We left Amsterdam last Friday, after 15:00 or so. It took 50 minutes or so to leave Amsterdam at the liftershalte (which is also the longest wait of this trip!). We arrived at Julien’s front door in Hamburg right in time for dinner. The third ride was great, a Danish managing director of 7 companies was happy to take us from the parking spot close to Osnabrueck. His Chrysler quickly accelerated to 220 km/h, and he was driving like a madman.
Unfortunately it was not convenient enough to blog with maemowordpy on my N810. So I’m writing this in Stockholm. Or well, in a really nice Summer house that is currently inhabited all the time in the Southern suburbs of Stockholm. It’s close to a beautiful lake. It’s actually not really suburbs here. There’s not even regular water. The pump broke and now we have to help ourselves with bottles and buckets. It’s a great lesson on how not to waste water.
Hamburg was great. Despite the heavy rain. We met up with Matthias and Lena (who was at the CouchSerfing Collective New Zealand) and met some new friends. We stayed with Julien, who is simply hilarious. A lot of parties and vegan pancakes. Again we left Hamburg a bit later. We quickly had a ride - before the rain came down, into sunnier weather. The couple (in their fifties) who picked us up told us they hitchhiked themselves in Norway, with their children. At the gas station we immediately had eye contact with a woman and then it appears that she (Swedish), her husband (from Belgium) and children (bilingual) were heading to Denmark and they were happy to take us there. In the car we talked a lot. Then I found out that her husband was making a living through Drupal and that he had too many requests and he’s willing to pass on some work to a starting Drupalist!
At the lines before the ferry I walked around to find a ride towards Copenhagen. I found a group of German kids (16, 17, 18 and 19 y/o) with big kanos on a huge Mercedes van. They were happy to take us and then we found out that they were actually going to the North of Sweden. So we skipped Copenhagen. I wanted to see Sigurdas and Stockholm though. We spent the night in our tent in the South of Sweden, which was quite comfy, woke up and continued with the German kids. They dropped us at a gas station where there was only one potential friendly car driver, who also took us to Stockholm.
Now it’s 14:00, Erga is preparing pasta and we’re planning on eating that and head North to Umea.
bonus vid preview
Hyves is a Dutch social network based in Amsterdam. I’ve been a member for a while now and I mainly used it to find people I know from my primary and secondary school. On the 29th of November I noticed that they were looking for people. I sent them a very short message with a link to my CV. Koen, one of the three founders, responded within 20 minutes. Exactly one week later I was in a plane heading to Amsterdam to attend the party to celebrate the 5.000.000th member. Most of these members live in the Netherlands; the majority of young people in the Netherlands have a Hyves account and many are actively using it. Officially I will start working for Hyves on the 1st of February.
There is a Hyves API (currently beta, mostly in Dutch) and will be implementing OpenSocial and some more very exciting technology. I will have to limit the time I spend on other projects but the contract I signed is quite liberal (e.g. compared to this one for CouchSurfing volunteers). On top of that, Hyves actively participates in the development of Gentoo Linux.
This weekend there will be a party in Trento. I’m moving next week, I will attend the first BeWelcome (un)conference in Antwerpen on the 19th and 20th, and I already found some places to live in Amsterdam.
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.
Yesterday I started reading Barabasi’s “Linked: The New Science of Networks”. It’s inspiring, in many ways. It makes me realize how different my life is, compared to most nodes in the social network of human connections. I have many connections, but compared to most people, most of my links are weak. I met so many people in so many places, mostly for very brief periods - i.e. a ride in their car, staying one night at someone’s home. Or just meeting someone randomly in the street.
Besides these realizations, the book is also giving me more energy to move TrustLet forward. Last month I was a bit pre-occupied with the way CouchSurfing is organized. I hope there will be an announcement, that CS is just a service from now on, and that many occurrences of “participation” and “participate” will be removed from the website. Anyway, there will be a big campaign to attract volunteers and members to BeWelcome in October.
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