Thoughts and so on regarding FOSDEM:
- Booking the first hotel solely based on price, overall review figure (didn’t read the review themselves), location (city centre) and free wifi availability resulted in a nice hotel and ensured I didn’t spend too much time on that (ignoring the non-hotel things I was investigating before).
- Still don’t understand why many people from Brussels pretend they can’t speak Dutch
- Perhaps better if you’ve gotten used to it, but I can’t easily find my way in that city
- While attending the GNOME stand for a short while I noticed the following things:
- The people usually attending those stands are amazing. I only attended for 1 or 2 hours (not sure how long it was).
- We sold loads of t-shirts
- I got a nice Mandriva t-shirt from Frederic Crozat
- Not too many men ask for size S
- A lot of questions on why we had those Nokia devices and how GNOME was involved
- The GNOME event box is really nice
It has a beamer, screen, webcam, nokia devices, etc. Although 3 digits is not enough for a padlock (figured out the combination for one of the locks, box itself was unlocked anyway). - Someone strongly suggested we should add a pink theme
- A lot of people asked if the stickers were free
Really nice compared to the (not software related) stand where everything was taken if not bolted down - The t-shirts were only 5 EUR for foundation members. Asking why people weren’t a foundation member resulted in some nice answers (often “not yet”, although 2 seemed to imply they were KDE e.V. members, not sure why they didn’t say so)
- Some electricity problem in Rotterdam meant the train went via Utrecht instead. Including transfer an (estimated) 1.5 hour addition to my travel time. Heard the “I’m never doing this [taking the train] again”. Well, it is far easier to recall one bad experience instead of adding up all the hours standing in traffic. Not implying that I was happy with the extra travel time. Service was good though, they said which track to go to for all the stations they missed, this including departure times.
- While in the train, I had some fun trying to find out stuff about the people traveling with me. Likely a result of watching this video.
- Some people carry around a CD player as well as a MP3 player and use both.
- Regarding FOSDEM 2009:
- Perfectly organized
- Loved the cloak room (left my luggage there)
- Loads of volunteers. Thank you all!
- Great signs everywhere
- Bus ride to Brussel-South station was very welcome, especially as the FOSDEM site included an estimated arrival time (made planning easy).