Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

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:

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I've been thinking all night trying to define the unease that was caused by attending the Open Source Think Tank.
It's hard for me to find out if this unease is caused because I was in an environment far away from my comfort zone, or if something else was going on.
I didn't feel like I belonged at the OSTT, and I woke up with a sentence from a French poem on my mind: "Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées, Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher."

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:

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The morning started great:

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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.

First day at the Open Source Think Tank. This is the registration desk:

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Yesterday, we were too tired to see much of the Silverado resort, but this morning we made a short movie to show the venue to the home front:

We had to get up early on April 10th. We were expecting our taxi to bring us to Brussels Airport at 3:30 AM in the morning.

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We had a successful summit a week ago, I taught an iText course in Paris this week, and now I'm preparing for a business trip to the US next week. This means I have plenty of work, and very little time to blog. I didn't even have time to look at the Google Analytics results for March until today:

Did we break any records?

I was nervous to organize our first itext summit. I have a history being Event Manager for Devoxx for 5 years, so I have a reputation to hold high in this particular Marketing field.

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There are a lot of pre-, during and post- arrangements to be made, with a backup plan for each phase. The more thought that is put into the planning phase, the better the conference.