Ordinary fool

Got to love this Internet. I've hooked up with a Montreal-resident French speaker named Sébastien Arbogast. He's a fellow Cocooner, and we're working together on growing Planet Cocoon, a site to support the Apache Cocoon development community (really, it's for geeks only).

Anyhow, the time difference between London and Montreal (coupled with our late night working habits), has meant that we've spent quite a bit of time chatting online over MSN. Apart from walking the geeky walk, we've been examining the catalogue of English idioms: "we're in the same boat", "the jury is still out", and plenty of parting phrases like "see ya round", "ta-ra, chuck", "spot ya" etc. (the explanations tend to drag out the farewells).

What's more, it's good to know the pot isn't exhausted. Today, while reading the Drupal mailing lists I came across another one: "clue bat". As in, "Let's work him with the clue bat.", or "We should not worry over such people. We should not even work them with the clue bat. Waste of time." Got to love English.

Brussels was a lot of fun. Believe it or not, DrupalCon 2005, part of FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting), was my first ever conference. I've long neglected my inner geek. It was all there: scraggy beards, long flowing hair, pasty complexions... My favourite T-shirt read "There are 10 types people. Those who understand binary, and those who don't."

Once that was over we went out in Brussels itself, to celebrate our good news. At the Mannequin Pis (peeing boy), we bumped into a couple we had already met, first on the Eurostar, and then at the conference itself. Fate was clearly determined that the four of us should meet. We stayed out drinking Kwak, Kriek, Orvel and Duvel until 4:30am.