Szimano’s Blog

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Finally our team managed to meet. And I’m not talking about meeting on AIM, only-for-oldies IRC or anything virtual. We realized that we’re made of flesh, bones, blood and all those things that a human is made of.

For me it was also first time to meet our not-so-new boss, Bob. He turned out to be a huge, huge guy. Like two meters or so… hard to tell from AIM usually :-). We had a really good time, lots of laughing, Adam playing with *things* in restaurants, James talking with his nice texan accent, Przemek not talking at all, Rysiek trying to fix some weird JSF stuff, Paweł being a bit to serious and Rebeca (Bob’s wife) trying to tidy this crazy bunch of geeks up.

We looked like tourists sometimes…

There was also Mark Newton, but had to leave ( ) soon and I haven’t even got a chance to shoot him with my camera.

From JBoss side I met few new guys (Emmanuel, Thomas Heute, Stefan Trojanowski who turned out not to be Polish, but Macedonian - yes - they end with -ski as well and Sasha Labourney) and got a chance to talk with well-known Julien about food, especially foix gras, and joke about .ORG <-> Portal stuff as always :-).

Antwerp itself was something between Kraków and not-so-big-and-very-ugly medium town in Poland - old town with outstanding Cathedral is very very nice. Outside full of blocks of flats in it’s ugliest way. Just look at those:

It’s not what i expect from Western Europe :). Anyway. The funniest part was when we decided to visit some crazy metal café. There was a huge skeleton hanging, music I don’t usually listen too played, anorectic black, pierced waitress etc. Bob started turning into a vampire…

So James invented clever Plan B - In Case Of Vampires . We had a really good laugh there :-). Some of us survived.

Work-wise we made a huge improvement so in all fields the trip was a success.

Oh - and this happened when we tried to buy tickets in Brussels