I have finally recovered from the trip to Jamaica. It took me the whole weekend, though. Maybe staying up late didn’t really help… Or I’m just getting old.

CampKDE was a cozy but great meeting and I really enjoyed spending time with people I already knew rather well and those I hadn’t met before.

Although distractions were many, I got to all the topics I had on my list and learnt a lot from Mauricio and – I must admit – Wade. Quite some new ideas take shape in my head and I really hope to make at least a part of those reality.

For example: what do members of the Spanish speaking communities think about a Spanish blog aggregation around KDE? What about Portuguese? Is there already a place for this on the web? Please, comment with thoughts and hints, I am not really at home in both languages…

And speaking of the net: there is a flickr group collecting photos from campKDE. So if you happen to have your pics uploaded there, shoot me a message and I will add you to the group so you can share them there.

Both days of conference are over by now. The talks were quite technical, but still interesting to me. At least the part that I actually understood. Nevertheless I learnt something: I knew about cultural differences between Asia and Europe before but it was new to me that those between Europe and (South- and Middle-) America were nearly as big.

For today I plan a BoF on collaboration between the KDE community in North America and Qt Software to plan how to leverage KDE along with Qt and hopefully another one on the needs of the communities on Middle and Southern America, now that I actually have members of our community from there at hand. So to speak.

When the alarm woke me up at 5 yesterday morning, I found it hard to believe that I would be spending most of the day on various planes and crossing several timezones. To be honest, it felt close to impossible to get out of bed. But I convinced myself at last and crawled down the ladder of my loft bed.

At 7.55 and -6° C Thomas and me got onto the plane to Heathrow. Surprisingly enough I didn’t have to hurry this time: I actually was early enough at the airport in Oslo to have a nice cup of coffee and call home.

Arriving at our gate in Heathrow, we met Leo who boarded the flight to Miami with us. I have never been on a plane for more than 4 hors before and I must say: it’s pretty boring. Especially when there is not much to see outside apart from clouds, water and empty icy Canada.

In Miami I had trouble finding my suitcase which could not be checked through to Montego Bay and going through customs took ages. Result was that I couldn’t check in my suitcase for the American Airlines flight to Jamaica and therefore had to leave all my bathroom goodies at the airport. Meh. For Leo it was even worse because his bag got lost somewhere on the way to Montego Bay.

I had to run to the gate but luckily caught the flight.

Right after landing I was overwhelmed by the uber-relaxed atmosphere on this island. Later at the Resort, I caught the opportunity to hop into the ocean right in the middle of the night while other KDE people were gathering around a camp fire on the beach.

We at Qt Software decided to join Camp KDE for various reasons. Thomas will give technical insight into the latest development of Qt, Ron Copeland – my fellow colleague from our office in Redwood, CA – is supposed to make first contacts to KDE contributors in America and I am looking forward to help with the promo activities and get in sync for the upcoming 4.2 release. And of course I am happy to meet new people most of which I only know by name so far.

Let’s join forces to make the next release a big success and move KDE forward to broader acceptance – along with Qt.