett (another blank last name :-( )
• Jamie Wilkinson
• Elspeth Thorne

For raising $10600, clearly they all deserve a beer.

The final haul, in addition to the print that kicked it off, was also substantial. Mary Gardiner volunteered a spot on the papers committee for the next LCA. It took a considerably larger target to be given an opportunity to get off the committee, but we now have the out. Bdale finally agreed to doff the beard if the combined total reached $25000. At some point somebody suggested the shaving be done by Linus, and that’ll be going ahead some time fairly soon. Flame agreed to transfer ownership of his custom numberplates (“GEEK”, highly sought by Elspeth) for a year. My personal favourite appeared this morning, after some high-speed hacking:

And at the end of it all, I somehow ended up with the print. I’ve already prepared the story of how it’s valued at $36000 and a beard.

After careful experimentation, I have determined that a size 60 might be a bit too large for Taz.

In completely unrelated news, on the way home from dinner tonight with a group of a dozen or so, some lowlife threw a waterbomb at us from a speeding car. It hit me square in the middle of the chest, and the morons couldn’t even figure out to put enough water in to it to make it burst. Instead it just bounced off leaving me with a nice red welt. Turns out that trying to get up the hill to the university accommodation when you’re already winded and bruised is something of a trial.

So yeah. Taking the back streets might be slightly faster, but be careful out there kids. Unfortunately not everybody out there is blessed with common sense.

• Distance driven: 2163.7km. Plus another 30 or so tomorrow.
• Distance walked: *shrug* 30km? 40? Lots of short walks ranging from half an hour to half a day.
• Times passed through Hamilton: 4.
• Best place name: Lemonthyme.
• Best place name that I actually stayed at: Snug.
• Cutest town: Bothwell. It sits smack in the middle of a big pretty farming bowl. The pub is awesome. Bothwell Grange has colonial quirkiness down pat. The whole experience just made me want to squee.
• Most awe-inspiring experience: Driving in to Queenstown, from the south, at approximately 8pm. The landscape is stripped bare and looks completely eerie. The highway descends in to this martian environment via a series of wrenching switchbacks, and the low angle of the light really added to the atmosphere. It really was completely breathtaking.
• Number of anti-logging protests that I let timc (henceforth known as “The Infamous timc”) divert us to participate in: 0.
• Best house name in Doo Town: Xana-Du. Disappointingly nonconformist, but a clear winner nonetheless.
• Best parma: the Dover Hotel was good, but I think the gong is going to have to go to the Snug Tavern, merely for incorporating a chicken schnitzel about an inch and a half thick.
• Number of hydroelectric power stations visited: 3.
• Dumbest moment: It’s a toss-up between sinking six pints of Cascade at the Victoria Tavern the night we arrived in Hobart, or attempting to sleep off the massive hangover in the park in Parliament Square the next morning with no sunscreen.
• Most sombre moment: Standing by the pool in the memorial garden on the grounds of the former Broad Arrow Cafe in Port Arthur. The Port Arthur site is absolutely amazing, but I didn’t really get as much of the intense sadness that others report until I visited the memorial. A close second was reading wikipedia’s chilling account of the day while trying to work out the fate of the cafe building.
• Most brutal aspect of convict settlement: The dog line crossing the 100m wide isthmus between the Port Arthur settlement on Tasman Peninsula and the rest of the island. Cash, Kavanagh and Jones deserve mad props.
• Best word I have learned this week: “isthmus”.
• Completely unscientific remarkableness rating of the Remarkable Cave, where 1 is “not very remarkable at all, really”, and remarkable is remarkable: 0.
• Suggestions for enhancing the Remarkable Cave experience: When the track to Remarkable Cave has been closed for unspecified reasons for an unspecified period of time, consider renaming the site “Completely Unremarkable Carpark”.
• Number of small birds accidentally struck by our vehicle: 5. timc got off to a spectacular start with 2 flying in to the path of our car and glancing off the windscreen on the first day. Unfortunately I rallied bravely over the last few days with sparrows and the like flying under the car, taking off and then swooping back down under the wheel, and bouncing off my side mirror. I’m not proud of this statistic, but feel that it should be relayed as a warning to other motorists.
• Number of other animals killed: 0. Thankfully. Unless you count crickets, in which case the number is “enough to turn the front of our white hire car a kind of greeny-purple”.
• Biggest photographic non-sequitur: The picture at the head of this post is my current favourite photograph from Cradle Mountain. Note the lack of anything even vaguely resembling Cradle Mountain.
• Number of motorcycle show’n’shines attended: 1. In the delightfully named Ouse this afternoon.
• Approximate distance I have come to the southern-most point of Australia (not counting Antartic territories): About 5km north. We drove to Cockle Creek and spent a couple of hours walking around the shore of Recherche Bay to Fishers Point, and then headed a little way down the ocean coast. Apparently getting to the tip of South East Cape requires a tent and rations.
• Number of cans of Cascade I have drunk while drafting this blog post: 2.5. I’m allowing myself to drink more than usual because I’m on holiday. So there.

Tomorrow we wander back in to Hobart for the start of LCA. I’m slightly sad to be leaving off the true holiday part of this trip. I feel like I barely scratched the surface of some places, Port Arthur in particular. And there’s large swathes of the island completely unexplored — I’m looking at you, Launceston and Davenport and the entire north coast. But at the same time, the siren song of a week of LCA awesomeness is hard to resist.

• Somewhere to lock my bike up.
• Somebody to feed my cat (thanks for your last-minute save, Nicholas!).
• Plane tickets to Hobart.
• A hire car.
• A travel buddy, who I’m quite looking forward to finally actually meeting.
• A honking great big bag full of cameras.
• A music festival.
• Intentions to bump in to Alice and Jamie and Pia somewhere along the line.
• A week or so with a satisfying lack of any other plans.
• And at the end of all that, one of the best technical conferences on the planet.
• One and a half sleeps before it all starts!