Just came back from FOSDEM, man it was crowded! It’s usually full there because it’s a nice conference that kept it non-commercial focus but this year there where at least thirteen people in your personal space most of the time. It’s held in Brussels/Belgium at the Universita©Libre. The talks are in the lecture rooms and the booths of the projects are on the hallways. Which means you have to fit 27 gazillion people in a 2,5 by 20 meter tube. Like IKEA on a Saturday afternoon: chaos, it stinks and people breathe down your neck all the time. Ever read about the experiment of John Calhoun in 68? I was feeling like being part of a rollback of it.
Brussels is a nice city. The architecture reminds me of a little bit of Barcelona. Very Mediterranean for a City that is round about a hundred kilometers away from the north sea. Of course i only saw stuff trough the windows of the bus that took me to the university or by walking around to find a place to eat/drink. The night life seems nice. From what you can get at a night or two.
Our DevRoom was okay. We might want to try a better mixture of technical hands-on talks and things that are more in the project space which tend to be a little bit abstract. I hope that many people will watch the video recordings of the project related talks so they spark interest. Because they didn’t at the conference :-/ My pictures from the conference are online. AJ has also some online already and the videos of the Talks should be on the wiki in the next days.
A cool thing happened on our arrival at Brussels international airport on Friday. After we left the Airplane and got our luggage we wanted to leave the airport so we walked in the direction of the exit. After we made it half there, security guards were coming up and pointed us friendly and without any explanation back into the direction where we came from. We are good people so we of course followed their suggestion, walked back and followed some other exit signs. This lead us in a circle back to the security guards. They were still doing the same. Pointing people to walk in circles. We asked them what the matter was and why we couldn’t leave the friggn airport. They still didn’t give any explanation. Something smelled fishy. We walked back to the point we started from. Now some other security guards said we have to go downstairs. We ended up in the hall where the security check for the departure flights is. As far away from the exits as you can be. By the time we arrived it was already very crowded. So we sat around there for another 20 minutes until they announced something in French/Flemish and everybody started moving back in the direction of the exit. Still having absolutely no clue what exactly happened, we exited the airport. Later we found out that there was a bomb threat and apparently we were evacuated. It was kind of cool because telling us nothing worked well, everything was pretty relaxed and there was no panic at all.