After a slightly unproductive Monday I got lots done at Akademy yesterday!

The first talk in the Open Document Day gave me a great subject for an article that I'm now working on - the politics of open standards in Europe, which overlaps nicely with the continued fight against software patents. It's good to see these subjects getting continued exposure at techie conferences. I only hope that KDE contributors will take it upon themselves to talk to their MEPs more about these two issues!

I then spent much of the day doing promotion stuff: I worked on the above article, helped Rob Scott and Ken Wimer get photos for the PlanetKDE hackergotchis, talked crap with various people to fish for story ideas, attended the Kubuntu session (edgy eft has some nice incremental improvements), then had a proper kde-promo meeting... with a whiteboard!

Of course that quickly turned into a game of pictionary - look out for portraits of the team by yours truly - in which Wade Olson and I proved that we can be unproductive and distracting in real life as well as on mailing lists :). The big problem with Akademy is that there are just far too many interesting stories, so Sebas Kuegler struggled to keep his wrap-up to our invitation-only press list brief. Hopefully we'll manage to get some more stuff on the dot over the next couple of weeks. For those fed up of seeing Wade re-post his life story to PlanetKDE every few weeks, my posts showing up twice, and any number of other gripes with that stupid software, dark mutterings harbour plans to slay the beast and install a nicer aggregator.

The day drew to a close with a group of us enjoying the webteam's anguished attempts to overhaul the KDE web presence (hint: the marketing team should take complete control, unless you want me to help out with low-level code in kdelibs ;)), then heading off through Dublin trying to find a mystical pub/club called something like 'Sinn A'. Lots of confused locals later, Aaron Seigo and I got cut off from the crowd so we sat in a themed club called Zanzibar, ranting about whaling and state/corporate power until he'd sated his 80s dancing desires. The next Akademy should really feature an organised ceilidh :D.