[NB: there seems to be a pattern of gnome-blog eating my posts, but I can’t figure out what it is. Blah. :/]
For the record, I wish to say ‘engorged cock.’
Put up the rest of my GUADEC Stuttgart pictures. Please add your pics to the list in the Wiki.
I told Roozbeh after the general meeting at GUADEC that there was a risk that I’d leave GUADEC actually demotivated this year. That didn’t happen; the party on the second night and very, very long talking with some good friends on the last night put the important thing- which is working with good friends to do important, cool things– back in perspective. I’m still frustrated by some stuff going on, of course, but overall, I’m fairly positive and I’m going to work harder to cut down on the frustrating stuff so I can focus my energy on the good stuff.
Some other highlights besides those two long nights with many friends:
- Another fun marketing BOF. Some very good ideas were thrown out- I think it’ll help get some more new blood and frame our language and tactics better. Notes up on the wiki soon.
- Saw my first ☠ demo. It has changed radically from the description I first saw of it (which I thought at the time was insane), and I look forward to seriously using a more robust version- I think it’ll really improve some of our communications processes, and probably more importantly, serve as a great testbed for a collaborative future.
- Met tons of people, of course. Listing them would inevitably mean I forgot some…
- Talking some with Christian Meyer about the gnoppix/liveCD stuff. Some good ideas there, and hopefully we’ll keep moving that forward and keep growing that micro-project community.
- Dinner Wednesday night on the garden. Long, lazy, no pressure. All good. And I ate in the presence of a Master of the Lazy Side of the Force. Sort of like Yoda, except that he is so perfect in his laziness that I can’t see him ever taking on a student.
Master of the Lazy Side of the Force, and his arch-nemesis, Darth Owen. - Meeting John Rice at the Ad Board. John is new in the Sun crew, and seems to have a lot of energy and interest in doing stuff well.
- Bryan Clark’s t-shirt collection.
- Quality talks with Seth and Havoc. I have too few of those, sadly.
- The power of the lazyweb translating the plaques from my Berlin trip before I’d left the country.
Some minor negatives:
- Organization and goals of GUADEC. How do we reach out to governments and users while still keeping things clear and interesting for hackers? And how do we fix communication so that local volunteers feel like it is their conference too? Overall the conference went very well, but we can do better, and with less effort.
- An IBM sales/marketing dude (rightfully and usefully) urging us to focus our marketing on the things we do best, and then following up by basically saying that we aren’t a desktop, we’re a reliable, cheap frame for thin clients. Blah. I’d rather lose on the desktop than ‘win’ as a thin client.
Random German and travel observations:
- German architecture seems in general very forward looking/experimental, possibly partially for the same reason as Chicago- had it, got it burnt down, got to start mostly tabula raza.
- I saw Trabants for the first time. One more piece of car history. Not quite Robert’s Poignant 959, but close.
- Germans seem to be the only Europeans who actually pay people to check train tickets.
- Finally had good German food- either I just had bad days in Nuremberg or maybe there is something to Schwabian food as distinct from Bavarian. The Bavarians seem to win on beer, though, from my light sampling.
- Turns out that traveling next to someone who has to buy two tickets is a good thing; they only take up 1.5/1.75 seats, so you have more space to spread out than you
By the way, someday a merciful god will give me bullet points in gnome-blog-poster.