Annoyingly mediocre long weekend

[fivemack]

Going to Brussels from Cambridge by bus and plane, rather than by train, for the sake of a small monetary saving was completely daft; Brussels airport is well outside the city, and it took 9:15->6pm to get there and 10:30->5pm to get back. If I'm going to travel nine hours, I at least want to be the other side of the Alps or the Atlantic; if I'd taken the train, I'd have had time to see more of Brussels than the Grand Place and the tram route to the university where the conference was held.

FOSDEM 2006 was a gathering of free-software developers plus enormous numbers of hangers-on, in which number I count myself. Google was there, in small force handing out migraine-inducing polychrome flashing badges, but no other interesting-sounding employers; besides, I have a job now which I didn't when I planned my trip.

There were some interesting talks: Jon Haslam from Sun showing off DTrace, a not-very-free-software tool which lets you do amazing inspection of the details of running systems to watch the weird interactions and ask very directly where all your performance is going, an interesting-looking Gnome video editor. Jeff Waugh from Canonical talked about what Ubuntu was trying to do, but in absurdly broad terms, and taking the relevance of Free Software to the convention-of-human-rights Freedoms as read. The Grand Place in Brussels has some spectacular fret-work in stone. I was a bit surprised to realise that, in this country where everyone would understand you in either French or German, I gravitated to German.

But there was a general feeling that this was an excuse for a huge number of geeks to go and drink beer in Brussels. Brussels beer is undoubtedly good; I got through a fair amount of the temptingly cherry-flavoured Kriek. But there was an immense feeling of undirectedness; there's that traditional maxim that a nerd is a geek with a purpose, and there were many fewer nerds there than I'd have hoped for. Throughout the conference, I had St Peter's admonition to Tomlinson in my ears:

"By the worth of the body that once ye had,
give answer -- what ha' ye done?"

Comments

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

You should have hung around with us darcs people - we spent a lot of time discussing the theory of patches, which I think you would have found pretty interesting.

I agree that without some purpose I would have found the whole thing quite boring, so I don't think I'll be going again unless there's a similar promise of getting together with an interesting set of people.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

They sing that in one of Pamela Dean's Secret Country books. I can't imagine a tune for it that isn't horribly incongruous.

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

The Grand Place, Belgian beer and waffles (and the art if you like that) are the only real reasons to visit Brussels. I like it as a city - I've spent enough time there it feels a bit like home in some ways, and it has some bits that are vaguely worth seeing, but you haven't missed anything major. Train is definitely the easiest way to get there though.

French or German

[(Anonymous)]

It's French and _DUTCH_, oh yeah, there is a german speaking part in belgium, way to the east and they account for a very small minority. The dutch speaking people are the majority in belgium followed closely by the french speaking. In Brussels you're probably better of with french.

Re: French or German

[hsenag.livejournal.com]

I think the point was that the Dutch speakers would also understand German. Certainly most of the ones in the Netherlands seem to.

Re: French or German

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I speak Germany, and while I can sometimes make out the general jist of a written Dutch sentence, I wouldn't say it follows that the languages are similar enough for the speakers to *understand* each other.

Re: French or German

[brrm.livejournal.com]

Oops, that was me, and I speak *German*. :)

[tea-cantata.livejournal.com]

Very belatedly: Have you done anything about your FOSDEM photos?