The beauty of the camping vacation is the enduring feeling of being on site. Air travel is very insular that way, I feel like I’m in the same place right up until I get off the plane, but when you’re on the road it’s a whole different feeling and more authentic in a sense. It’s tiresome if you have to go far to get there, but once you cross the border into where you’re going there is a real sense of expectation that gradually bears out. And you can stop anywhere you want along the way.

Locations of interest:

• Wien (classical concert)
• Verona (late night outdoor opera)
  Camping right near Lago di Garda – a summer camping hotspot
• La Spezia (all day visit to the pictoresque villages in Cinque Terre national park)
• Genova (city walk and a visit to Europe’s largest aquarium/oceanography museum)
• San Remo (walk along the promenade and swimming at the beach)
• Monaco (city walk, swimming at the beach)
• Nice (walk along the promenade, swimming)
• Cannes (walk along the promenade)
• Ramatuelle by St. Tropez
  Camping at the unbeatable Les Tournels
• St. Tropez (city walk)
• Marseille (city walk)
  Camping in Aix-en-Provence – a nice town in itself
• Les Baux-de-Provence (a splendid ancient castle)
• Orange (the best preserved Roman theater in Europe)
• Geneve (CERN museum, city walk)
• Lausanne (city walk)
• Bern (Einestein museum)
• Zurich (natural earth museum and a robotics museum)
• Munich (Deutches museum – world’s largest museum of science and technology)

And that’s a way to spend three weeks.

Oh sure, initial impressions can be disappointing. The drab landmarks of postcard tourism.. the baroque London Bridge, the utterly pointless Tower of London, the entirely forgettable Buckingham Palace, the simplistically named Big Ben, the gaudy Westminster Abbey. Next to Rome or Paris they look almost barbaric, like the Stone Henge next to the Eiffel Tower. But I cannot for a second imagine that someone could come away from London without absorbing the magic and the culture inherent to it. There’s something for everyone to love.

The most striking thing about London to outward appearances is the architecture. There is no shortage of classical buildings, but then there is none of modernity either. Soho, Picadilly, Westminster for a bite of classical; St. Paul’s, Queen Victoria, Cornhill for the modern. But you don’t have to chase it down, architecture is everywhere and the urbanism is top class, it all fits no matter what it is.

Walking around the wide streets there is that feeling of a real metropolis. The streets are buzzing, both motorized traffic and pedestrian. And they do not fall asleep after dark, there are always people. For that warm and cuddly city feeling Oxford Street is a good bet. When you’re ready to take a load off, look for a Starbucks (they’re everywhere). Then walk across the street to Caffè Nero, a cozy café chain without the fast food atmosphere.

If you’re after shopping there is a huge Borders off Oxford Circus, 4 storeys of bookstore. Be there at 9am and you have the whole thing to yourself! And it’s well worth it. Books have always been cheaper in England. You can walk out with two shopping bags for the price of a sports jersey or some silly fashion item.

London’s subway system is unique and something of a contradiction. When you look at the map you notice that the stations cover the city very laboriously, it’s obviously a huge network. But then you enter the underground and everything is so cramp, the passage ways are narrow, there’s little space above your head, the platforms are about 4m wide, and the trains themselves are no different, only wide enough for 3 seats and a passage – less than a bus. So why is a network so vast, designed to transport so many people so cramped? And still, the trains run with such regularity that you’re never actually obstructed or stalled, it’s very efficient. The maximum waiting time in zone 1 is 3 minutes in the daytime.

State instituted paranoia

The one thing that everyone knows about London and Britain nowadays is that it’s a surveillance society. I didn’t actually take any pictures myself, but I bet I could cover every last site of interest just with the pictures taken for me and of me in every location. I’m not sure whom I have to call to recoup those photos, though. It’s no exaggeration, there really is a camera everywhere, and often, several.

All of this for my protection, naturally. The subway is already entirely covered in cameras, but you’ll still see signs reading “for your protection we are installing more cameras”. Ditto in the commercial realm, the same cameras wrapped in tinted glass (so as to be less obvious) greet you in a café as the ones you see in the street.

