Ouch. A three days week-end. Eventful and restless.

I caught a train on Thursday evening, an hour and half after leaving the office, to arrived at 11pm in Paris. pouype was kind enough to host me for the week-end. He was waiting for me at the railroad station and drove me to his house, in a nice and quiet suburb.

On Friday morning, pouype and I got into the train, he to go to work, I to go to La Defense, to attend Paris on Rails conferences, in IBM’s Descartes Tower.
The conferences were very interesting, and it was the opportunity to meet many of those from Ruby France and Rails France I chat with on the Internet. I also met the team from the company I have job interviews with the week before, and the recruiter from Teamlog was here as well. I’ll write a complete page about these conferences in some days.

After the conferences, pouype (who joined after his day job) and I stayed next to the tower, so I could catch anyone I knew coming out, to introduce him to pouype. After discussing the interest of each conference with kristalino and bartocc , pouype, underflow, zencocoon and I walk around to finally have a drink and, after being cordially invited to leave, had pizza for dinner (where we were asked to leave too, a little after at 10pm O_o).

On Sunday, pouype, his wife and I went to a Greek restaurant, after what she stayed at home while we drove to La Cité des Sciences de La Villette, for APRIL’s 10th anniversary. We attended a conference and then leave to meet leeloo, the Mandriva Girl, and one of her friend, who lives in Montpellier, so we’ll plan to see each others sooner or later.
I didn’t watch my clock and I was four minutes late to get the train back to the South :-\

After considering waiting for 11 hours at the railroad station, as the following train to Avignon was at 7:54am on Sunday (!), I choosed to wander around and try to find a cheap room.

I did. But you can imagine the comfort of a EUR 50 (USD 64) room, less than a quarter of a mile far from the railroad station… I even blocked the door with chairs, in case someone tried to rob me during the night… (I took some pictures, I’ll upload them later)

Finally, I caught the earliest train this morning, and got back home at 11am.

Eventful, restless.

Ouch. 00:53 am.

I’ve just finished writing our last French speaking Ruby users, Ruby France, e-gathering, during which we dealt with… administrativia.
It wasn’t long, but I’m not very productive when I spend the evening watching Prison Break and chatting on IRC.
Anyway, we’re on our way to building a strong Ruby community in France (by the way, we need a logo, so, if you’re a graphist, feel free to contact me (zifro@ this site) to show me something ; in my idea, and hexagonal Ruby will be perfect, as France is also called the Hexagon).

I wrote I was at the JDLL last week-end.
It’s time to point at a stand I particularly liked : LinuxChixFrance (who claimed to be also grep|grrl too).
It’s a group of women, willing to see more girls involved in the open source community (like Debian Woman, Gnome Women). They were explaining to every each guy coming to their stand what goals they target, and were selling very, very nice A3 (European size, more than twice the US Letter size) posters, which you can see there.

As most of this blog readers are not French reading ones, here is the translation of the texts of the posters, from left to right :

1. I code, You code, She codes, We code, You code, They (women) code

2. One can love to take care of animals without even dreaming of becoming a vet.
3. This woman uses Free Software. It makes her : [ ] sexy [ ] independant

4. This womand hates mouses. She prefers command line interfaces.

I was well-dressed (I wore a suit and a clean shirt) so I suppose the girl (zopeuse ?) thought I wasn’t a techie (but I may be absolutely wrong…) and explained me more precisely what LinuxChixFrance wanted.

To support them, I bought five of each posters they were selling, plus a small Tux pendant (I bought a pink one, I think I’ll offer it to my sister). The girl didn’t believed it at once, then she was truly happy to see someone would spread their message by pasting and/or distributing posters.

The fact is there aren’t enough girls in FLOSS (Anne Ostergaard made a neat conference about “Women in Free Software - Findings from the FLOSSPOLS report on gender 2006″ while she was at the 2006 RMLL). All that those girls say are sadly the truth : from kindergarten (toys play an important role in mind development, and girls are given dolls while boys are playing with construction games, tools and stuff) to university, girls are more or less forced to other ways than computing.
So whatever we could do will be a first step to welcoming more girls in our community.

I’m waiting for the first girl to join Ruby France