Akademy – Day 4 morning notes

The Camera Crew Union got together with the other underworld organization, the nefarious Belgian Train Posse, to delay my arrival to Akademy this morning.  I doubt it was the wait staff in town that sabotaged me, as they would have had to come over to my table once to see who I am.

Some morning notes:

• Gossip, gossip, gossip.  All sorts of “these people” talking to “those people” stories that only seem to happen at Akademy.  Let’s hope some initiatives come true.  Great buzz going on.
• People are being slightly less social this morning.  You may think that’s odd with only one track going on, but it’s simply because a majority of them are fixated with Nokia N810s.  How many?  Enough to merit an upcoming announcement on the Dot.
• Oh, one note from last night.  As you can deduce from any dinner that involves Zack, few details are actually fit to be published.  So, since I can’t really go on further about a dance club full of 12-year old boys, I’ll instead mention that the dinner also involved Claudia Rauch.  For those of you that haven’t met Claudia or her neon green glowing Tuesday sweater, she’s the real deal.  Our first employee, so to speak, was a very good choice by the board.  They found someone who’s professional, courteous, interested in making the most of her position, and most importantly – can tolerate and even embrace several hundred techies.
• Breaking news: KStars SoC student from India, Akarsh Simha, just got passport/Visa clearance and is flying over.  Even though the speeches are over and he’ll only arrive for the last 2 days, he’s still on his way.  How awesome is that?
• As a side note, his mentor is Jason Harris.  I mention this because of a comment that Jason made at the Release Event in January.  Now I didn’t even get to introduce myself to Jason, but I did hear him relay:  It sounded like he was peaking out, plateaued or just unsure of what to do or how to change KStars.  The Release Event and being around people apparently energized him and gave him some new ideas (paraphrasing – hope this isn’t inaccurate).  Any how, in the last 6 months, I’ve indeed seem blog entries, code commits from Jason, and now he’s mentoring Akarsh.  Funny how these events will do that to you.
• PlanetKDE:  Imagine a world beyond HTML 2.1.  Imagine a world where Color Me Badd is no longer popular.  Are you interested?  So are we.  Clee has our endearing love for setting up the Planet, maintaining it, and battling the oxymoron that is Really Shitty syndication.  In the world of Clash of the Titans, Planet software is the Kraken and Clee is our Perseus.  But our Planet does need some attention.  And Franz, Ruphy, Physos and myself are going to help crack this nut once and for all.  If we don’t have a better planet aggregator and interface in place by Christmas, my name’s not Wade Wilson.
• Ade and I had a decent little talk about the eV: its perceived vs. theoretical vs. practical function.  After explosive growth over the past several years, it would be foolish for the membership not to reflect on how our day-to-day work adheres to existing bylaws, and how we can improve our performance.  He apparently had similar conversations last night.  I welcome the eV to do some self-actualization.  I think that’s on the hierarchy of needs, right below cheese.
• In Tackat’s unending quest toward Marble Mania ™, I see an article this morning on Linux.com from Bruce Byfield.  When we talk about plotting world domination, who better at plotting points than the Marble maintainer.