fosdem - a huge success

While Fosdem was actually from Saturday to Sunday I already arrived on Friday afternoon and got picked up by Susanne and Hartmut - only to discover that I somehow managed to give her my departure time instead of arrival time :-(
During the following visit of the atomium I really tried hard to blame broken copy&paste code in my pdf reader on that but some people don't really seem to believe me in that - but oh well :-).
We actually ended up with doing our own beer event in a location pretty close to the temporary "house of elephants" which had an incredible collection of beers but lacked a bit of - well "other" people" except the 15+ postgresql people waiting (endlessly) for the waiter to bring some more beer.
Nevertheless we had some really interesting discussions on a huge variety of topics which lasted for most of the night .
But the real challenge came when we arrived back at the hotel and the receptionist told two of us that well "I cannot find your keys" which was kind of "uhm WHAT?".
Fairly long discussions later they figured out that they actually double booked(!) our rooms and started to rang out those people (hi Koen Martens!) at 03:00 in the morning so we could pick up our stuff and get new rooms.

The first day of FOSDEM started with with us preparing the booth and I attended Robert Watson's talk about how the FreeBSD project works - pretty interesting to see that they are facing a lot of challenges pretty similiar to what we scale - though at an even larger scale .
Later on I visited some of our own talks and had to prepare for my one one too. This was actually my first public talk in english in a long time but I think it went fairly well - except that I had to go through my slides fairly fast because I lost a bit of time due to *erm* technical problems with the projector and the fact that we really should look into adding breaks between each and every talk in our future schedules.
However the talk went reasonably well and I got some nice questions and feedback - maybe I will look into doing other talks in the future ...
Saturday evening we ended up chasing a place for dinner in brussels (first by trying to follow Greg Stark but Gabrielle was actually the one who found a nice italian restaurant that had enough place for 18 people) - and a few of us stayed for some more beers later on in a nearby bar.
Sunday was the second day of fosdem - it started really early in the morning with Gabrielle being the poor guy that had hist talk scheduled for 09:00am which even got delay by the fact that the building was not even opened at that time.
After nearly getting sold out(mugs, elephants) of some of the merchandising stuff we had on saturday - sunday was seeing a bit less people trying to buy stuff but we were seeing a lot of really interesting questions asked at the booth and a lot of really excited users.
It is also fairly interesting to note that we were actually the only Opensource(or otherwise) database with any noticeable presence (except for the lone guy in the MySQL AB t-shirt) at this conference.
Sunday ended with us having dinner a nice Lebanese restaurant and a small group of us (Michael Smith, Magnus Hagander, David Fetter and myself) getting Kilkenny and Guinness.
One of the things that we discussed there was the historic (I hope so at least) initial vote for the board of directors for the European PostgreSQL Usergroup done at FOSDEM.
We had 24 people taking part in the vote and ended up with the following for initial members of the board:

Jean-Paul Argudo(fr)
Gabriele Bartolini(it)
Magnus Hagander(se)
Andreas Scherbaum(de)

Congratulations to all of them for getting the votes and I hope(nah I'm sure) they will do a fantastic job!