Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

If you own a smartphone, there's always a service that tracks where you are, whether you like it or not. Privacy is a thing of the past, and that's why I don't bother trying to shut down all tracking. As a result, I can create these neat maps showing the different locations we've visited in the last two weeks. It's a pity that Google uses the European time, even after I switched the clock on my smart phone to Californian time.
Anyway, this is us flying to San Francisco:

What to do the day before you fly home? Ingeborg chose for an evening swim in the Swimming Pool of the Oakwood Appartments in Mountain View:

Source: Uploaded by user via Bruno on Pinterest

Our second business trip to Silicon Valley this year is coming to an end. In the morning, we drove to Palo Alto for a meeting with Barnes & Noble. It was a short meeting, but everything that was said, was very much to the point. I like that.
After the meeting we drove to Santa Clara. We were early, so we did some sight seeing first:

Source: Uploaded by user via Bruno on Pinterest

We had been mailing with Citrix, but unfortunately, we didn't manage to pick a date and time. If only we had known we'd be so close with some extra time at hand...

If you have a meeting at 10 somewhere in the Valley, make sure you leave in time, because traffic on the 101 can be hell:

Source: Uploaded by user via Bruno on Pinterest

Yesterday, we had to work away a huge backlog, so we rewarded ourselves with some brainless entertainment:

Source: Uploaded by user via Bruno on Pinterest

On Monday afternoon, we had two meetings in Oakland, so we had to take the bridge to the East Bay:

Source: Uploaded by user via Bruno on Pinterest

On Sunday, we had lunch in the Fish Market in Palo Alto. It's my third visit to Silicon Valley, and every time I've been eating here at least once:

Source: Uploaded by user
via Bruno
on Pinterest

Although you might not have noticed it on the photos in my previous posts, we didn't have much luck with the weather. We've had rain, a storm, and it wasn't very warm. All this changed today:

Source: Uploaded by user via Bruno on Pinterest

The morning started great:

Source: Uploaded by user via Bruno on Pinterest

If it were up to me, I would give away all my work for free. As a matter of fact, many people consider my early work (the old and obsolete releases of iText up until version 2.1.7) as free as in free beer.
I'm living proof that this approach doesn't work. One thing very few people realize, is that a successful product can be destroyed not only in spite of but also because of its success. That nearly happened to iText in 2008, the year my son was diagnozed with cancer, also the year the Belgian Social Security retrospectively taxed me (going back 5 years in history!) because they didn't believe I didn't make any money with iText.