Life, the Universe, and Everything

Hmm, what’s going on?
Seems they are having a lot of trouble on our national webservers:

Isn’t it sad, by the way, that the HTML of the error message generated by Microsoft IIS contains 12 errors? Can’t they even get that under control? The Drupal error page on the other hand, which is even more complex, validates perfectly.

Yup, the Belgian Prime Minister using Drupal. And he really likes to show it too:

:-p

So, 12 out of 15 people showed up at Geekdinner
Paal and I had a good time.
I came in far too late myself, as I was stuck until 19:00 in Ghent at IBBT where I was invited for a discussion about
the recruitment of international high-profile ICT candidates in Belgium. I
gathered some very good insights there, I must say. Happy to know that there
will be a follow up on that.

Anyway, I made it just in time for the soup, so I didn’t miss all that much
after all. I was happy to see some new faces, like Rein, Frank and Ywein. Welcome! :-)

The food was good, but I’m not so happy with the restaurant though. When I was
making the reservation last week, they really made a big fuss out of it. They
were too busy, asked me if I couldn’t arrange it on another date, asked me to
provide full menu insight on beforehand, wanted to shove up vegetarians a fish
meal, etc… It turned out that, except for us, only 5 more customers were present that
evening. Talking about planning and customer services… Next Geekdinner
Limburg will be held somewhere else, probably just in Hasselt, as nobody really
seemed to mind the distance (and apparently we can handle without the Ghent
troup :-p). Kris even mentioned
Ostend or Roeselare as location for a next Geekdinner! :-)

After the meal, everybody moved over to our
office for the waffle dessert prepared voluntarily by Wouter. I catered for the ingredients and the
location and stuff, while he did the actual cooking. I didn’t get enough eggs
though, and apparently he wasn’t too happy
about that. Sorry, Wouter! Anyway, I do think that making waffles for 5 or
for 10 people doesn’t make that much of a difference, whereas for preparing a
whole meal, the amount of people really does have an impact.

Just found out now that we didn’t take any photos. Too bad!

Thanks to all those who showed up. May I, by the way, remind you that this was
the first Geekdinner to have more than one girl? ;-)

Just came back from the first BarCamp in Lille and I had a great time.
You could tell it was a French organisation, as there were abundant amounts of food… and what kind of!
It started off with a buffet with different kind of cookies, fresh strawberries and cherries.
Several types of drinks were made available and later on they started coming around with warm pancakes with a dressing of your choice.
At the end of the day threre was a free ice cream for all attendees.
And I was told I missed the cake…
Who doesn’t love the French? ;-)

As far as the talks are concerned, I was a bit disappointed to find a large focus being put on Enterprise, Management, Marketing and other things you can prepend to 2.0.
For the tech-savvy, there wasn’t all that much to be learnt.
I guess this had to do with the organisation team (and the location) being from the ESC Lille.
It was interesting nevertheless.

Again, Raphaël and I gave a presentation about MyOwnDB and again, we got some nice reactions.
Getting pretty nervous by the way for our GPL release in a couple of weeks!

It was nice to see how many Belgians made their way to Lille (which is so close to Belgium that the train station has more Dutch signs than the train station in Leuven has French sings).
I arrived together with Patrick and met new, interesting people like Michaël Uyttersprot and Vincent Battaglia.

Tomorrow, I’ll be present at Open Source Expo 08 in Karlsruhe.
Looking forward to it!

So, yet another Geekdinner post. The
restaurant wants us to provide a menu overview on beforehand. Each menu
includes a starter (soup) and a main course (meat, fish or vegetarian). No
dessert, as Wouter and I will cater for a Nero-style waffle fest afterwards!

I initiated some creative
Doodle usage, to find what you want.

Please make sure to mark your preference before Friday, 23rd of May. The
default choice is meat. Thank you!

Important message (hmm, after only a mere 4 months of blogging, I’m already assuming people are actually reading this :-)):
Geekdinner Limburg won’t be held at Paal 26, as previously stated.
Earlier this week, Loes and I went for dinner at Ten Caetermere.
I found it in so many ways better than Paal 26 that I promptly decided to move the whole Geekdinner thing there.

