Tuesday — Be thou my best thought

I think my talk went reasonably well in the end, though there were no questions. I'm not sure whether the audience were entirely satisfied or catatonic with hearing me drone on.

After the talk, I went off and hacked for a bit to clear my head until it was time to go to the brewery; I sat next to Michael Meeks on the way down there, and we talked about office suites.

When we arrived, they had a pretty comprehensive exhibition about how they make Guinness: I wandered around that, reading about hops and barley, until I noticed that people were vanishing upstairs. Well, toucan play at that game, so I followed. My goodness. There was a bar with people walking around handing out pints. There, Will gave me the useful information that Guinness Special Export is much more tasty than the ordinary kind. After a rather large number of pints of that, a rather good U2 cover band appeared, so we all danced. (Thank you for the whiskey, Chani.) I feel surprisingly well today, apart from a slight headache. I suppose Guinness is good for you.

Huge thanks to the organisers, who have certainly shown themselves capable of… no, that line is far too obvious.

Surprise free laptops

Intel and Nokia have decided to give us all free laptops, as long as we use them to go around and show people MeeGo, and for those of us who are coders, we write lots of cool stuff with them.

Here is the queue to get one:



And here is my new and as yet unnamed laptop, running MeeGo:



I have to say that installation was a piece of cake. Now everyone has three devices attached to the wifi: their ordinary computer, their phone— N900s are almost ubiquitous here— and their new laptop. So I hope this posts!

Oh, I have to mention: the screen on this swivels right round, and is a touchscreen, so you can just tap the screen instead of using the touchpad. It is a very, very shiny thing.

Wednesday— In the day and the night

Today was a day of un-conferences, where people attending the conference made up the programme. It was a day of being given notebooks, as you've already heard. And it was a day of packing everything up.

After things were cleared away, some people went to watch the Ireland v Norway match, but we went to a brewpub called Porterhouse for beer and pies.

It's been a memorable and useful few days. Back to Philly tomorrow morning.