Friday, January 23, 2009

Bdale Makes the Cut

This year's linux.conf.au charity auction was going to help the "Save the Tasmanian devil" organization. Things started to get crazier and crazier, with strange attempts to get Linus to do something resulted in a change of the mascot for one release from Tux to Tuz.

As the crowd grew more frenetic, someone jumped in with a demand for Bdale's beard. Despite starting the whole thing off with a beautiful print of his wife's award winning photograph, he began to reconsider under the pressure. Arjen Lentz (who at the conference promoted http://bluehackers.org/) stepped up and offered the hair on his head if Bdale went through with it. Bdale did say if over $10,000 was donated then he would (although I'm not sure if he believed it was possible; I was very pessimistic on that myself). Matching challenges were also tossed out and taken up, and the final result was a total somewhere in the ballpark of $40,000 (au) being raised.

So come Friday around lunch, a huge spectacle unfolded as Bdale, Linus and Arjen prepared for their ordeal. Arjen went first, to allow for a little practice before the more difficult (and anticipated) task of Bdale's.

The event went off well, with much amusement, live tweeting, and even local television coverage. Once Linus had completed his arduous task with clippers (having foregone the hedge clippers he was first looking at) there was just a bit left for an actual razor. Being the wise man that he is, Bdale decided that he himself would do that close work. However, in the pause before that I caught a great shot that to me conveyed his great temperament and sense of humor about the whole thing, as he endured the temporary pain and embarrassment in order to be able to do his part in helping preserve one of God's great creatures here on earth.

2 comments:

Tina@ SendChocolateNow said...

That's what happens when a bunch of geeks get together and drink too much? Seriously, it was very magnanimous of him to shave his beard.

T.

Shelley said...

Raising the money to help the Tasmanian Devils was a very cool thing.