Coming Home To A Place I Have Never Been Before

He was born in the summer of his 27th year
Comin' home to a place he'd never been before
He left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again
You might say he found a key for every door
-- John Denver, Rocky Mountain High

Returning from my vacation -- during which I forced myself to a strict and complete media blackout -- I find myself indeed coming home to a place I had never been before:

Mark Shuttleworth announced the HUD
The Document Foundation is on the final approach (gears down, flaps extended, clear skies and no winds over the runway) to be formally established as an entity in Berlin, Germany
and these infographics by Italo make me realize what an amazing success LibreOffice already is, if you lift your head for once from the daily business and take a calm and awed look around.

And then there was FOSDEM 2012, which is really a culture shock, when you arrive there directly from the dreamy snowy mountains of the Massif de la Lauziere ⁽¹⁾.

LibreOffice had both a Dev-Room and a booth (and great crew of vocational booth boys and babes, whose regular occupation is coding and contributing to the best free office suite ever).

The Dev-Room was packed with 18 talks in one day, which I had the pleasure to close with my paced⁽²⁾ "10 reasons to contribute to LibreOffice today" while in parallel there was the additional LibreOffice keynote by Michael Meeks showing off some of the niftiness of LibreOffice on new form factors.

Next stop: LibreOffice HackFest on 14th April 2012 in Hamburg! Mark your calendars, ladies and gentlemen!

⁽¹⁾ quite an travel experience: digging out the car from the snow, driving to the valley, taking the train to Lyon, taking the tram to the airport, sitting in an unheated terminal at -10 degree celsius after security for two hours (dont fly easyJet), flying to Bruxelles, taking the subway to the city, finding the Hotel from memory. The story of the return from Bruxelles to Hamburg is shorter: the pilot managed to damange the plane during the first 10 meters of taxing so we (including the incidentally four LibreOffice hackers on the same plane) had to change to a difference vehicle.

⁽²⁾ mostly for we were behind on the schedule

This was originally published at 2012-02-07 16:24:00/2012-02-07 16:24:00 on livejournal.