I’m staying at the campus (student) accomodation, which is fab, people call it “5 star student accomodation”. We did two dinners in our full kitchen, pasta Sunday night, and Indian curries on Tuesday.

The swag is cool too: a simple calico bag, a deck of cards (Tux backed), a Tassie picture Rubik cube; all fun and/or actually useful. I’ll see if I can take pics of all items and upload to Flickr so it can be shown on http://swagreport.com

One curious thing is that hardly any geeks seems to be playing with the cube… I’ve been solving it for a few people who did dare, and the organisers have asked me to have a table at the Open Day on Saturday to help any others that want to have a “safe play”. I first learnt how to do the cube while at primary school in Amsterdam, so I’ve got about 32 years of experience ;-)

At the Penguin dinner last night we had a fundraiser for research to save the Tasmanian devil. They are severely threatened by an infectious cancer. Bdale Garbee’s wife donated a fabulous photo print, which provided the basis for the action led by Rusty Russell. It’s a kind of tradition that other things get bundled into the auction. Flame Herborn offered is QLD “GEEK” license plates for a year, Monty Widenius matched a bid (in donation), and at some point someone offered a considerable sum if Bdale Garbee were to shave his beard (auctioning off hair is another tradition, previously people like Jeff Waugh and Rusty Russell have lost head hair and moustache).

Anyway, Bdale was looking a bit distressed, and he felt a tad better when I offered my head hair (much as it is ;-) to help the Tas devil and in honour of my 40th birthday a month from now. A consortium of about 20 people put up the very considerable winning bid – Elspeth Thorne’s Mazda RX-8 will show off the GEEK plates for the coming year, very fitting.

And so it appears that I’ll be losing my hair on Friday morning, with Linux Torvalds doing (some) of the shaving honours. We’ve been looking for volunteers so he can practise (hacking kernels is not quite the same skill) but so far this has been unsuccessful ;-)

I’ve been told a bald head can be colder than imagined, and thus I might go acquire a beanie some time today.