Well!
deep breaths - the VITTA (http://www.vitta.org.au) conference opens on Monday. It has nothing in common with linux.conf.au (http://linux.conf.au) other than the fact I'm organising both conferences, and they both have something to do with IT. Albeit at very different ends of the scale.
VITTA is the Victorian IT Teachers Association - and they run this conference every year for a broad range of teachers using computers in schools, teaching IT and computing, or just using IT in innovative ways... The theme this year is "Rethinking education: you say you want a revolution?" It's a question. On purpose. The theme was determined in February this year - but it's been thrown into sharp relief by the Federal Election campaign... The Opposition promises a computer at school for every senior student... Great - but are they also going to resource the teachers to help make the most of this? I hope so. I hope organisations like VITTA will be able to assist schools, educators and students thrive and exploit the potential of this promise. If it actually happens.
So... linux.conf.au had a milestone this weekend too - we closed Early Birds Regos, because we'd run out of Early bird slots, the early birds who actually paid, will have got the discount rate, the early birds who just registered, and didn't pay, have missed out. There's been some grumblings about this. We're only counting paid registrations, and while I sympathise with the grumblers, it's really the only way we can be fair, as we do have limited seats this year...
And they're now 50% sold, with 2 months still to go.
And the shwag has started arriving too! :) I'm looking forward to sinking more time and energy back into linux.conf.au after I'm done with the VITTA conference...
In other news - apologies for the dodginess of the website - we have 2 issues we're contending with - 1 - the authoritative DNS for conf.au is in Thailand, and - 2 - the VM we're running the website on keeps running out of RAM. Whilst we're 'working' on these issues, they're a bit outside our control. Believe me this is as frustrating for us, as it is for all of you, but all I can do at this point is apologise... and say "persevere".