HCC
What? HCC! HCC is originally a weekend dedicated to computers, in the centre of Utrecht (Jaarbeurs Hallen). People from all around the country come to see new stuff from companies such as IIyama, Creative, Microsoft, etc. It was quite sad to see the amount of “foldersnollen” (those are 17-year-old girls dressed in slut-like clothes that are trying to make you read advertisements; if I wanted to see that I’d have been in Tivoli last friday), “gilmeesters” (those are stages with men screaming about everything and nothing, and a whole crowd behind the stage that screams back when he tells them to; he usually gives away free keycords, or he has foldersnollen at the corners of the stage to do this for him) and the amount of bad-quality (too loud) noise (especially in GameExpo) in this year’s edition.

There was a small corner for Linux-based computing, organized by NedLinux (an online Linux-oriented forum), NLLGG (Dutch Linux user group) and KDE-NL. Unfortunately, no sign of life from GNOME-NL there, but at least something positive. Partly my own fault, I could (should) have helped organizing if I expected GNOME-NL to do something visible… Ohwell.