Of course, Obama will ultimately be judged on how he performs over the next four or eight years, not for the quality of his speeches, just as our presenters here are judged on their deeds more than their words. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of seeing a number of talks by people who have backed up their words with actions, which is one of the things I like best about LCA — you’re listening to and watching the people who have actually created the things they talk about, for the most part, and who can talk with real authority on the matter. The Django tutorial was a great example of this, with Jacob being able to talk not only about how to use Django, but also how it works and why some of the design decisions appear to have been made with journalists in mind (well, basically because they were). Django’s something I’d wanted to find out more about for some time, and I’m really looking forward to using it now.

Before moving onto the aforementioned dinner, it would also be remiss of me not to mention Thomas’s talk on (really) remote management. A sign of how engaging that talk was is that even though I have little interest in the hardware and electronic side of things (which the talk was largely about), I was thoroughly entertained for 50 minutes.

Especially the repeated references to cow-related problems.

So, the Penguin Dinner. The food was outstanding and probably the best buffet I’ve had, the company great, and the amount of money raised for research into saving the Tasmanian Devil quite remarkable. Which is likely to also describe how Bdale will look after he’s been shaved by Linus.

If I have a complaint about the dinner, it’s that the "auction" process is entirely too drawn out for people like myself who don’t have the means to take part. I realise it’s an LCA tradition, but there’s an argument that it’s gone a bit too far in the last few years.

Today, in no particular order: Wikia, Klingon, Inkscape, more coffee.

I find myself strangely fascinated by this election. I mean, Barackstar is pretty obviously going to win, unless the pollsters are having an even worse year than politicians without any common sense, but after the dull 2004 campaign (not to mention the WA state election that excitement forgot a couple of months back — at least until the votes started getting counted), it’s just nice to have an interesting contest.

For the rest of my day, editing, stop-motion filming, and cooking a chicken tikka masala await.

Man, I just hope this election’s called early so that I actually get most of that done.

* This AST, not this AST. Don’t get them confused. It’s embarrassing trying to parse some source code and realising you’ve just got Tanenbaum on a plane instead of loading the syntax tree library.†
† Yep, I think end of semester madness has set in again.