free software

Working for Hyves in Amsterdam

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.

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Amsterdam

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Nokia N810

I wish Nokia sold laptops. I really liked my Nokia 770, that I bought in December 2005. It's running mostly free software, and is very Debianic. I wasn't traveling with a laptop then, and it was a nice (and often cheap) way to get online. I also read a lot of books with the excellent FBReader. And I created MaemoDict, which never really worked very well I must admit.

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Windows Vafanculo: BSOD in less than 30 minutes

I have to admit it, I am typing this using Windows Vista. I really needed a new laptop. I couldn't wait for amylin to bring me a MacBook, and Apple is just too expensive in Europe. I also considered getting a Dell with Ubuntu, but unfortunately, in Europe they're only selling them in the UK, France and Germany. And then I saw an ad of a Toshiba with 160 GB HD and 2 GB RAM, DVDRW and all that stuff, for 599 euros. So I went there this morning and got it.

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The Wiki Party - closer to reality

Last year I did a BoF at Wikimania 2006 about The Wiki Party, the idea to start a political party. Today Anu sent me a link to a Facebook group with this same title. I jokingly told people "when I'm 40 years old I will start this party if no one else did before then". Fortunately I won't have to, anymore. Of course, it's happenning in Finland. Olli Sirén was considering to run a campaign to the Helsinki City Council.

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And then there was Kunnafonix

I expected that, as a white guy from the west, you would also pay accordingly. It happens to be, however, that in Mali people actually don’t try to rip you off all the time. In India anyone would try to get some extra cash from us poor westerners. But here, up to now I only paid too much to a cab driver. I actually knew that I was way overcharged for my cab ride to the Hellen Keller Institute, but what the heck. 2000 CFA instead of the 750 CFA we paid to get back. It was hot, and I didn’t feel like stressing myself. I just told the guy that I knew he was bullshitting me.

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Learning another language

It is interesting to be in a country with 11 national languages besides the official language, and these are only the biggest language groups. So many languages makes French actually much more neutral than one would think at first regard. I haven’t been studying Bambara as much as I wanted. Bambara is, surprise suprise, the language of the Bambara, comprising 30% of the population, and Mali’s lingua franca spoken by about 80%. Many think learning languages is difficult. I think it isn’t.

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