Thats right, from the heart of Wolverhampton, LUG Radio Live 2006 is this weekend, 22nd and 23rd July 2006 at the University of Wolverhampton’s Student Union bar and it’s only 5 of your GB pounds to get in, so you have no excuses for not being there. Tickets here.

If you’re not sure whether to come or not, you really should come. Last year was an absolute scream and made me feel very proud to be part of such a fun and welcoming community. There are some great speakers, including Mark Shuttleworth – Ubuntu head honcho and space travelling millionaire, Simon Phipps of Sun, Stephen Lamb of ahem… Microsoft, Michael Meeks of OpenOffice.org and many other things, ‘The Reverend’ Ted Haeger of Novell, Gerv Markham of Mozilla – one of last years highlights for me, Bastien Nocera of Gnome and Red Hat and Jonathan Riddell of Kubuntu.

Of personal interest to me are Jonathan Haslam on DTrace, John Leach on Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, Matthew Bloch on Virtualisation and Mirco Müller talking about Lowfat, amongst many, many more.

And of course who could forget LUG Radio community heroes Ben ‘mrBen’ Thorpe and Bruno ‘he’s basically French’ Bord, aka kNo`. Aside from being community heroes, they really are great guys.

On top of all this, there is also LAN gaming, BOF (birds of a feather) sessions, where you sit and discuss with like-minded people about your chosen BOF topic, then theres the exhibition area with the likes of Gnome, Ubuntu, Debian, O’Reilly, Fedora, Novell, Linspire, Bytemark, OpenSolaris and heaps of other people.

Also in line are are a LUG Radio Live recording and the shaving of Jono’s beard in aid of Amnesty International (donate here), the biggest donor will get to do the shaving.

Rumour has it, there are even going to be some girls there. Real ones. But you shouldn’t stare as Kat Goodwin, Jen Phillips and Phated will be talking about women in open source and probably about the attitude of all us slack-jawed male gawpers.

The schedule is here. Got nowhere to stay? The accomodation section is here.

Please come, it’s a truly great, heart-warming time. You may even get to see me so drunk I can only open one eye (again, though I’ll try not to bother Jonathan Riddell all night this time) and possibly see me in the most disgusting suit in the world (again, again).

Be there or be != geek.