my blog

Sunday 5 July 2009

Social Event at the Desktop Summit

Nokia is sponsoring a social event tonight for the GNOME and KDE communities, where people will be able to chat together about really important things, like the good food around here, or the nice sound of the sea when you sleep, or how walking in the sand can be hard.

The event will take place at the Terraza del Muelle at 21:30. I assume most people are like me and won't be able to even know where to go, so we have a meeting point at 21:00 at the Dunas Canteras Hotel (Calle Portugal Nº 68) — it's 10 minutes away from the conference venue and it's really easy to find: walk alongside the beach until you see a big group of people ;-)

Thanks Nokia, I'm sure we'll have fun!

[19:21] | [GNOME] | [#522]

GUADEC tidbits #2

  • First, for everybody in Gran Canaria: there's a hacker room at the Fataga hotel where you can hang out a good part of the night ;-) Just go to Fataga and go downstairs.
  • Robert Lefkowitz's keynote was great: he's a really talented speaker — definitely learnt things about how to do a good talk —, and you could read on various faces that people were enjoying the keynote. Liberal software is what gentlemen use sounds really cool. Not a big message that changes your life, but definitely an interesting way of thinking.
  • Walter Bender talked about Sugar, and learning. Definitely talked to me, since I've still some interest in teaching/learning from my past life. It was also cool to see him do the presentation inside a sugar session run in Xephyr.
  • For some reason, Sílvia (who's still doing an amazing job at the registration desk, with Gil) believes I could have sent her some openSUSE t-shirt without having her address. Really. How was I supposed to do? (Sure, I had forgotten about this since last GUADEC, but don't tell anybody).
  • Went to buy some quick food with Lucas, Diego and Benjamin. For some reason, Lucas keeps pretending he can understand Spanish, but when he was asked do you want something else?, he couldn't hide the truth... Luckily, Diego saved the day.
  • Stormy and the Board had a lunch with RMS (no, Diego, Lucas and I didn't eat twice), where we talked about C# and free software. No big surprise, but was still interesting.
  • Still trying to pronounce Germán's first name correctly. But I enjoy Jorge's name!
  • Lucas showed me Chrome. It starts fast. I mean, really fast. We compared with epiphany and, hrm, well, there's some progress to do there...
  • Met Thorsten Prante, who knows a friend of mine in Grenoble, with no link to free software. Small world.
  • We hopefully managed to poison Luboš — he was the only KDE guy in our GNOME dinner. But we still love him :-)
  • Quite some people are coming to me and try to pronounce Vincent correctly. I just laugh at them evilly, of course! More seriously, that's cool to see how people are eager and curious about those little details which aren't really important. That makes a difference.
  • Just overheard in the hacker room that some Ubuntu people are working on Windows stuff. Ask Jorge for details ;-)

[00:12] | [GNOME] | [#521]

by Vincent