FOSDEM – 31 January 2015

First day of the conference. It was incredibly crowded. The Janson lecture hall is one of the largest in Belgium, and it was nearly filled to capacity for the keynote.

This being Belgium, even the vending machines on the university campus have waffles.

The sessions themselves were...OK. I missed out on one session because the room was full and their fire codes don’t let them go over capacity. A couple of the other sessions were just people reading their slides out loud. One guy didn’t talk loudly enough to be heard at the back of the room, and another one had a droning voice that nearly put me to sleep. At yet another session, the presenter had at least three “um”s per sentence, which made it difficult to follow what he was trying to say. The last session I went to was pretty good; the presenter had a good sense of humor and the topic was fairly interesting.

Sometime during the afternoon I walked out of the building, and there was Richard M. Stallman. Read the first couple of paragraphs of the linked article to understand the contributions he has made to free (as in “free speech”) software. He was handing out leaflets asking FOSDEM to put the word “free” back into their web site explaining the name of the conference.

On the way back to the hotel later in the evening, I saw an electric car recharging station and another one of those “pick up your package any time” locker systems.

Food

Highlights of the day: lunch at Just Like Your Mom’s vegan food truck. Second best: a hot waffle with chocolate.

Dinner was at Le Délire Parisien near the hotel; I had waterzooi. It was good, but the broth seemed a bit thin and the chicken breast was rather dry.