Back from my 10 day trip to Belgium. I have an absolutly wonderful time visiting thomasvs, my cousin and Wim and Michelle. It is incredible how much you feel you have done during a vacation when traveling so much around being with different people.

FOSDEM was fun too, not really because of the talks (even if some of them was very interesting), but mainly due to being able to hang out with so many fun people in the GNOME community. I never liked going to LUG meetings and similar due to them tending to be way to nerdy in my opinion, but GNOME gatherings on the other hand tend to be attended by very outgoing and entertaining people. The fact that people are able to bring their non-techie girlfriends/wives and they actually enjoying hanging out with the GNOME crowd in the evenings is a testament to this. Not to say that there are no GNOME people out there lacking people skills, there are, but they do in no way dominate the field when Gnomes gather.

Anyway back in Norway now with a lots of things on my agenda, like making some gstreamer related releases, writing some business proposals, work related tasks, making a new GNOME summary, preparations for the Oslo Summit, try to get themeing more clean in GNOME2 and so on.

Also got to see a lot of Belgium during my stay, at least the Flemish part. Spent time in Gent, Brussel, Antwerpen and Leuven. I liked them all even if the weather was colder/wetter than what I had hoped for. While writing this I started pondering on how quickly I have come to consider the people I stayed with there my friends, then realized it hadn’t really been quick at all, considering all the time I spent chatting with them. Yet I think that having seen and talked to these people in real life from time to time over the last few years is what have made them true friends in my view as opposed to people I just have a friendly relationship with over IRC. IRC is a great way to get to know and keep in touch with people, but I feel that the medium do not allow for the forging of true friendships, you need to meet up face to face somewhere for that to happen.