Bobulate

I’m still sick. I still can’t hear properly, nor breathe, so as FOSDEM draws nearer (where I would man the FSFE booth, attend a few talks, and promulgate a business-friendly selection of Free Software licensing topics) I’m forced to re-evaluate whether I can go there at all: no, I am not going to FOSDEM. I’ll miss Paul’s bits on PIMping the KDE desktop, which is a particular shame. I’ll miss Michael Meeks, with whom I was looking forward to chatting about copyright assignment. I’ll miss Vincent Untz and the Dutch GUADEC team. I’ll miss Claudia and the KDE gang. I’ll miss the OSOL guys. I’ll miss the cute lovable blue Postgres elephant. And the weird devices at the OpenBSD stand. I could go on.

Instead, I’m going to stay home, eat lots of oranges, sleep a lot and hope for a better future. One where I can actually hold a conversation without phlegming anyone to death.

On a totally unrelated note, I’m reading “de telduivel”, a book on mathematics for kids by H.M. Enzensberger (English title “the number devil”, but the book is originally in German). It’s a fun book, and this time I’m actually reading it to the kids. Their minds do wander when we get to topics like fib(n)^2+fib(n+1)^2=fib(2n+1), but it’s inspiring for me as well. It’s been a long time since I sat down to try to do a little proof on paper, and since I don’t have to talk or breathe very hard to do math, it’s fun!

Like many folks, I’ll be going to FOSDEM this weekend, in Brussels. Thomas Koch posts his whole weekend schedule — gosh, that’s ambitious. I know I never get around to attending one tenth of the talks I might intend to see, simply because there’s too many people to talk to, things to demonstrate, chats to have and random other interesting things to do. Given the state of my health, I think I’m going to remove “excessive amounts of beer” from my list-of-interesting-things, but I’m still looking forward to Brussels Cheese during the social hours. Isabel Drost is giving a talk on Hadoop — that’s one I might actually make a point of attending, because otherwise I’m never going to understand any of her blog posts. I guess like I’m tedious about licensing, she’s tedious about map-reduce. We’ll see.

For most of the weekend you will find me at the FSFE stand near the front entrance. I hope it’s less freezing cold than down the other end of the hall where the KDE stand is, traditionally. I’ll be available for legal and licensing talk, mostly. Governance? Patents? All ears. For technical stuff I will need to escape from the watchful eye of my handler, Hugo Roy, and covertly discuss bits and bytes.