FOSDEM was tiring, but not exhausting, this year. I may be getting better at this game, and one unique incident occurred in that Sebas, Paul and I were at a dinner table all drinking mineral water. The friday night was epic and saturday a lot tamer. I think a lot of people felt that way. Brussels traffic continues to be my personal bugbear. But it took Sebas, Jos and myself only three hours to get home from the ULB by car (just as long as the train ride would have taken, but more convenient when hauling 40 pounds of computer equipment).

So in terms of what happened at FOSDEM Pino and Harald sum things up pretty well: there were many many interesting talks to attend. Unfortunately, I only got to attend one talk (and give one demo of SQO-OSS in the research room). The rest of the time was productively spent talking to many many different Free Software people: users, developers, translators and researchers. So I’m glad I didn’t go for the talks, I would have been annoyed at my inability to attend most; but since I go for the people, explaining how KDE4 works in a cross-platform way (we had Solaris, MacOSX and Linux running side by side) is a good thing to do. Chatting about font rendering is good. Looking for locale issues when using Strigi in GNOME apps is good. Pondering developer motivation is good. There was a lot of goodness at FOSDEM.

Pascal Bleser (sp?) is just awesome at organizing (for putting this whole thing together); his daughter (she looks to be about two years old) is just cute as a button. And only two-thirds terrified of all these weird people. I had to do some digging in my memory to be able to ask her about her lady-bug ring in French, but that turned out for the better because later I was answering questions about KDE EDU in French as well. Anne-Marie, we missed you.

Wayback Machine is awesome, Wayback links are marked like this.