It’s only 300 metres further from our office than Paal 26 is.
This means we probably can’t make it on foot from the restaurant to the office for Wouter‘s great waffles, but there’s enough parking space at our office to solve that problem.

Looking forward to this!

Enough
votes were cast to decide for the following about geekdinner Limburg:

• It will be held on Tuesday 27th May 2008.
• We should be at least 12 people (sorry Amedee, sorry Guy).
• This means it will be held at a restaurant, our
  office can’t cater comfortably for 12 people in one room to eat self-made
  dinner. Too bad!
• We might have a nice extra though: Wouter and I will try to provide a
  self-made dessert. I’m reserving our table at a place called “Paal 26”, which is only
  500m from our office. After dinner, people who are interested can come along
  to join us for a great Belgian Nero-style waffle dessert at the office!
• That is if it won’t be too late, off course. I guess we can start a bit
  early. Let’s meet at 19:00 and start eating at 19:30. Is that okay for
  everyone?
• It’s literally at 5 metres from the exit “Beringen” on the E313, which
  is one exit next to Lummen where the
  E313 and E314 intersect.
• People taking public transportation: take the train to Diest and continue
  on bus 7 to Beringen which has a stop in front of our office and one in front
  of the restaurant.

Yesterday was a day well spent. I was at Mobile Web Camp Hasselt and did
a presentation about My Mobile DB, a MyOwnDB presentation in which I focussed on our
vision/roadmap for the mobile future (in short: through a very lightweight (in
terms of bandwidth) REST API, MyOwnDB can
become a *very* good choice to db-enable your mobile app).

I want to say special thanks to Dorien from citylive for putting such a great effort
behind the event!

After a whole day of presentations, scripts and a Wii, a couple of late stayers had a drink/dinner
together after which Loes and I went to
Kinepolis Hasselt for a late-night film. Did you know that Kinepolis Hasselt
inserts a 10-minute break in the middle of the film? This is so annoying, I’m
really considering never to return there. It’s truly awful. A couple of weeks
ago, I was there to watch Rambo 4. Exactly at the moment where Stallone says
“It’s time to decide: live for nothing or die for something”, suddenly lights
went on and music started to play immediately: “De meeste droooomen zijn
bedrog…”. Argh! I didn’t get into the mood of the film again.

I volunteered for organising the next It Pro Geek Dinner (IPGD).
At first, I was thinking of organising it in Hasselt.
After all, we’ve had Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp before already.
Being afraid that way too many people wouldn’t be able to make it to Hasselt, finding it too far away, I decided to move it a bit (20km) closer to the centre of the world: Paal.

So, if you want to join, please don’t hesitate to sign up!

And now, for the grand announcement: if not too many people subscribe (I’m not announcing the limit of course), I will invite you all to our office and cook myself.
No need to worry.
I know how to cook.
A bit at least. ;-)

See you soon!

Last weekend, I spent my entire Saturday in geek-land: a Barcamp followed by a
Geekdinner. Lovely!

I met some really interesting people again this time, and got to see
live-blogging from nearby for the first time. Raphaël and I gave a presentation about
MyOwnDB, and even before it was finished, you
could read
about it already. Apparently, it’s still not that easy to explain what MyOwnDB is all about. De Standaarddidn’t really get it completely either. We’ll have to work on that!

Anyway, I really love hanging around with Barcamp people, even though I
couldn’t find anyone to help me fix my laptop. :-)

Later that day, we all shifted to the net|lash offices for a mixed GirlGeekDinner and ITPro Geek Dinner. I had a great
time again meeting very interesting, almost famous people and hurting myself
(and other people) playing tennis on a Wii.

I hereby officially announce that I will be organising the
next ITPro GeekDinner. It will be the first one in the province of Limburg.
Let me present you with a little fact: starting from Antwerp or Brussels,
Hasselt is as nearby as Ghent is!