It was FOSDEM time! After the guys somehow bribed the ferry staff to give us a cheaper ticket using a twix (all legit! He told us when you call up its loads cheaper), we were bound for Brussels, but not before a quick security check.
The ferry was fairly empty. We watched films on Dan's laptop and attempted to use the wifi. Tom had brought his i-phone (bring out the koolaid!) and I had a quick play. It's all very shiny, but still doesn't take my fancy. Unfortunately, Didi found a "fart machine" application, which was amusing, but somewhat embarrassing.
The driving parts were fairly so, so. Arriving in Brussels, we immediately notice how different driving here is. As Didi says "He who wins, is he who has the fastest car and largest horn". We parked up at our "hostel-hotel" hybrid and took our stuff up to the 5th floor, bit of a climb. The room was infact very good, for 250 euros (3 nights). There was a shower, TV and 4 beds, can't complain. Shame the wifi didnt reach to the 5th floor.
We ditched our stuff and went to find "delirium", where google were giving free beer to FOSDEM attendees. Unfortunately it was rammed. You couldn't even get close. A guy approached us saying that he was here for FOSDEM and needed someone to booze on with. This was Leo, a Brazilian debian developer living in Germany currently. We headed back the the grand place and found a nice little place where we bantered for a while with Leffe. Leo crashed on the floor of our room, as he had no place to stay :P
In the morning we drove to the Campus and met the various people that members of our group knew. Dag and the Centos team, Wim and the OpenBSD team etc. Watched some talks, KDE4.2 (shame nothing worked in the demo :o ), keynotes about the state of open source and some others.
We would have loved to have gone for the meal with the OpenBSD team, but unfortunately we had no cash. We were seriously skint, so we had to pass. Shame, because it's always fun to go drinking with those guys. Instead we met up with Matt, who I went to college with and who has now been working for Cisco Systems for about 2 years. A couple of old friends from Basingstoke were also visiting him, so we all met up and had a pizza and drank probably too much beer, ending up in a really dingy but cool pub called "port noir". This place was underground in what looked like a converted beer cellar, with arched roof, made of brick. Wooden tables in many small cavern like rooms. Very cool.
In the morning we watched some more talks, including Didi's talk on large LDAP configurations. I think that went fairly well.
After this we hooked up with Matt again and he gave us the tour at Cisco's Belgium office. All very shiny. Cisco branded mints for f**k sake. Free drinks on every floor, free fruit too. How many places do you know where employees can play pinball in the office (google employees need not comment, you probably have one each!). Most impressive was the lab, two huge floors furnished with racks and racks, as far as the eye can see of networking hardware and servers. You could not hear yourself speak over the cooling systems and fans in the systems. We dawdled around the isles admiring the hardware for a while. Even spotted some Ultra 10's and 5's! Cisco love their sun kit. No pics, sorry.
Sunday evening was a quiet one. We played about with QT4 and watched some britney spears thing on MTV, which made a change from this odd "Plop" kids program we had been watching each morning. Very odd, and i just found a web page on it and also torrent. Fun times!
So yah, that was FOSDEM. We enjoyed it, so thanks to Bournemouth Uni and Bristol Uni for helping out with some of the funding of the trip!
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