B. Mann Consulting

I'm winding down on my last evening here in Barcelona. Folks in Vancouver are starting to wake up, and I'm looking forward to heading home. Here are some of the things I enjoyed while in Barcelona:

So, in actuality, the prawns and olives above were not that great, but they WERE available within 2 blocks of our apartment at a random street side cervezeria. The food here definitely is in incredible - -I'm looking forward to sharing my pictures of the market once we get to somewhere with a solid Internet connection. With the new camera, at almost 3MB per picture, we have to be somewhat careful about not overloading wireless networks we are connected to.

The plan is to go back to the market today and cook for folks at our apartment. I'll be sure and document in pictures and video. The apartment (through EasySleep) is quite nice -- has a kitchen with gas range, lots of shops in the area to get supplies, easily sleeps 5. Some trouble with the Internet and Mac laptops, and payment has been problematic (don't ask...), but I would definitely stay in this type of apartment rental again. There should be more of these in Vancouver...I'm not really aware of anything organized like this other than Craigslist.

Had a great evening talking with Brian Sutherland from the Vanguardistas, who are Zope3 experts. I have some notes and will post more about this.

We've got some work to do today, and DrupalCon Barcelona will hit full force tomorrow....given my previous records around blogging during events, I may very well go silent until I come out the other side and spend a day at the beach...

So, I'm madly rushing around the house throwing stuff together, doing laundry, etc. (Later: I'm plugged in at the airport, waiting to board).

Dave set up some travel tips for me, and I asked 43 Places what the best beaches in Barcelona are.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll have time to make the flight to Malta to visit Darren and Julie. I didn't realize there was a direct flight from Barcelona to Malta. I've still got my fingers crossed that I can shuffle my flight back, so we'll see about this...

Oh, right, why am I going? We've got some client work to meet up around, and that's followed by DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. This looks to be the largest Drupal event ever, with almost 400 people attending.

Anyone have other tips? Leave a comment! I'm going to try and produce a fair amount of social media, so follow the Flickr stream. See you in 10 days!

I can't believe it's been almost 4 years since I last bumped into Mark Pratt (entry from November 2003 about OpenSourceXperts). A chance IM conversation today let me know that he is now based out of Barcelona, but my trip to attend DrupalCon Barcelona means that I'm just going to miss him while he makes a trip to the US.

Mark is a Zope expert, open source business model experimenter, and more. He told me he's now got a great consulting firm, Vanguardistas, that are doing "amazing things with Zope3". I admit to knowing very little about the cool stuff going on in Zope3, so it will be interesting to hear more. And of course, we're all partners in waving the flag of open source goodness, especially in Europe.

I'll be missing Mark in Barcelona, but he's connected me to some of his colleagues at Vanguardistas, and told me that La Bombeta is where I'll have to go for delicious, cheap food. I'm really looking forward to this trip...I really have to make plans to be in Europe more regularly: there are so many great people and projects to get connected to, never mind the side benefits like great food :P