Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

I've just added two (of the three) iText companies to Geekplan.com, an IBBT and GentM initiative:

As predicted, the statistics for April aren't as good as usual because of the Spring break and the Easter holidays:

These vacation periods may not be visible in the heartbeat of the 'visits', you can clearly see it in the graph of the Alexa ranking:

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:

We found a huge pile of mail after returning home, and now I'm going through all the letters, invoices and other mail we received in the last few weeks. One of the letters I received contained the book sales for 11Q4. For some reason, people are still buying the first edition. In the world of IT books, you have a bestseller as soon as you can sell 5,000 copies. And yes: the second book is now at 5,394 copies. That makes it official: I've written a second bestseller!

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

Whereever you go in Silicon Valley these days, you're reminded of the Oracle vs. Google trial. Everybody has his or her opinion about the case, and up until now, I've heard many people express the hope that Oracle will lose this case. I don't agree for reasons that are purely personal, but hear my opinion: if there's justice in this world, Google should lose.

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