JLP’s Blog

I’m now safe at home for about a day and here is my look back at aKadmy 2007.

I’m glad that flights and other travelling went so smoothly. Yeah, it was a bit long and there was a lot of waiting, especially the first day, but that’s about it. Found the bus between Prestwick airport and Glasgow just fine. And the walk in the middle of the night from the bus to Euro Hostel was also fine. We felt lost just for a short moment, but then found the hostel immediately.

The room in the hostel was OK, nice to have your own shower and you got fresh towels every day. There could be more variety when it comes to breakfast and it would be nice if each room had a free wireless internet. Well at least they had internet at the lobby of the hostel.

The aKademy conference itself was great. I expected that there would be around 200 people, but I’ve heard that there were actually about 300 people. The talks and BoFs were interesting. I especially liked the ones about KDE and FLOSS in education. What I did miss is a talk about translation and localisation, which is a very important part of KDE and free software. It was also unfortunate that the wireless internet connection only started to work at the end of the second day. I also expected that they would be selling more KDE merchandise. like plush Konqi, more t-shirts, pins and stuff like that. Other than that it was really nice to meet all the people and I sure hope I will be able to go to aKademy 2008 next year.

About Glasgow. The English accent they use there makes people hard to understand sometimes. The traffic lights work in a strange way, feels almost randomly. With sister we also tried Kebab there and it was put together in a different way than here in Slovenia, didn’t taste very good and it was very expensive (like everything in Glasgow). The weather was depressing a bit. Almost always cloudy and it was raining very often. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to go sightseeing. The aKademy programme filled almost entire day and at the end of the day I was just so tired that I went back to the hostel and fell asleep.

All in all it was a great week and I recommend to every KDE user to definitely try to visit aKademy at least once. In the end I must thank Linux User Group of Slovenia, who paid for my trip and made this great experience possible. Thank you LUGOS!

Read more:
Ready for aKademy 2007
All packed and ready for aKademy 2007
aKademy 2007, day 0
aKademy 2007, day 0, part 2
aKademy 2007, day 1
aKademy 2007, day 2
aKademy 2007, School and Education day
aKademy 2007, BoFs Day

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland