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First official day of LCA2003 today.. went to a well attended talk by Rasmus Lerdorf about some funky stuff you can do with PHP.. learnt about a lot of things I didn't know PHP could do, like generating Flash on the fly and reading EXIF data from JPEGs. He works for Yahoo! as a systems engineer. And there's a photo of him and daffy up on daffy's webpage ;)

But the coolest things was the opening talk.. basically a talk about the conference, the area, perth in general.. and then someone in a Tux suit came out and started jumping around stage. Tux was introduced as the special guest, then ran around some more.. then took off his Tux head.. and who would be inside but Linus Torvalds :) ( Linus as a penguin )

I got a seat near the front, and ended up sitting behind Linus's wife and three daughters.. hehe. Then near the end his wife left with one of the kids.. and when everyone started leaving, she still wasn't back, so his two other daughters (aged 2 and 4 probably) were just sitting there alone looking confused.. and did I mention they only speak finnish? So I got a kid who was a conference helper to look after them till the mother penguin, or Mrs Linus, as some refer to her, came back.

After the day's festivies, a bit of Medal of Honour : Spearhead was played, and then there was a shmoozing session. But the king penguin didn't come.. my aim for this week is to get a picture of Linus with Daffy ;) I know it's silly, but then that's daffy for you ;> Had a bit of a chat to a lot of people at the schmoozing, including a guy from Google.. Also, I met kaliteya after her partner picked me out at the schmoozing session. Had a bit of a chat to her just before I left.

Tomorrow more cool stuff awaits :)