The premier IT conference in Australia, LCA, commences tomorrow with several mini-confs covering subjects such as Linux in Education, GNOME, Debian, MySQL and Linux research to name but a few.

This year I've splurged on a professional ticket and it appears that was a bit of mistake - because as a result of election campaign, crop growing and client commitments, I am going to miss large chunks of the conference. I'm hoping to at least make the open day and the Penguin Dinner. While these are good events to make, they will not make up for all the great presentations I'll miss.

There's one talk that I consider a "must see" for conference goers - Carston Haitzler's Desktops on a diet. Carston not only regularly challenges the accepted norm of Linux, Apple and Windows desktops with brilliant insights but also backs it up with code, as anyone has run the pre-releases of Enlightenment 0.17 will attest.

See you there (at times!)