London feels like a pretty safe place if it wasn’t for the police crawling everywhere. I don’t know about you, but seeing a police unit doesn’t make me feel particularly safe. Presumably they are on scene to stop, intervene, apprehend, pursue and I don’t want to get stuck with a ticket for crossing the street at my own choosing just because the restless cops feel they have to justify their presence somehow.

State instituted paranoia is on show. There’s a warning sign on everything to alert you to the magnificent danger. Walking down Horse Guards Road in Westminster I saw an entirely unremarkable statue surrounded by a fence on all sides, with a plaque stating that it would be a criminal act to climb the fence. This kind of thing is systemic, there is so much distrust and hostility in the announcements and signage. A security circus.

The thing is though, I don’t think the public is buying it. They are tolerating it, because it hasn’t impacted their lives much, but London doesn’t strike me as a society in anxiety or panic, far from it. London was the site of a bombing since the era of paranoia ensued, fair enough, but is the solution to that not police work rather than a paranoia epidemic? The public seems to think so. Terrorism is shamelessly used for political currency, as is the current trend. In the same area there’s a monument to the Bali bombing victims. Not that Bali was unimportant, but how many other people have died tragically through various other causes in the same period, starting with the civilian casualties caused by the Iraq invasion (concentrate on the territories under British control, say), ending with the armed conflict du jour on the African continent? No political gain from that, so let’s not dwell on those shall we.

Left is right, except when it’s not

It is so typical of the British to be different. Not different in a useful way, just arbitrarily so. It might be illusions of grandeur over the long lost empire. One of those differences is driving on the other side of the road. Britain is part of a small minority of countries that drive on the left. To what end? Cars have to be built special for those markets. Traffic rules cannot be made universal worldwide. And for what? There is no trade-off to make, it’s completely inconsequential which side you take. The only justification is “it must be this way because it’s always been this way”, which is a popular non-argument.

To the extent that motorized traffic works smoothly on the “left system”, it also affects pedestrians. And in London there are some very clear signs that the left system isn’t all that smooth. For starters, there’s printing on the street at every pedestrian crossing, “look left”, “look right”, to tell us where the traffic is coming from. I’ve never seen this anywhere else, and it wouldn’t be necessary if people understood how the traffic works.

You would expect that if the Brits are dedicated to the left system then everything would work accordingly. But it doesn’t. When you’re walking down the street on the right hand side, sometimes you’re against the stream, sometimes with it. In the subway, where they have instructions for everything, they often have partitions in the middle of a walkway. In some places the sign says “keep left”, in others “keep right”. When you get to the escalator, you’re supposed to stand on the right, and walk on the left, in blatant contradiction to the left system. The escalators themselves are flimsy on it, sometimes the one going up is on the right, sometimes it’s on the left. Sometimes you’re coming out of a walkway on the right and crossing over to the escalator on the left, clashing with the people coming down and switching to the right.

Some people have a dream of driving in the US. I guess they relish an exciting drive across the Bible Belt and then desert country.

According to Google, you can do New York-LA in a day and 17 hours, provided you pick the shortest (and fastest?) roads and drive non-stop.

What about coast to coast somewhere closer to home? Every summer a bunch of tourists pack into their cars and drive up to the north or Norway for a relaxing road trip on our narrow and windy roads.

The scale here is 1:2.

I had to put in two extra pins on the map, or Google would send me into Sweden. But there’s your Lindesnes-Nordkapp connection.

It turns out the East-West coast span of the US isn’t even twice as wide as our North-South run, and you can do it in roughly the same amount of time.

So basically if you’ve done North-South in Norway you’ve done more than half the distance across the US. Doesn’t sound that impressive at all anymore, does it?

Ps. In the Netherlands you can do Maastricht-Groningen in 3 hours, it’s like a paper route.

This year’s trip was blessed with excellent weather, which always makes a big difference in the mountains. Here’s a bunch of pictures from the resort (hosted on deviantart).

There’s also a short clip of me skiing down the slopes (hosted on youtube).

Now that’s a way to spend Easter!

