I’m in Tasmania all this week on a mini holiday, actually I’m going to be doing Shaolin Gung Fu training with a master I used to study with 10 years ago. It was certainly fun transporting my weapons by plane 
Hooray! I’m staying in St Helen’s and travelling through Launceston to get here and back.
Anyway, back to FOSS. I have a smallish hard disk in my laptop (40GB) which has pretty much filled up. I bought a new 160GB hard disk ($85, bargain!) but didn’t bring any bits to do the transfer to Tassie with me. St Helen’s is a very small town. About 7,000 people (only a little bigger than my hometown). Anyway, I thought I’d try my luck and see if there was a local computer shop. Bingo! I went in and they had the parts I needed and then came the hard part:
“Do you have any Linux CDs”
The man looked at me a little confused at said “I don’t think there is a difference between CDs that work on Linux and ones that work on Windows”. My heart fell but I persevered with “no, I mean a CD with a Linux operating system, preferably bootable”. He had a spark of recognition and referred me onto one of his workmates who, lo and behold, had many versions of Linux on hand! Rock! We then had a great chat about FOSS, I mentioned that linux.conf.au is in Hobart in January, and why they should _all_ go along. I also invited them to a talk I’m giving at Launceston to TasLUG folks about FOSS, the Census and the OLPC project. They were very interested which was cool, and I think I convinced them about the value and fun of participating in the community 
Hopefully we’ll have a few more enter the fold, mua ha ha!