I work at least 70 hours per week and weekends are an important time for getting stuff done without the usual amount of phone calls and emails, so I felt pretty inconvenienced when someone locked the office door on Friday evening and forgot to leave the key in the agreed place.

I was returning from my second food break and I found that I could not get to the office where I have Internet access, and my laptop and all my notes and todo lists were imprisoned until Monday.

On Friday night I started reading Tariq Ali's Rough Music, and caught up on some sleep. It's a short book and I I finished it on Saturday. It was mostly about the bias of the mass media. Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions was better, but Rough Music used the UK as it's example, which is a bit closer to home for me than Chomsky's book. I also studied a bit of Brazilian Portuguese over the weekend.

I spent Saturday evening finally fixing the door frame and putting a lock on my appartment. I had to get the door burst in with a crowbar about a year ago when I lost the only key.

Saturday night was spent in Celtica - an Irish bar in Brussels city centre where pints are 2 euro until midnight. Some friends were over visiting Brussels and Pete O'Malley was doing the music. I left there some time after 5am.

I got up at 11h30 on Sunday to get a potted plant at the huge market which is at South Station on Sunday mornings and then went hunting for an appartment. My current place is cheap, bright, is only a 35 minute walk from the city centre, and is well-located for public transport but there's no Internet access and it's so small that I can't even offer visitors some floor space to sleep on.

On Sunday night I made my next day's todo list and wrote this blog entry on paper. The 2-day typing break was surely good for my fingers, and my girlfriend certainly didn't mind me being locked out of the office. I have one appointment to see a new appartment, and one place that I have to phone, but I'm glad I got that job started at least. But now, time to catch up on all the non-home stuff I didn't get done...

Next Thursday, March 16th, in Belfast is the "FOSS Means Business" conference.

The desire for a free software event came from industry associations in Northern Ireland. Their secondary focus is to encourage "all-island" commercial iniatives. That secondary focus is of great interest to the public sector in Northern Ireland.

This event struck me as a good use of my time for three reasons:

1. Interest from both the commercial/private and government/public sector meant that this event was going to be high-profile
2. Specifically it would reach out to a lot of people that I can't easily reach on my own
3. I could contribute something that the event was lacking: the sustainability angle

Sustainability is about raising awareness about what made all this free software come into existence and what must be done to make sure it continues to flourish. This aspect of the free software message can easily be left out when event organisers are accustomed to taking a view which narrowly focusses on supporting an existing business model, or an existing technology.

As well as telling a big audience about something of value, I wanted the event to tell them about how to hang onto that value. This is why Richard Stallman is giving the closing keynote. He'll be adapting his speech to suit the business audience, and he'll be incorporating a dicussion about the GPLv3, but at the core he'll be talking about the struggle that made this software exist, and the current and near-future threats that have to be guarded against. These include software patents, and DRM.

I'll have a quick speaking slot myself, in which I'll explain how FSFE's Fellowship program contributes to the sustainability I'm talking about - and I'll ask people to join.

Free software was not initially political, but it has been made political by those whose business models are threatened by the shift from user-dependency and disablement to user-freedom. ...and as Stallman says: you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.

(If you're coming to FOSS Means Business, there is no charge, and registration is not mandatory, but to give the organisers a rough idea of how many chairs and coffees and how much food is needed, it would be useful if you added your name to the Attendees wiki page.)