The roads I take...

I finally managed to get my photos from last October's trip to California sorted out to a smaller "best of" collection that I also find useful for putting up in a public web gallery.



And as I was traveling with a DSLR and a zoom lens for the first time, I finally could take some shots I couldn't with just the pocket camera in previous vacations.



Not enough with that, though: I got invited to Mozilla's all-hands event taking place in the first week of April in Mountain View!



This means I'll be back to California quite soon, flying off next Saturday, April 2. For everyone who wants to meet up with me, I'll stay the week after the all-hands for some chance for additional work (meetings) but also some fun, so contact me if you want to meet up then!



And else, have fun taking a look at the pics!

I have mentioned it previously, and now it's coming up really fast: My personal browser start page says I have "2 days, 17 hours, 36 minutes" left until take-off to a trip that will lead me to the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley and the Mozilla headquarters.

I hope to be working next week (October 4th through 8th) from the Mozilla headquarters and having a number of meetings with different people working from there, on a mission to improve communication and cooperation between different parts of Mozilla and the SeaMonkey project.

If you are around in that area or at Mozilla, please contact me via email or on IRC and I hope we can arrange meeting up - after all, talking to people involved with Mozilla is what I'm there for.

Of course, being out of my usual environment, I'll try to have some fun next to the work engagements, and so I already have tickets for a Friday night Country Music concert (Rascal Flatts, Kellie Pickler, and Chris Young) and a Sunday night football game (Eagles @ 49ers) - and I'll probably take most of the second week I'm there to drive around (I have a rental car for the whole stay) and do some sightseeing and relaxation, though I haven't planned details yet.

In any case, I'll spend most of this Friday (Oct 1) at airports and on planes to get there, and most of Oct 17/18 traveling back the same way.
I should be around on and off on IRC the first week of those two, but probably not or very rarely the week after - still I should be back in Vienna with some time left before the core SeaMonkey community will convene here.

Oh, and I hope to get even better photos than on previous trips due to having an (older, but still quite decent) DSLR with me in addition to the good-quality pocket cam I usually took all my pics with.

It took me a few weeks as usual, but I now have a reasonable collection of 150 pictures out of about 1200 I took on my US Gulf Region trip, and uploaded those on the website:
Photo gallery: US Gulf Region - November 2009



From rising skyscrapers to swamps, rivers and the Gulf, from museums and monuments to all kinds of stadiums, from live music bars to a Whiskey distillery and a guitar factory, from squirrels to sharks and tigers, I think the pictures show the wide variety of what we saw there - and I'm sure that was only a small part of what the region has to offer.



The hardest part of doing those is always to reduce the vast amount of good pics to a collection that people still are able to view, I hope I managed that task this time again, even though I needed to leave out some other just-as-good ones.

Just to let y'all know, I'm back home from my 3-week vacation in the USA. I'm safe and sound but quite tired and I have a huge backlog to work in the next days, looks like about 1400 bugmails and 120 normal emails that I put aside to really work on - next to finishing up the photo collection and other stuff from the vacation. Oh, and I haven't even looked at newsgroups, planet or hg yet. So, expect to hear from me again, but don't expect me to be very responsive this week while I'm working that backlog.

Nuff said, I guess I should go to bed and get a good night's sleep first of all.

As some of you might know, I've long been planning to go on vacation in November, and this is coming up fast now, so I'll let everyone know where I'll be in those weeks that you'll not see me on IRC or, unless there's an emergency, anywhere else in the online world.

I'll take off together with a good friend (who already joined me for the California trip last year) from Vienna next Saturday, November 7th in the morning and land in Houston, TX on the same day in the late afternoon (thanks to the time shift). From there, we've rented a car and will do a round trip that is only roughly planned and subject to change as we feel necessary.

Our current plan is as follows:
Nov 07-10: Houston Area (Space Center, Galveston, ...)
Nov 11: Houston - Port Arthur - Baton Rouge - New Orleans
Nov 12-14: New Orleans
Nov 15: New Orleans - Gulfport - Biloxi - Pensacola
Nov 16: Pensacola - Montgomery - Atlanta
Nov 17-18: Atlanta
Nov 19: Atlanta - Chattanooga - Nashville
Nov 20: Nashville
Nov 21: Nashville - Jackson - Memphis
Nov 22: Memphis
Nov 23: Memphis - Little Rock
Nov 24: Little Rock - Texarkana - Dallas
Nov 25-26: Dallas (26th: Football match @ Cowboys Stadium)
Nov 27: Dallas - Houston
Nov 28: Houston/Flight

In the afternoon of the 28th, we'll ride the plane back to Europe, arriving in Vienna on 29th around noon (now paying for the timeshift).

A map of POIs we've marked for this trip is available from Google maps (I'd so much love if OpenStreetMaps would support easily generating such things). If you know anything additional that could be interesting to pay a visit to, please tell me about it!

If you want to meet up with us somewhere, note that our plans are not set in stone and we might change them around as we see fit, but I should be able to check email every evening at the hotels, and that will probably also be the only reasonable way of contacting me in that time. I won't read anything that doesn't suggest in the subject that it's important or affecting my trip, though. I'm on vacation, after all.

That said, I'll still be around next week, but don't expect any really heavy work from me - and have a great November!

Originally, I only wanted to get a few photos up fast but that ended up taking me a few hours today, esp. in adding photo descriptions, and then some OpenStreetMap updates regarding the places I've been...



In any case, I finally found the time and made selections of photos of a number of travels and events to put online (I only post selections because I often have hundreds of photos of those travels and it can probably get rather boring to view them all - but then, it takes some time to select and put up photo descriptions).



As most of those events are somehow related to Mozilla, you might be interested in some parts of them, even though the parts about conferences are usually rather small, I tend to chat more there than take photos, after all. Though, you might just like all the other pics as well...



Those galleries are newly available now:

• FOSDEM 2007, Brussels
• FOSDEM 2008, Brussels
• Canada/USA - July/August 2008
• MozCamp Barcelona 2008
• FOSDEM 2009, Brussels
• Lift09, Geneva

This list totals 337 photos, all with tags and descriptions.
(Even though this still misses MAOW Berlin 2009, from which I haven't made a selection yet, I hope I come around to that soon.)

So, I'm back from my Summit+vacation Canada/USA tour, after the long bus ride from Whistler to Vancouver I'm sure you heard about or were on, I spent another week in the lower Fraser Valley (i.e. the almost flat land between Vancouver and Chilliwack and the Western half of Washington state. I took lots of walks, did a huge amount of sightseeing, had a very good time and took over a thousand pictures, a selection of which I will upload to my site some time in the next few weeks.
I still need to catch up on email, bugs, planet and newsgroups even though a glanced over most of the email at nights in the hotels (thanks to Best Western for having free Internet on all their hotels!) - but there's so much going on in our community that I probably need some time to be fully back to normal.

Oh, and I didn't even do a Status Update for the week before the Summit...

Well, I'm even planning on catching up on that.