Life has again been busy around here, so this post will be a bit longer. Event-wise, this year so far was packed with good stuff for me, let me therefore pick a few cornerstones:
After the habitual FOSDEM and CeBIT, there was a new event, the Dresden Impress sprint. Thanks to the generous sponsoring from the Dresden Technical University Institute for Applied Photophysics around Prof. Karl Leo!
Following that I went to LinuxTag in Berlin for a workshop and a meeting around LibreOffice certification, and was honoured to listen in to Jimmy Schulze’s updates on getting German parliament stand up against software patentability:
Jimmy Schulz at LinuxTag
(he and his fellow party member Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger being named by others already as the only LibDems to be dearly missed in German Bundestag, after the defeat of their FDP at the recent general election)
Then came the annual LibreOffice Hamburg HackFest, this time generously organised (and diligently documented) by my fellow HHHackers Bjoern and Eike – while I was busy moving house and showing up basically for eating pizza. 🙂
Which was one of three turning points so far this year – after almost exactly ten years of living in small-town Buxtehude, we followed the beckoning of the big city and moved back to Hamburg (almost) downtown. The reasons for that are numerous, but two of them I’d like to point out here: childcare offers for people who want to work fulltime is still largely a mess in western Germany (Hamburg being a very notable exception) – you’ll see below why this suddenly became relevant; and secondly because the public transport system is just soooo much better, to the point that I currently ponder getting rid of my car entirely.
What came next was a short trip to the Masters of Rock festival in Vizovice – despite more than 1000 km away and us camping out there, festivals are really a recreational thing for me. Let’s see if we manage to go in the upcoming years. Some impressions:
Sadly, for the currently-ongoing LibreOffice conference 2013 in Milano, I could only attend a mere day. Apologies to all whom I missed to say hello to, chatted with only briefly, or did not bid goodbye properly – the timing this year (see below) had me straddling between two things very close to my heart. Still, it was wonderful to be there and meet you guys – clearly also helped by great food and drinks. 😉
Dining in Milano
And definitely, from past (double-) experience, the most live-changing event in 2013 clearly was this little guy here – can’t say how happy I am to have you now, Alan Benjamin!
Benni
Oh, and – the focus of my dayjob has shifted away from LibreOffice, over to datacenter topics like virtualization and cluster filesystems. But don’t you worry, I’ll stick to this project that I helped building – now in a purely volunteer capacity, like so many other contributors that still make a hell of a difference, in this wonderful community! 🙂
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