Choccie
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Customer Services, Travel 1 Comment »One thing I really shouldn’t do is head in to excellent chocolate shops on my own. While wandering around last night I found the Puccini Bomboni shop in Singel, Amsterdam. Adrian had mentioned about this a while ago on the currently-defunct-and-thus-no-link Uborka.nu so I made a mental note to go back.
I had some time spare today where nothing was going on, so I wandered back – and oh dear, oh dear. €35 later, and I’ve got a selection box of some truly evil-looking (calorie-wise) choccies, as well as some caramel nougat, and chocolate-covered orange slices. (Think grand-scale jaffa cakes) – and I’m being dead good, and not even opening any of it ’til I get home.
The shop is fantastic though – you can almost get high on the smell of the chocolate. The staff were lovely too, translating the Dutch labels (who’d have thought that rabarber meant rhubarb, eh? Ha. ) and generally just being really nice. I’m sure I’ll do more of a review of the chocs themselves when we’ve eaten a few, but I can say already that some of them look deeply tempting. Getting them home intact will be an achievement for sure.
Reaping
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: News, Thoughts, Travel 4 Comments »Fantastic news in the Guardian today, that the government has announced a reshuffle that will mean Virgin fucking Trains losing their franchise for the cross-country from 2007.
And it’s about fucking time too – they’ve been running the service so badly over the last couple of years, they deserve to lose it.
Attendance 2
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Euro OSCON 2005, Geeky Leave a comment »On a far geekier note, it’s also been really interesting to be talking to, or seeing presentations from, so many of the people whose IT experience, programs and knowledge I’ve been using for years. People like Rasmus Lerdorf, who wrote PHP, Tim O’Reilly, the CEO of O’Reilly publishing ( the tech books with animals on the cover – and if you don’t know them, don’t worry) and Larry Wall, who created Perl.
That’s just a tiny subsection of the people here, obviously – but all the same, it really is pretty cool.
Attendance
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Euro OSCON 2005, Geeky, Thoughts Leave a comment »One thing that’s interesting here (well, I find it interesting, anyway) is how many women there are among the attendees. It’s nowhere near a majority (yet) but I’d say about 15-20% of the attendees are female, which is a huge leap from what it was five years ago.
Definitely a good thing, when so many of the keynote speakers were banging on about (among other things) equality and open-ness in all things.
Confusion
Posted: Tue 18 October, 2005 Filed under: Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Bloody Hell, is it really only Tuesday?
My brain’s been confused by flying out on the Sunday instead of the Monday – I’m a day out as well as being an hour out. Either way, it’s just not very good really. Grr.