Posted on by Olav Vitters

FOSDEM 2009

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).

3 Replies to “FOSDEM 2009”

  3. I was on a later train that went directly to Rotterdam and further according to plan, but because of some electricity problems on the way to Utrecht the “train manager” walked down the corridor and asked everyone personally if they were going to Utrecht and told them what to do. That’s what I call service!

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