(roughly by order of importance)

• Van Gogh - at least in some of his periods - is much more close to pointilists than I thought before.

• Everyone and his little sister establish IA-64 compile farms (accessible naturally to - again - everyone and his little uhm... brother). This is very fashionable these days.

• The conference/exhibiton complex where the celebration took place, called RAI. I had trouble to pronounce it correctly (causing some minor misunderstanding with taxi drivers) - naturally I tried to pronounce it either in american manner - "ar-ei-ai", or just English/Russian one - "rei", while in Dutch it should be straightforward "rai".
  On one of numerous walls there were amazing Humpty-Dumpty pictures. There were like 50 or more (oil-painted) pictures, each one differing slightly from neighboring ones, with theme/style ranging from fried eggs prepaired from Humpty-Dumpty (rather crude), to cubistic, surrealistic and very realitic portraits of it.

• The half of the Amsterdam population moves from place to place by bicycles (and this means the half of the whole population - including small kids, elderly people, business people in suites and elegantly dressed women). You can observe people talking by mobiles when bicycling, the whole bicycling family talking to each other, and traffic jams from bicycles.

• The name of Dutch currency was a mystery for me. For starters, the israeli bank clerks tend to call it "florin". My memory of Stillmark, Jules Vernes, and such youth literature told me that at least XVI and XVII century pirates called it something like "gulden" (in Russian translation of course), which roughly corresponds to what is written on banknotes - "guilden", but arriving to Amsterdam I discovered that if you pretend to be at least partially understandable, you should call it "guilder".

• When software developers drink too much beer they starting to be no less loudy than regular people.

• The beautiful stamps series "Dutch cities", "Amsterdam channels" and such I baught in the airport appeared to be issued not by Netherlands, but by such strange territories as "Mordovia" and "Bashkiria". Wow! This was a pleasant surprise, but I was ashamed that my experienced philatelic eyes overlooked that from the very first glance.

• (not surprisingly), windoze and commercial unix guys tend to appear in suites, use how-it's-called-that-shitty-bloatware-everybody-use-for-presentations and behave appropriately. Linux guys wear t-shirts from thinkgeek and copyleft, use Linux presentation software (suprisingly, it exists!), and occasionally sitting on table while giving a talk.

• I subscribed to some service which seems to be commercial-world analog of so fashionable in these days open-source-developers-and-users exchange services. The reason I did so that it was a nice girl sitting in their boot, and most importantly, they offered some kind of climbing robot as a present (ah yes, and it was free!). The big dissapointment was to realize that they don't give away this robot immediately, but just promise to snail-mail it.

• There seems a very different approach to the whole issue between Intel guys (which are, by the way, mainly windoze-oriented, as far as operating systems come to consideration) and commercial unix guys (HP, IBM) from one side, and Linux guys, from the other.
  For Intel, it is all about optimization. According to them, they started to work on Itanium like 7 years ago. It seems quite coincidential that this is 64-bit processor. Of course Intel cannot stay aside from mankind movement towards 64-bit word, but even if weren't such, they would release something similar to Itanium nevertheless, no matter how-many-bits. According to them, this is the first time when so many optimization possibilities are provided on hardware level, and not on software one. Of course, there is a lot of talks about larger access to memory which is provided by 64-bit processor, but key words here are "parallelization, pipelining, predication" and other buzzwords from arsenal of optimization, and not "64-bit".
  Commercial unix world (or rather its part which is involved in the issue) seems to follow that. For example, HP talks very much about optimization capabilities of their HP-UX ported to IA-64, and Silicon Graphics released compiler for Linux which supports part of Itanium optimization capabilities.
  For linuxers, on the other side, it seems just yet another 64-bit-porting issue. The key word here is undeliberately "64-bit". According to RedHat and SuSe reps, porting to Linux Itanuim is the same as porting to another 64-bit platform.
  That's probably (and even obviously) follows from yet very inmature status of Linux on IA-64 (despite that porting efforts are joint venture of linux community and such big shots as Intel, IBM, HP, etc.): gcc does not support any IA-64-specific optimization; gdb is not working; there are some glitches in glibc and kernel. But, RedHat promise very soon ("next week") improvements. Overall, Linux on Itanium seems to be a very fast moving target and by no means isn't close to stable state. So this "just-another-64-bit" attitude is probably a result of an unadequate Linux support.
  It's naturally to expect, when the things will be sorted out and Linux on Itanium will stabilize, the optimization issues will come to the first place.

• It was amazing to see Microsoft keeping an absolutely low profile in all these celebrations (especially in contrast with other big guys). The scheduled talk from somebody from Microsoft about porting from 32 to 64 bit, was replaced by similar talk from Intel. There were no single Microsoft person. I dunno whether this represents some common trend, as the conference at whole was a rather local european event - there were almost no north-americans.

• Porting from x86 to IA-64 on windoze seems to be much troublesome than on unices (observations based solely on seeing some windoze guys running screaming away after a half-day porting-to-windoze lecture; the corresponding Linux lectures, OTOH, were short and sweet).

• It was interesting to hear stories from the former Evil Empire guy which works now for Intel: anecdotical stories about how David Cutler fits into the whole hierarchy, how people making their carrier by moving from Windows to NT development, and such.

• When people speak about such important issues, some presentation screen contain more trade- and copyright marks than the actual text. Intel ® Itanium ^TM Developer Tools (hm. how they managed to omit them here?) for Java ^TM.

• Intel positioning itself as a major software company.