The swanky atmosphere Sunday morning was slightly impaled by a grammar blooper in the program. But never mind. Wikitravel proclaims:

Concertgebouw

Famous for its orchestra and its accoustics (among the top ten in the world), this is the world’s most frequently visited concert hall.

I have to say I’m starting to suspect it’s the staff authoring this glowing review. Personally I wasn’t all that impressed with the acoustics. The large performance hall is a venerable interior with profuse decor, however the technological realization seems to have evaded modern technology. The chamber orchestra was not heard terribly well in the rear half of the hall, which seems a bit amateurish from a sound technology perspective in this day and age.

But for just 15 bucks it wasn’t bad value for money, even though I expected more from the venue.

If you’ve ever been to a trade show this will sound familiar to you. Trade shows are marketing stints, it’s where companies go to sell their image (and hence their products). It usually goes a little something like this. You have a big open area, like the area of a large supermarket.

This floor is filled with booths, that is a couple of screens to separate it from the next booth, on which they hang a poster or five of the company logo, product catalogs, whatever they want to catch your eye with. Then there’ s a desk where the person manning the booth sits. There are a couple of other people standing around the booth, engaging onlookers in conversation about the company/products. All of them wear matching apparel to show you they represent this particular company. The best booths also have some other gimmicks, like computer screens showing a demo of their software or some other kind of demonstration/snapshots of their product in action.

When you go up to the desk, they have all kinds of free stuff for you, like pens, keychains, stickers, candy etc, branded with the company logo.

This is essentially the way I pictured Fosdem to be. Given that it’s not a commercial event (or at least for the most part it isn’t), it might be a little different. I certainly expected the projects that think of themselves as being the most exciting (KDE, Ubuntu, Fedora etc..) to have some cool demos or whatever that would wow those of us present. Obviously these projects publicize everything they do (so it’s not like they need a conference to explain what they are about), thus I thought they would take this opportunity to show off their best features and tricks.

What I found it to be like

I narrowly missed Fosdem last year, which I regreted, so I was looking forward to it for a long time. Out of the two days it is in session, I arrived Saturday at about 12:15 (opening was at 10:00) and stayed until the last talk, which ended at 5pm.

The first thing I was looking forward to was “the floor”. Unfortunately, there was no floor. Instead there was a crummy and very crowded corridor which doubled as “a floor”. The moment I walked in I was quite lost, it was so crowded that I could see booths, but I couldn’t see what they were for or which direction to even go. As I walked around, I realized how they had organized the booths. Actually “booths”. They arranged a bunch of tables in a long line, most of which had an A4 sheet taped to it, printed on it the name of the project it was for. Behind the desk were a few people sitting behind laptops. On the desk were some items, like stickers, pens etc.

So… there weren’t any actual booths. And they hadn’t brought very much with them either, some a single poster with the project’s logo, some didn’t even have that. The items were not for giveaway, they were for donate-and-get-for-”free”. Which ruins the whole point of having free stuff, but I suppose since these aren’t rich companies that can afford to give you stuff, it sort of makes sense. And it’s kind of in the spirit of open source anyway, you can donate to the projects you like.

The trouble is.. that’s it all was. None of the booths actually had anything going on. In most cases the people at the booths were just sitting behind laptops, consumed in their own stuff. I think OpenSUSE had a computer actually turned the other way, with an open document and the words “Try XGL now!” written in it. Well… that’s nice, but wouldn’t you think OpenSUSE would have a little more to show off than just a plain boring desktop with ripple effects on the screen and XGL which everyone has seen 7 times over? I mean when you go to a certified geek event, what you would expect is shiny hardware, huge screens, fancy graphical effects, software running on exotic hardware etc. The whole idea of booths is that you go up to them and there is something to see/read/try/experience there. KDE, Gnome, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mozilla, they all had nothing at all to show you. O’Reilly was much more interesting, they had brought in lots of books they were selling (and of course geeks love O’Reilly books). The Free Software Foundation was mostly selling clothes with various advocacy slogans, but at least they were trying to engage people in conversation, not consumed in their laptops.

