It's been a while... I pity my international audience. Let's see what I've been doing lately:
I started blogging in Dutch a few months ago, my native language. I offer language-specific feeds, but apparently with little effect: 84.54% of the feed consumers are still subscribed to my multilingual feeds, 12.20% to the English-only feeds, and a measly 3.26% to the Dutch feeds. So much for my effort. :) Blogging in your native language is fun, BTW, since (in my case) the audience is completely different. There's very little IT bloggers, let alone open source bloggers in Belgium, and I know many of them as friends or ex-colleagues, so you tend to stop bragging about coolness, community karma and did-you-know-no-you-didn't posts, and just chat about the weekend, the kids, and male chauvinist pig themes. My Dutch blogging was influenced by the emerging Flemish blogospere, and all the elbow-pushing associated with emerging e-communities. I had good fun while it lasted, but now that mainstream media are picking up the blog theme, it gets increasingly boring to see the egos clash and everybody eagerly trying to put him- or herself on the map. Me too! Me too!
Professionally, I've been pretty busy, which is both a combination of the yearly work biorhythm the entire industry participates in, and Daisy slowly blossoming. Next week, we're hosting an information seminar and it looks like a nice number of people will be showing up, even though our marketing sucked as always. 1.3 is progressing nicely, and it looks as if we will be able to shift future feature release plans towards real needs of paying customers.
We're in the process of hiring somebody as well, and are currently even confronted with the gruesome task of having actually to choose between two nice candidates. Two fresh graduates, they seem smart and nice to get along with, and I'm sure they would both be nice colleagues, but unfortunately there's only room for one at the moment. The luxury of choice!
Business-wise, we're in the last miles of the-road-towards-an-offer for a high-profile customer here in Belgium. The nerve-racking wait and finger-tapping is almost over, and there's already reassurance from their side that the main discussion point now is size and scope, rather than the boolean Daisy-or-not choice. The kind of customer which will enable us to generate local press attention, which is always nice for fledgling projects and companies as ours.
And just 48 hours ago, some fellow dinosaur started nagging me sweetly and softly about some potential international business for or with Daisy. I'm psyched even if I don't know what will happen, as it's just another proof that if you lay low and keep energy away from buzz and focus on stuff instead, people are bound to find out what you're doing, and might even happen to like it. Hurray for non-marketing!
There's lots of silly stuff going on on the Web, BTW, about Ajax, Rails and continuations. Let the nay-sayers and the drooling groupies rejoice: there's themes to flock around, and blog posts to write, and trackbacks to be generated! As oftentimes, there's nihil nove sub sole, but that won't refrain the blogging crew from thinking their voice will shape this planet's destiny. Well, as I often say in Dutch: "while doing this, we're not committing any other crime".
Oh: and the family is going well, thanks. The youngest daughter is a bit ill ATM, but nothing life-threatening - just the side-effects of living in the Western industrialized world: respiratory system diseases... thank you, Arcelor!
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