11
May
Politics politics. Here in Waloonia we have to spreak French, walk half a kilometre north and you are barred from speaking French and have to speak Dutch. Go a further kilometer north and you're in Brussels where you have to speak French but in practice everyone spreaks English. And they manage this all without bothering to have a government. Almost as crazy as home where the old prime minister resigned to make way for a posh English chap who will doubtless steal our milk and make us pay a poll tax. Really I should have been in London tonight to visit Buckingham palace and put myself forward for the job of Prime Minister and had the chance to found the Pacifist Free Software Kingdom of Scotland (plus southern principalities), but I missed my chance all because I'm at the Ubuntu Developer Summit planning the next six months of Kubuntu.
We've had a guests from a couple of my favourite companies here for the first couple of days. Thiago and Jergen from Nokia's Qt dropped by to convert the world to goodness and correct pronounciation ("it's called cute"). Secret basement meetings with design teams got some of the inner world of Canonical developers converted while Qt Quick got the designers wanting to know when my 4.7 packages would be ready so they can stop using that Flash rubbish.
DX Team consider conversion
Then Paul Adams made a humungous entry to covert the world of groupware to Kolab. We get lovely testing three times a day for our KDE PIM packages, they get to make server packages and the hopeful promise of Kolab on a server CD before the next LTS.
Kubuntu developers are here in style. Jon the Enchilada made it through the volcanic ash and Daniel Nicoletti will wow us with improvements to KPackageKit.
Brussles Ping? UDS Pong!
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Something inaccurate in your description of Belgium
"Politics politics. Here in Waloonia we have to spreak French, walk half a kilometre north and you are barred from speaking French and have to speak Dutch. Go a further kilometer north and you're in Brussels where you have to speak French but in practice everyone spreaks English. And they manage this all without bothering to have a government"
The official language is Brussels is bilingual (Dutch and French) so you don't have speak French but you can choose. Altough in practice more people have french as their mothertongue in Brussels than dutch + those that have dutch as their mother tongue more often speak also french than french-speaking people speak dutch. Since brussels is an international city with the HQ of the EU and so on, most people in public places will probably speak english too as you pointed out.
And that we (I'm from Belgium as you might have figured yourself) have no governement is mostly because of these 'problems' with languages...
Although we are very lucky since Belgium has a lot of parliaments (7) and governements (6) we will always have a government / parliament or 2 as backup :p. (Only 2 parliaments, and 2 governements are responsible for my area, so I have only one backup :p)
Have fun in Waloonia!
Jonathan, that's a marvelous blog. I love your political commentary. Can you be convinced to do weekly stand-up-before-web cam comedy about European political issues? Are you serious about poll tax, btw? Someone should learn these politicians some ecology. If you weigh votes by monetary compensation you create an unstable system with governmental power undulates between parties.
Perhaps a more stable democracy is one where there are no periodic full parliament elections but a weekly replacement of the PM with the least popular support. We have the technology for it!