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Woke up early this morning, so I started looking at my mails. And then prepared to go out. I decided to not take my breakfast in the hotel (don’t ask me why… I was just tempted by taking a “pedestrian breakfast”. I walked down the street in the general direction for the subway station. Explored a bit the streets around, and found a place to buy a breakfast, took a “small” hot chocolate (and they’re not joking since I burnt my mouth) and a muffin… The chocolate was far enough for me (and they call this “small”!), the muffin was big. Everything is larger here, cars are larger, street are largers, train are larger… I’m not a tall guy, and I feel even smaller here. =)

Took my breakfast under the rain, next to a tree (in order to protect myself) in a park near my hotel. And then took the subway, it went almost smoothly (had some difficulties finding the right track in the station) and reached the MIT Stata Center easily… but, very early! I was there at 8am (but the event starts at 9am). I helped some people around to prepare stuff for the attendance, and people where slowly coming.

I chatted a bit with people around they generally look amazed when I tell them that I’m a KDE developer (“what the hell is he doing here?“) but that’s well accepted of course, they are friendly. I feel like a diplomat, I’ve already some possibilities for cooperation between both projects through books ideas someone raised to me. I have to admit that it’s really tempting… some topics we could cover would be interesting.

My diplomat role became even more “official” during the presentation session, during this session everybody had to introduce themselves. I then stated that I was basically here to improve collaboration and sharing in my own area (hardware discovery and interaction) but that if some Gnome developers wanted to point some other area where we could do better, they just have to ask me and then I’ll take the time to push the information to the right persons in the KDE community. Ok, we have the FreeDesktop but most Gnome people don’t know KDE people working in the same topics (and vice versa).

For lunch, we had loooot of pizza sponsored by IBM. Very good idea, free geek food!

I contacted David Zeuthen already, he’s really friendly and passionated about his work. I’m sure it’ll be really a pleasure to work more with him in the future. Because of the small discussions we had with him and some other people working on DBUS or HAL, we’ll surely have a BOF about FreeDesktop tomorrow.

This evening I’ll surely go to dinner with other people that expressed an interest in improving the collaboration between both projects. It’ll surely be interesting. Overall, I’m really happy to be here, doing all that. :-)