If you didn't hear the news, conference registration for LISA13 is now open!

There are discounts galore, too. Register before October 15th to save hundreds of dollars by using the Early Bird discount. You can also save if you work for the government, or a nonprofit, or if your employer sends more than five people to LISA. Check out the registration discounts page for more info.

The conference is being held in Washington, DC this year, from November 3rd - 8th at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park. As always, there's a great conference discount on rooms, and the location is great. We're not deep in tourist central, but we're almost across the street from the National Zoo, the National Cathedral, and the United States Naval Observatory, which you probably know from its famous NTP service, tick and tock.

Training starts on Sunday as always, and we've got a strong opening session. Two full day courses (including a new class called SRE University!) as well as eight half day classes are a heck of a way to start a conference. It doesn't lighten up at all as the week progresses, either.

Something I'm really looking forward to seeing is the new concept of a Hack Space. The idea is kind of like an applied hallway track, where you learn, discuss cool tech, and implement it. Some things will be guided, others will be free-form, but the idea sounds great, and it's a welcome addition to the LISA experience!

What also caught my interest was the addition of a new conference-within-a-conference, SESA'13, the Summit for Educators in System Administration. The idea behind this mini conference is that it is really hard to teach system administration, and we can only get better if we work at it together. For this reason, people interested in how to teach system administration to young sysadmins and to those who only want to become sysadmins are getting together at SESA'13. If this is something that you're interested in, then you need to sign up right now.

It's held on November 5th at LISA'13. Whether you come for the training, or you come for the awesome technical program (with keynotes by Jason Hoffman of Joyent or invited talks featuring Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTI), you can be sure that your time and money are well-spent, and you'll have a ton of new ideas to take back to work and implement. Because that's what it's all about, isn't it?

Register for LISA today, and I'll see you there!