I spent Thursday and Friday in Zurich, Switzerland visiting my friends Marcus and Caitlin and attending the Google Open Source Jam.

On Thursday, I arrived in the early afternoon in Zurich. Getting to Zurich from Siegburg is easy and takes less than five hours as there is a direct ICE connection to Basel and from there it is just one more stop with an …

I constantly wonder what my former co-workers would say if I popped into work wearing what I have been accustomed to wearing since I joined MySQL AB in July 2007. Would they actually get used to me showing up in nothing but shorts, sleepily stretching out in front of the computer, boiling a a cup of tea and then trundling into the office laptop in one hand and hoping that no video conference would be required today?

It’s the beauty of MySQL: 80% of the company works on a distributed basis, as in out of their homes. With IRC, phone and email, if you can avoid video, you can pretty much be sitting naked while you work if that is your preference. But wait, there’s more. It means that you can work from anywhere in the world: An airport, in the car, in the train and ultimately in a completely foreign country.  I promised that six months after I joined the company I would reflect on …

This certainly took longer than expected, but here are some pictures that I took during our MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, Germany last month. Enjoy!

I am a conference junkie. I love attending them, organizing them, speaking at them, planning to attend them, seeing my friends at conferences, making friends with the nice (but often stressed) people who run conferences and so on. I even like eating the (often bad) food - kvetching about it builds a sense of camaraderie with the other participants.

Given how much time and money I spend on conferences already, it might be hard for you to be able to get more money directly out of me. However, here is one small tip on a way that you might be able to do this.

When you send me email about upcoming events, send me links to useful feed as well. Many of you are technologists who run technology conferences for other technologists. For Zarquon’s sake, use the common pieces of technology that many of us use.

What would such feeds look like? Well, to answer my own rhetorical question …
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I've returned home safely from my trip to St. Augustin, Germany (near to Bonn), where I attended this year's FrOSCon. As last year, it was a very well organized event, kudos and thanks to the conference organizers (who are all volunteers!). The conferece program was packed with good sessions again and the ones I attended were interesting and well done. Many OSS projects also exhibited in the hall way, it was nice to stop by and chat with these folks.

I gave a talk about "Opening the doors (and windows) of the Cathedral - Enabling an architecture of participation around the MySQL Server", which describes the ongoing activity at MySQL to open up the development processes to the Community. Given that I gave this talk for the first time, I think it went very well, at least I did not run out of time The slides are …

It's been an exciting week again with my MySQL colleagues (PS team). We don't see each other lots, but when we do, we do it good! Last evening was fun playing a MySQL Trivia. Like, when did Monty wrote the first lines of code or who joined before our CEO Marten got in the company. Good thing we had Max in our team, we won!

Orlando is, I've been told, maybe not a good starting point to get a taste of US. It's like a big entertainment place with restaurants linking amusement parks. However, via Chad and his wife Mary Ellen, we got to know some other folks. We went to a bar and that was great experience. The Orlando downtown bar on a roof was also very interesting, good music there.

Either ways, I'm happy I'm going home soon. In a land where you get a 20oz T-bone steak or 3 cm think pork chop, I wouldn't survive long. Probably going to other states will be good to know this big country, but I'm not in a hurry. There's still …

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on February, 24th & 25th. I went there last year and really had a great time. This year, I submitted a proposal for a lightning talk, which has been accepted! I've just been informed that the lightning talk schedule is now published. My talk "What's new at MySQL AB" will be on Saturday, at 17:00. I look forward to being there!

Landed last night in Seoul and got a ride into the city with a few
others who are speaking at Linux World Korea. I have a Keynote to do
today on the State of the Dolphin (aka MySQL) at the Confernce.
Thanks to my normal lack of need to sleep I decided to go walking at
6AM to see the city. Seoul is north enough to already be light out at
that time of day so I could see everything, and at not deal with
large crowds. Across from the hotel is the Buddhist temple of
Bongeunsa, and I spent a couple of hours walking through it. Its a
pretty amazing place, the art work and detail in the temples are
impressive.

The odd point in the adventure? Having a Buddhist monk come up to me
while I was in a temple and give me what turned out to be four pounds
of steamed rice with beans baked all around it. I wasn't sure
exactly what it was till I got back to the …

Today I uploaded a batch of pictures into my gallery and I also re-arranged a number of albums into a separate Conferences and Events collection. The latest additions in there (yes, some should have been uploaded some time ago already!):

• EuroOSCON 2005 in Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Open Source Database Conference 2005 in Frankfurt, Germany
• FOSDEM 2006 Conference in Brussels, Belgium
• MySQL Developer Meeting 2006 in Sorrento, Italy …

Last night I returned home from our internal MySQL Developer Meeting in Sorrento, Italy. The trip again was uneventful (something I certainly don't mind) and I used it to catch up with email and other work that I could not take care of while being at the conference.

The event was very well organized (kudos to Carol and the rest of the team!) and I enjoyed meeting old and new colleagues. It was nice being able to discuss stuff from face to face and hearing about what's cooking at the various other parts of the company in more detail. Too bad that we sometimes had so many tracks in parallel - it was difficult at times to decide which session to attend without fearing to miss something else. I gave a presentation about SUSE Linux (why it's the best Linux distro to use) and how our developers can help to foster our user community.

On Monday evening, we arranged a small meeting with local community users, some of them …