The Gentoo booth was one of the least noteworthy. They had one laptop showing “Gentoo for Mac” on the screen, and that was it. No other materials (well there was a small one page flyer listing the advantages of Gentoo if you count that), and when a guy asked about t-shirts they were apparently sold out. So either they didn’t bring any or they didn’t bring enough. As a Gentoo user, I’d have to say that was a pretty pathetic showing for the biggest annual European event.

Google was there too, not sure why. I think they had a raffle going, but from Google you would expect some gimmick. All they had was a demo of Google Earth running on a laptop, which isn’t open source, and everyone has seen anyway.

There are some pictures to be found here. Notice how a) there are very few shots of the “booths” and b) how they look a lot more like a cake sale. A booth is supposed to look something like this, or this, or this, or this.

Okay, so the booths weren’t quite what I expected, but what separates a thing like Fosdem from just a trade show is that you have something for the intellect as well, you have interesting talks. The way they set this thing up is that they have 3 different locations for talks. Then they have a host of other project specific locations where they run talks about that particular project. At the time I arrived, there was actually nothing happening in any of those rooms yet, there was just a talk in the main auditorium, for which I was late anyway. So I strolled around the area and tried to decide which of the later talks to go to.

From 2pm onwards, there were suddenly parallel talks in 17 locations. I have to question the wisdom of this system, I mean if you find that you would like to attend a few of them, it’s very hard to be in multiple places between 2pm and 5:30. I ended up just going to the main auditorium for a talk on ReactOS (which was very technical and not too interesting from a user perspective), then a “lightning talk” on OpenWengo (which was too short to be informative) and then Andrew Morton’s talk on the kernel (which again turned out to be quite dull). Of course, I can’t say whether the 16 other sessions at that same time were worthwhile or not.

By all the noise about Fosdem on Planet KDE, I would actually expect them to put on a good show. I suppose instead of setting up a great booth they went to work on giving good talks, which I didn’t attend as I’m physically indivisible.

The verdict

I really wanted to see one of these events, and perhaps I picked the wrong one to attend. In any case, I think I’ve satisfied my curiosity. What strikes me most is how badly organized it is from a “physical” perspective. You have these tables set up in a narrow corridor, which is flooded with people. At times I actually had to stand aside and let a stream of people pass before I could make my way ahead. The place itself is a university campus, not a very pretty one at that. ULB is clearly in pretty heavy decay, so the hallways were sort of dirty, with paint coming off, crooked walkways on the outside and so on. The auditoriums themselves are in pretty decent shape, at least. Of course, it’s a matter of resources and having permission to use university buildings for this, but I can imagine that holding this at our campus in Utrecht would be heaps better in the sense of actually having the necessary space. When you go to a conference, you’re not supposed to feel like oxygen is precious, you’re supposed to enjoy yourself in a nice location, with good lighting, plenty of space to move around, and a nicely organized “floor”. (Needless to say, though, obviously Brussels is a much more interesting city.)

It might be fun for developers who have a chance of getting together and hanging out, but from a user’s perspective, unless the talks are dynamite, I don’t really see the attraction. Definitely nothing to warrant spending 6 hours on the train. I mean I’m very interested in free software, I use it, I read about it, I’m into a lot of the projects. But coming to Fosdem I don’t see much of interest to me, which is surprising. I brought my camera too, thought I would get some nice pictures of the booths, but there was nothing there I would take a picture of.

There’s a little feedback form here in the Fosdem program brochure and among other things they ask me to rate the “catering”. I have to ask “what catering”? Or maybe the question isn’t meant for me, but as far as I’m concerned, the coffee machine in the J building works well and the coffee is quite good, thanks for asking.

For being the biggest annual European open source event I would certainly expect a lot more “magic”, in one form or another. I donated 25 bucks to Fosdem for a t-shirt (in a way just to feel like it wasn’t a total loss), so in that I encourage them to keep at it and improve, but I don’t think I’ll be coming back.

• them: It’s heaven on earth.
• me: It’s rainy in February.

• them: The city is so beautiful, Gaudi masterpieces on every corner.
• me: It’s a congested city, with very little architecture of interest, and Gaudi is extremely overrated.

