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Academic head of the MIT Media Lab Alex Pentland and Eric S. Raymond (ESR), software evangelist and straight-shooting author of some of the Free software world's most influential essays, will be there. If you can cough up zero dollars (or the equivalent in lire, pesos, krugerands, galactic credits, etc.) and get to Boston on Friday (31st March) or Saturday (1st April), you'll be well met at the 3rd annual Geek Pride Festival.

The Festival is free and brought to you by Andover.Net / VA Linux, Addison-Wesley and SwitcHouse.

Also in attendance will be the esteemed Cmdr. Taco himself, Rob Malda, and Christopher Locke and David Weinberger, authors of The ClueTrain Manifesto. Listen to them address the assembled throngs, and ask questions. In addition to speakers, there will be food, chair massages, a $500 cash-prize Quake III competition, an install fest with support from the Boston Linux Users Group, and booths representing groups like Perl Mongers, the Free Software Foundation and more.

Roblimo will be there, enjoying the street party he secretly believes is being thrown for his and lovely wife Debbie's wedding anniversary, and JonKatz may be there as well. The first person to ask Katz about his dog and the manhole, then transmit a recording of his reaction to hemos, will win an as-yet-undetermined fabulous prize. If you can't make it to Boston for April Fool's Day, you can vicariously experience the gathering via downloadable video and audio, available for the same price as the festival, less the cost of getting there.

johnathan spectre wrote in to tell us about these really cool plasma shoelaces. plasticPaddy wrote in to tell us about SkyBird, a nifty remote-control ornithopter. Fire up the flux capacitor, because feebeling wrote in about this WWW guide, circa 1993. seizer told us about some crazy guy TCP/IP tunneling through E-mail: now that's dedication. Speaking of crazy people, Green Monkey scared me with his submission, a Web site devoted to Pokémon butts. From the self-referential bucket, the Webby Awards have nominated Slashdot in the 'Community' and 'Print and Zines' categories. Go Vote and we get some trophy or something. _damnit_ wrote in with a nice little piece on the Ides of March. In case you're in the greater Boston area, Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda will be speaking at the Geek Pride Festival at the end of the month.