Posts (page 2)
Flag of Belgium
Map of Belgium
First of all, Belgium is small. Only 10.000.000 inhabitants, less than half of the population of metropolitan New York. The country is roughly triangular in shape, with the longest distance from border to border being about 300 km. (250 miles?). You can drive the entire lenght of Belgium in about three or four hours (for a small country, we have a lot of highways too).
We have about 60 km. of shoreline (on the North Sea). Our neighbours include France, the Grand-Duchy of Luxemburg (now they are really a small country, see map), Germany and The Netherlands.
With the exception of Luxemburg, we have been invaded by, ruled over, occupied by or been part of about all our neighbouring countries at one time or another during our history. But also by Spain, Austria and the Roman Empire.
Every Belgian schoolchild knows the famous words spoken about the tribe of the Belgians by Julius Caesar, the Roman conqueror: 'Of all the Gauls, the Belgians are the bravest'. Not many of them know that the quote goes on and says: '... because they are furthest removed from civilization and have not been weakened by trade and culture'.
As a country, Belgium only exists since 1830, when independence was declared from the Netherlands. The first thing we did was to invite an unemployed German prince to become king (Leopold I) and we have had a constitutional monarchy under the Von Saksen-Coburg dynasty ever since.
Three official languages are spoken:
- Dutch, in the North (Flanders), by about 60% of the population
- French, in the South (Wallonia), by about 39% of the population
- German, in the East, by about 1% of the population
(German is spoken mainly in a small cluster of villages that Belgium took from Germany after World War One. The inhabitants were at first reluctant to be Belgian, but after World War Two they assured everyone they were not really Germans afert all.)
This concludes my first article about Belgium. Let me know in the comments if you found it interesting, and I might write a bit more about this weird little country.
From www.thinkgeek.com, where else?
This morning I was invited to attend the Microsoft Developer and IT Pro days as a guest. It was kind of an experiment by Microsoft Benelux: they wanted to invite some influential local bloggers and I guess they couldn't find any so they asked me :-)
(They probably knew about my blog because I was at the Geek Dinner with Robert Scoble in Brussels a while ago)
I enjoyed the free Microsoft Sandwich 2007's and the free Microsoft Coffee (decaf only! at a developer event!) and took a stroll down the hall with all the vendors. It seemed like every other partner of them was giving away a free X-box in a competition, hehe.
I also attended a presentation about the new Office 2007. Pretty slick, but immensely complex to set up and maintain, if you ask me. Microsoft must also be running out of names for their different packages: Home & Student, Small Business, Basic, Standard, Professonal, Professional Plus, Enterprise... what's next? Galaxy? Universe? Standard Plus and Standard Regular? Medium Enterprise?
Personally, I'm happy the way things work at Six Apart: If you have an interesting piece of information, toss it on the wiki or on an intranet weblog. No bother with workflow rules, tasks, rights management or any of that stuff that gets in the way of being productive.
My Comet invite!
So this is it... The new blogging tool everyone's been talking about. And I'm using it :-) Let's see what this baby can do...
First, here is a nice book by a colleague of mine:
