Guadec 2007
Monday I ran a few errands and whatnot and we prepared for our trip. The most unusual thing that happened today was a brown out which caused plenty of people to come out on their terraces and ask what was going on to the street. We got to the airport nice and early but then had our flight delayed by three hours! We got meal vouchers and I translated to the English people traveling to Birmingham that the shop only had the option of jamon serano and patatas bravas for us to eat. We arrived at our hotel and got to sleep around 430am.
We are in Birmingham for the GUADEC (gnome conference). This is held at the conservatory close to the heart of town and near some gorgeous civil buildings. I was a little worried about coming along because I’m primarily a web developer so I’m not that interested in the desktop - as long as the browser works, an exaggeration ofcourse. Saying this I do use a lot of applications to do my work. However this Guadec seems to have plenty of application based talks, discussing where their applications are going and what funky new features they have so that’s very interesting to me. Then plenty of people have been saying that the desktop needs to concentrate more on web applications and web developers, which is pretty special, though I’m not sure that I care too much about that happening.
Tuesday night was the Collabora/ Openedhand party at the Australian bar ‘Walkabout’ We ate upstairs where there was plenty of yummy pub food then we had a lot of free drinks downstairs which was packed full of hacker friends. We were lucky enough to meet some guys that will be working in the same office as Jan when he gets to Sun. After the party some of headed to a wild club up the road and we had yet another sleepless night.
Wednesday there were interesting talks again and we had dinner at a nice bar called Bennet Hill, then a drink at the hill with friends. When I got back to the Etap hotel my electronic key didn’t work in the lock and after that was sorted out with new cards being made I found the desk was all put together in neat piles of papers and the 25 euros I had stashed under them was gone. hotel did nothing about it so I’ll probably review them badly.
Thursday, Another full day of great talks including Thomas’s talk about project management and releasing your project. That night we had the LUGRadio party at the Hill then on to next door for more drinks then we had a little party in Wims room.
Friday the final day of the conf for me. I think I’d like to write an application with python and gtk and whatnot, I’d like to use fspot and gimp better for my photos(though I do store all my photos in Australia not on my laptop). I’m not sure what else I decided on here or what other things have changed. One of the conf organised arranged for me to get Ladies tshirts which rocked because I registered very early and they ran out for some reason earlier. There was a good talk on writing gnome apps with python. We went for dinner in a little group of gstreamer related people to SOMAGA across the road from the hotel, which was a great african food restaurant (nigeria and kenyan based) even the yummy guinness was imported from Nigeria.
