At FOSDEM this weekend
23 February 2007I’m at FOSDEM this weekend. I’ll be giving a talk in the Mozilla developer room today and a second one in the Web track on Sunday.
If you are here please come by and introduce yourself (I look like this).
Whenever I travel to Europe I’m always struck by a few things:
1) Why the heck don’t we have high speed trains in the states? The TGV (and Eurostar for that matter) are definitely a better and environmentally cleaner way to travel..
2) Why is internet access so expensive and spotty in hotels? This is true in the states as well – wireless either doesn’t exist, is very unreliable, or extremely expensive (usually a combo of the last two) I’m test driving a EDGE/GPRS/UMTS/HSDPA card which might turn out to be *cheaper* (gulp) than wifi in the hotels.
So far it has been working well – performance was blazing at SFO – workable but slow here in Brussels. It has definitely made me appreciate sites like Google that are low bandwidth. We’ll see when I get back whether it is worth it or not…
3) Yogurt (all dairy for that matter) always tastes better here. Maybe the lack of pasteurization?
I’m staying in Europe through the next week to meet with a variety of folks (Leiden Monday, London Tues, Warsaw Weds, and Paris Thurs->Fri) – so if you are close to any of those places and want to meet up – please do drop me a line!
6 Responses to “At FOSDEM this weekend”
February 24th, 2007 at 1:22 am
Yes, yogurts taste beter here because they use normal milk, not fat-free milk like almost all yogurts in the US. That’s why yogurts in the US have a more chewing-gum-ish feeling.
For babies, apparently, it’s mandatory to use normal milk…
You can find _excellent_ vanilla yogurts at Albertson’s in the Bay Area but they’re labelled as Baby Yogurts
You don’t have high-speed train in the US because you have an oil industry…
February 24th, 2007 at 7:50 am
BART? Someone down there made a mistake of not bringing it down all the way to San Jose. But it’s pretty efficient up here in Oaktown/SF.
The South Bay kinda blows.
February 24th, 2007 at 8:11 am
Not sure about yogurt, but the soft cheeses in Europe are significantly better because they can use non-pasteurized cheeses.
February 24th, 2007 at 8:21 am
We also don’t have high-speed trains because we have Amtrak. As long as the federal government is willing to bail Amtrak out every several years without ever saying “no more” when they run out of money yet again, the system will not improve.
February 24th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Of course, if I ate yogurt made with whole milk my health would be even worse than it already is now.
February 26th, 2007 at 12:19 am
hey, who call use geeks after all ? Your post was about internet access, high speed train and yogurts and we all commented only on trains and yogurts
Who cares about internet access, really 