amylin and I have been crashing at Morgan’s (6 1/2) in Montreal since Thursday. We hitchhiked here from Northampshire, MA, where we stayed with Joe. We had left a bit later than planned so it was not easy to get to Montreal. There are hardly any cars driving from the US to Canada these days, not even Canadians, even though the CAN$ is almost exactly worth as much as the US$ these days. I booked progress in many projects, and it even looks as if Paolo and I might be able to finish our first paper next week. I also added some wiki integration to Morgan’s Crash project.
Tomorrow we’ll be leaving for Boston again.
Here’s another picture, actually taken without my presence, but it’s appropriate…
I just found this picture of me, making electronic ambient noise with my laptop running CheeseTracker, at Placard5, headphone concerts for 12 people in Paris, 2002.
Last week I found a list of books available under Creative Commons licenses on the Creative Commons wiki. You can find some great titles, such as Wall Street, Capitalism 3.0 and Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. Some of my favorites were already on the list (Free Culture and Down and Out of the Magic Kingdom and We the Media) but I had to add Everyone in Silico and Producing Open Source Software.
I was also pleased to find out that the Semantic MediaWiki plugin is successfully used on the wiki. And that they use OpenID. Of course I couldn’t refrain myself from doing some structural improvements on the CC wiki. And yesterday I was promptly made sysop.
amylin cut off her dreadlocks last night. Today she is frantically trying to comb out the remains of her dreads. Last night we also went to a great theater show, we were in an audience of 20, sitting inside, watching tens of “actors” performing on the sidewalk and on the street, mingling with omunexpecting by-passers. Very entertaining!
This week was also great for dumpster diving. It’s just too easy in New York. I also got some work done on TrustLet and spent too much time writing stuff about the CouchSurfing Leadership Team. Fortunately I also booked some progress with getting other people hacking on the BeWelcome code. I can’t wait till it’s finally released under the GPL, so that I can just add a link to the one-file BW Rox for Windows I’m working on.
So, now I hope that my dreadless dear will fix me a new layout for this blog some time soon.
Addendum, October 2007
I mostly fixed the layout myself, but at least she just sent me this picture.
I have been a contributor on Wikitravel for a long time now. I was not too worried when Wikitravel was bought by Internet Brands (which has already shown interest in buying CouchSurfing). But I have been annoyed by the lack of database dumps at Wikitravel for a long time now. So I was very happy to stumble upon an alternative: Wikivoyage.
The project was set up by disgruntled admins of the German version of Wikitravel. I haven’t gone into the gory details, but it could be more than the lack of database dumps. My wild guess is that there was a cultural misunderstanding between Wikitravel, that was founded with an SF Bay Area Burning Man culture, and the Europeans dealing with policies created by them. It’s funny to see some more parallels here with CouchSurfing but ortunately Wikitravel was already a lot more open (using Creative Commons and mostly open means of communication) than CS so forking was quite easy.
Now let’s see if a little bit more pressure will induce Internet Brands to make the dumps available.
It’s crazy how it’s possible to be together most of the time for one year while traveling, but not when staying in one place. I hope that humanity will be able to get rid of borders some day, well, rather sooner than later. Anyway, I’m flying to New York next week, to see my love!
Unfortunately I can’t stay as long as I would like to. Paolo doesn’t let me. I’m happy we booked a lot of progress with the TrustLet code. And today I even came up with the GuakaMole trust metric, which is the best trust metric of the ones we’ve tried so far on the Advogato dataset.
I’ll be coming back over Dublin, where I hope to stay with matthew75. He was one of my guests in Paris in 2004, and now he happens to be living in Dublin. I found him again on BeWelcome.org. It’s amazing how small world networks work.
Now I can’t wait to see amylin, for a hand massage and delish vegan munchies! Tomorrow I’m taking a 15 euro train to Kufstein, which is right next to the German border, then I’ll hitch to the Netherlands from there.
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