Freitag, 2. Mai 2003

G'day Marcus: Just noticed that Marcus and Michael are spending some weeks "back home" - which for them is Australia! Hope you have some fun guys! Wow - they left on Thursday and arrived on Saturday? That's global travel for you.

Don't have kids: (I'm joking). At the moment the family is away for a couple of days and if you want to know what it's like with 3 - then Frank can now tell you. They're back tomorrow so I'm having a ... umm.... quiet evening.

Social faces: Something I particularly like about events like Jax and OSCON is the fact that I get to meet people again. Working in open source area brings down certain barriers that exist in the normal world of customer-relations - so meeting customers that are using open source is always more fun. It loses that sense of "we have to sell you something" and "here are our new shiny brochures" and becomes more of a peer-conversation. Of course we're out to sell something in the end - and creating new business is important - but its more... relaxed. For want of a better word. Something that is hard to get other people to understand. An example: This morning I chatted for an  hour on the phone to someone I've never met personally and who works in one of the major telcos in Europe. They're using Cocoon and so we spent basically the hour where he told me what they had done and what issues they had and so on. I told him what we did and gave him a couple of answers to questions he had. Now hopefully, we'll be meeting up at Jax for a further talk and of course in the end it would be great if we could get into some business relationship. But for now it's someone who is using Cocoon and wants to know how to carry on and how to avoid certain mistakes. And you can bet that he'll get that from us without me saying up front "well that will be xxx € an hour before I talk to you". The interesting thing is that in the end this will pay off. In fact we had the first contact with many customers we now have some months ago. Then there was a lull when they tried things out themselves and now - once they've worked out that open source can get the job done - they come back. Hard to explain to people more involved in traditional marketing and something that perhaps you have to have experienced to really understand. People like Steven will hopefully agree with this.

Jax preview: Only about a week to go to Jax and we completed the Cocoon power workshop presentation today. Now fitting a weeks Cocoon training into a day is not easy and so something had to go. In the end we decided to leave out the programming side of Cocoon (i.e. building your own components) and focus on showing the big picture of Cocoon from a more user-oriented point of view. So. if you're coming, then you're in for around 200 slides and hopefully a day full of interesting information about Cocoon. The workshop will be in German - but the slides are in English. If you're interested in having something like this on-site or even a longer Cocoon training - then drop me a line.

Gaming awe: Tonight I was struck with gaming awe. It's been a long time since I saw a game that made me go "wow" and more so - was one I could actually get into for any length of time. Most of the titles that come out are sort of ho-hum. Interesting for about 5 minutes. The kids seem to like them so perhaps I'm just too old now. Anyway, today I went and bought Zelda, Windwaker for my Gamecube. There's been a lot of talk about it, I'd seen some of it on TV and it's getting good reviews. Now, I never played any of the previous Zeldas, even on my trusty N64, so I was a little hesitant. However. It rocks. The graphics are superb, even though the use of cell-shading was criticized beforehand. The gameplay (as far as I've played) is just right for me with things moving along at my pace - instead of my pace being driven by the game. Anyway - if you've got a Gamecube - get Zelda. And if you're wondering which console to get - get the Gamecube and then get Zelda. You won't regret it.