It’s about 6 years since the last time I was in Brussels (when I was here to play trad music in a series of very fun gigs), but it’s hardly changed, it’s a surprisingly easy city to navigate. I did get a very dodgy hotel key card though …

More photos in my FOSDEM flickr set. There’s a bunch of us here from Joost and it’s very useful to come and get a perspective on what else is happening in the Mozilla world.

It’s been a very strange, mixed and extremely busy month for me. I’ve squeezed a lot of travel into a very small month, my Dad was in hospital for a bit, Nóirín got engaged, the already hectic pace of work at Joost is now picking up even further (it’s pretty cool that we signed Viacom, but that also boils down to a lot of work to get done!), my mother came to visit me in Leiden, and other things have happened which give me good cause to be happy.

It’s been both my worst and best month since moving to the Netherlands, and until we launch (and go out of beta) and for a good while after that, I think it’s going to be even more of the same. It’s also about the half-way point of my (planned, at least) stay in the Netherlands, and there’s still plenty of places I haven’t managed to see yet, which is making me think!

Still, I’m having a great time, I’m meeting an insane amount of people, getting to see a great variety of places and am spending an awful lot more time out and about than I would be in Ireland, so I’m making sure I’m making the most of it too. Now, I just need a teleportation device.

Right now it’s -23°C outside, with a windchill that puts us somewhere down at -30°C, but it’s still surprisingly comfortable to walk around in with many layers and good gloves.

On Tuesday I fly out to go to London, where I’ll be spending a few days in the Joost London office, but am mainly in town to talk about E-voting for the Open Rights Group. The events look like they’ll be great fun and I’m especially looking forward to finally meeting Dr. Rebecca Mercuri. While I’m in town, I also hope to take a trip out to Bletchley park. In all my visits to the UK, I’ve still never managed to make it out there.

And finally, next week I’ll be in Limerick to talk at skycon on the same subject, but with more of an open-source slant. I’m going to try and cover how Open Source and E-voting can interact, is open source e-voting software really useful? But also, how ICTE used open-source principles very successfully when we were organising our lobbying efforts. Should be fun! Now I just have to write the presentation!