Why are all these posts named the same thing? Because “ausgezeichnet” is my favorite word in German. That and “gemuetlichkeit.”
After an extremely late night with the Ambassadors, Max and I get up with far too little sleep. Some strong coffee in the hotel breakfast room helps quite a bit though, and we make our way back to the Messe, this time to the correct station with a much shorter walk. Gerold and the crew have made us excellent little magnetic name tags we can attach to our brand-new polos without poking holes in them. The booth looks great, and blue-shirted Ambassadors are soon milling about helping visitors by answering questions, giving technical advice, and just being generally friendly and welcoming.
In the morning we run into Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier from the OpenSuSE project, who tells us some interesting things about Zypper, another packaging product they’re using with PackageKit. (It turns out there’s a libzypp backend for PackageKit!) He also tells us that OpenSuSE is investing some energy into Smolt, the hardware inventory system that we use in Fedora. I hope to find him later today or tomorrow to talk about some joint work on a MediaWiki based i18n/l10n system that will interface with Transifex — should be an easy sell since OpenSuSE also uses MediaWiki.
Max and I sit in a couple talks (on OLPC and OpenMoko) before repairing to the developer center, a large room where people can sit and hack or (in our cases) answer a lot of email and talk with some of the Fedora folks here about plans for the summer and upcoming events. Yaakov is here and, having just started his internship this week, is very eagerly planning for how to spend the next few months. I can’t help but think how lucky we are to have brilliant and energetic people like him everywhere in Fedora — I’ll leave it to him to talk more about what he’s up to as the summer goes on.
I have a couple phone calls with some Red Hat folks during the afternoon, and unfortunately that, my mountain of email, and my photo-tastic blog from yesterday keep me from getting around to all the booths. Fortunately, there are three whole days left for me to make rounds. I do get to stop by the Zope Corporation where, along with a beer, I score a good conversation with Christian, a developer there, about our experiences with Zope and Plone and how they see the future of web app deployments.
That evening Gerold has made reservations for everyone at a charming restaurant underneath the train station at Savignyplatz. I follow his lead and order the rumpsteak with chanterelle sauce, which is quite good. After dinner my jet lag and the less than satisfactory sleep from the night before is finally catching up with me. Max, Thomas Woerner, and I bid everyone goodnight and trudge back to the hotel to crash.
More to come on LinuxTag Day 2, later!
Heh. When I took German in High School (a long time ago) our textbooks had a conversation that included someone’s enthusiasm for the “ausgezeichnet pilzgericht”. Of course that became our phrase thereafter.
It still comes to mind these many years later …