Got back from What the Hack late last Sunday in time to visit my girlfriend, whose birthday it was and who was gracious enough to not dump me for going away over her birthday.

Man, what a time. To be honest I didn’t do anything or see anything. We got wasted every night. Jono, Aq, Bill, Matt, Garp and Graham who were my travelling companions and myself spent the 4 days or so sitting around hacking on a few things in the non-security sense. Jono played with gstreamer 0.9, while I tried not to die of a hangover.

Aq, Jono and Bill also spent a good amount of time laughing at the chinny raccoon and gimping up suitable mockups of all manner of chin related articles, culminating in the Little Book of Chin (link sadly dead). For anyone who hasn’t got a clue what this is all about, it is embedded in British schoolboy humour and is to do with the fact that when someone is lying you say they have a Jimmy Hill chin (Jimmy Hill is an English ex-footballer with an infamously large chin who became renowned as a pundit for talking crap). Therefore you might start stroking your chin is you are implying someone is bullshitting. Furthermore you might say that you, “Chinny reckon” in so much as you reckon (not) with added chin, hence you chinny reckon. Jono and Aq employ this mightily on LUG Radio.

Anyway, in true Planet Gnome style, here is the 5 things I learned at WTH:

1. Geeks can’t dance for shit. I’ve never seen anything so funny, it’s like an American high-school movie with all of the ‘cool’ kids taken out and all the dorks taking their chance to shine. Awful.
2. Having a gay, Germanic looking geek head bull-like towards you, stop dead in front of you and stare at you for 5 seconds longer than is comfortable with their head at a coquettish angle, is scary enough to make you clench so tight that your bumhole turns into an impenetrable wall of steel.
3. Night-time musical entertainment sure wasn’t any higher than an after thought on the agenda, if the quality of the output was anything to go by.
4. Eindhoven is a quiet, unpopulated city, where there are very few people walking about. We concluded this to be because everyone was at work and not hanging around like jobless, dole scrounging wasters like in England.
5. There are a lot of dull, braying, over-confident arseholes making a fuss of themselves in front of everyone, unaware of the fact that they are short, fat, squat looking and lacking in any kind of social skills. Sadly most of these people were British.

And there you have it. That was What the Hack.