• them: Gaudi was a genius.
• me: He was a great engineer, but a lame artist. As an architect he doesn’t hold a candle to Calatrava.

• them: Barcelona is the greatest city in Europe.
• me: Valencia is a lot more beautiful and interesting, Barcelona has few avenues and streets to see.

• them: Camp Nou is a-w-e-s-o-m-e.
• me: It’s nothing too special if you only take the tour, Stade de France is a lot more impressive.

• them: The weather is delightful.
• me: Winter in Barcelona is roughly the same as winter in Norway.

• them: I would gladly see Barcelona and then die.
• me: The hype is ridiculous and the city is a big disappointment.

• art lovers: Joan Miró is exquisite.
• me: Very gifted for a six year old, why did he retire so young?

Although this was indeed New Year’s Eve, in a city of indeed 1.7 million people (Wikipedia), the Old Town wasn’t exactly busy. Nor was it even lit up. Indeed, a big Christmas tree with a “Merry Christmas” neon sign, in small face “by Company X” outside the Royal Castle. But no other special lighting or anything fancy like that, the Market Place was completely dead as well. About half the people out were tourists, mostly Japanese with cameras (who knew), but a lazy Sunday afternoon might draw more people to this place than, well, New Year’s Eve, apparently. The cops were out in force, every 50m there two of them, in black uniforms ornamented with yellow fluorescent vests.

For New Year’s, the atmosphere was extremely timid. Very few fireworks in the sky, both here and elsewhere in the city that you could see. Finally, around midnight, the festivities started in the square outside the castle. The Polish have long and strong traditions of firework abuse, and the first notable rocket hit the castle wall, bounced off, and exploded near a couple of cops. Most people were standing at the highest point in the square, around a statue, on the sidewalk around the square. One of the fireworks misfired and exploded literally 10m away from the people closest to the square, scaring the hell out of some and causing them to step back. Hilarious.

As it was about ten to midnight, the explosions were now closer together. One of the rockets apparently exploded right near the neon sign by the Christmas tree, the sign went ablaze. The cops were looking ominous, but they exhibited a generous dosage of Scandinavian cool. Some got on the radio, but none of them actually did anything to tame the fire. It’s just a shame that the damn tree wouldn’t burn, it would have been fun to see it fall to the ground. Christmas is over, by the way.

There were several different languages around me, but I practically had Swedish right in my ear, giving a running commentary of the action. I didn’t mind though, the girl was cute. At midnight, there was a culmination of explosions, and a whole lot of noise from far and near for those who don’t especially value their hearing. Several more fireworks went practically along the ground in the square, from one side to the other, as bottles were knocked over when the rockets ignited. I don’t think anyone got hurt, but the January 1st news always report the number (in thousands, customarily) of people severely injured by fireworks the night before. Apparently, the cops were on scene to make sure everything was civilized, but frankly they were entirely redundant since they clearly didn’t plan to restrict what people did with their fireworks.

Then, around ten past, we hurried to catch the last subway home. Indeed, a night to look forward to the whole year. Here’s a hot tip. If you’re torn between an invitation to a private party and going to the Old Town for New Year’s, go with the former.

Apparently, I’ve covered almost 130km in three trips, can you believe it? That’s easily Trondheim – Oppdal. If I keep this up I might even cover enough distance to the equivalent of Den Store Styrkeprøven (the Great Test of Strength), that is Trondheim – Oslo. Well, aside from one little detail – the terrain on that route is hilly as hell (elevation of up to 1000m), whereas Holland… isn’t. Apparently, last year’s winner took 14h over those 540km, insanity! That’s an average speed of 38km/h, mine last night [you know, when I almost killed myself? ] was… 18 km/h

Anyway, the cool thing about this stuff is that it’s actual GPS data being handled. Both of the sites are derived from Google Maps, which really shows how great Google’s concept is (and how they are allowing others to use it instead of locking it up like a lot of companies would!). So that means you can download routes in GPX format, which is a standard format for this, and use it with a GPS device, for instance. You could also use GPS to track your actual travel route (instead of plotting it by hand) and then upload that to a website that handles GPS info. It’s pretty neat, all this.