20060706

Back from EP. I am not sure there are many interesting things I can write about the conference and the talks I attended (I may try later). I most certainly am not active enough in the Python community to be in a position to make the most out of such events (I am a bit shy).

One team I was most impressed with is the PyPy crew. Armin Rigo is an hilarious and talented speaker.

Taking the risk to sound like a groupie, when I got to the CERN the first person I saw was Guido! I was amazed, he exists for real, we were in the same mini-bus going to the conference building. He also sat right in front of me in the main auditorium when we listen to Alan Kay's keynote.

I met and spoke with Raphaël Marvie. He lives in Lille, I should try to hook up with him.

I also had a brief discussion with David Allouche (who looked at my badge saying 3 quoi(s)?) which gave me a logo idea ;)) and Robert Collins from Canonical (both involved in Bazaar-ng). I don't think I was cool enough for them to hang out with (I understand I felt midly out of place).

The funniest encounter was at lunch on the Tuesday when 2 recently hired Google employees sat with me and asked me what I was doing for work ... I am a topmaker, I buy wool, send it to Bulgaria, scoure it, comb it and try to sell it to spinners ... you should have seen there faces.

Started playing with pyYaml to discover what I believe to be a bug. Well it is not, default_flow_style=False in the dump parameters fixes it. I am trying to write an intelligible (I am in the wool industry) cross origin bareme format. I think I have managed to put something decent together.

A highlight of my stay in Geneva was to hook up with people I hadn't seen in years, the Gelmini's family: Pierre, Marianne, Alexandra, Agnès (Olivier was not there); and Sophie (cousin by mariage, ex-lover, etc.). Everyday I made the time to go to les Bain des Paquis, there is nothing like going for a swim in a mountain lake, surrounded by beautiful cool people.

I finished To kill a mockingbird which I really loved. Not sure I would call it the best novel ever written but it is very good!