Amarok Blog

This is me on Sunday.. "the day after". What you cannot really see on this photo are the giant bandages around my head, arm, shoulder and knee. They were the result of my little stunt I did the night before at the social event @ Froscon 2007. The Amarok team is known for being party animals, and of course we could not make an exception this time! We hit the dancefloor, and we hit it hard. And then I hit the ground, and I hit it hard. Missing this 1m deep step to the dancefloor, I met the ground horizontally, beer glass in hand. That's Amarok entertainment for ya! Stunts included. After all I was very lucky though not to have any serious injuries, just lots of bleeding skin wounds all over my body. Again many thanks to the Froscon dudes for patching me up in the night.

Here you can see the original Amarok party animals at work:



And here's our Beermaster Sven, Kranz in hand:



A Kranz is a great thing. It's round. It's got a handle. And the best part about it: There's beer in it. Lots of it.




On the next day Harald, Lydia and I held our talk about Amarok's team structure and upcoming features of Amarok 2. The talk wasn't exactly great, but I think considering our damaged state and short time to prepare (I wasn't really prepared at all, since the talk was originally scheduled for another conference), we got the message across and did quite well.



Overall the Froscon was a great experience, and I hope to repeat it next year (although maybe without the stunt show; we'll see). The organizer team was *awesome*; everything went so smoothly. Catering, location, social event, it was all very well organized. I met a lot of great people from other projects, and I had the chance to meet some Amarok teamsters that I had not seen in real life before.

What really bugs me about conferences like these is the constant background noise level though. Maybe it's just me (a hearing problem?), but I find it very stressful to talk to people over such a noise level. It was a great experience to talk to people face to face and demo Amarok2 to our users, but it's no fun having to shout constantly. This wasn't helped by the fact that our booth was next to the Jacklab dudes' booth, who were showcasing their music software with a real guitar and drum kit

On the monday after Froscon we still had some time left until our flights/trains/etc departed, and we (Amarokers) spent some hours in Cologne with Miriam and Florian from the FSFE. We visited the famous cathedral of Cologne and after that went shopping and had beer at a nice place directly at the river Rhine. Quality time, and it was great to meet Miriam and Flo, who are really nice folks.

You can find more photos of the event here and here. Also, here is a very nice blog entry (in German language) from Valerie.