Just yesterday I attended a first working brunch related to the Austrian OGov Data Initiative. The workshop had the goal to detail the data we are interested in and also to define the overall goal and degree of formality ( detailed results).

The turnout was very good, with a good mix of individuals, university people, smart companies. Needless to say, I saw no observer from the public sectors.

And - being a methusalemic Internet person - I had some flashbacks, reaching back into the early 90'ies.

The BIBOS "Experience"

I was university assistent at that time. And while I was supposed to write my thesis, I rather preferred to experiment with this new thing called the Internet.

Advice: Do some reading before writing me. I mean it.

The dirty little man was nervously hopping from one leg to the other:

"If you touch me, I will kill you."

I tried to look right through him and smiled coldly.

• "It is not ... a matter ... of violence. It ... never is."

It was the 1st of January, the day right after New Years' Eve. Sylvester itself, and the days before that were marked by constant explosions of fire crackers. Annoying and nerve-wrecking, especially when at 3:00 in the night.

Start of December I attended the ESTC 2009 (European Semantic Technologies Conference) here in Vienna.

It was my first attendence, and it was interesting to see how the non-academic faction of the semantic web crowd looked like. I had seen the academic portion at the ESWC 2009 where I presented a paper on semantic time series in one of the workshops.

And while I wore my Topic Maps T-shirt publicly in Heraklion, at the ESTC it was kept well hidden under my pullover all the time.

In an earlier life I was designer and developer of Internet shops. This was a time when Perl-o-saurs roamed the planet and the only game in web server town was "Apache with CGI". No mod_perl2 goodness, no MVC bloat, just good-n-old-n-slow CGI.

http://www.music.at/tu-ball/

I had just boarded the train and was unpacking my MacBook to continue work on the geo-semantics Perl package, as the clock on the platform changed to 9:05.

During this past year, every morning was a race against time. First I had to take that short walk through the nearby park to the next tram station, taking line 18 towards the southern rail terminus.

Yesterday evening Solomon Burke played in the Arkadenhof inside the Viennese Rathaus. Or should I say held court.

The research center I work in is in the south of Vienna, closer to the traditional strawberry fields. So it is quite natural that the farmers directly drive by at noon and offer strawberries, fresh only a few hours after having been harvested.

Was:

• Jonathan Worthington: Rakudo Update

• Talk 'die Perl, die!'

Wo:

in den Räumlichkeiten des NIG (Neues Institutsgebäude)

NIG, Raum D116, im Gang D

Was:

• Perl QA Hackathon in Oslo

• Talk 'die Perl, die!'

Wo:

in den Räumlichkeiten des NIG (Neues Institutsgebäude)

NIG, Raum D116, im Gang D

Was:

• Jozef: Packaging Perl modules for Debian

Wo:

in den Räumlichkeiten des NIG (Neues Institutsgebäude)

NIG, Raum D116, im Gang D

There is one thing many Europeans do not understand about seasons (the climatic ones, yes):

• You would miss them, if you didn't have 'em.

And there is one thing many Australians do not understand about seasons:

• You cannot miss them, because you never had 'em.

Mostly for our Australian friends, those who have been so overly supportive over the last years, those we had to leave behind, those we sorely miss (no, I don't mean you, Warren) ... here a recent view from our window for your education:

http://www.music.at/tu-ball/

Ort:

Weihnachtsmarkt Spittelberg, Treffpunkt Ecke Burggasse+Schrankgasse