Entries tagged ‘life’
Cities I’ve visited this year, in which I’ve spent one or more nights. Cities marked with * where visited multiple times on non-consecutive days.
- Naaldwijk, the Netherlands*
- Enschede, the Netherlands*
- Copenhagen, Denmark*
- London, England*
- Stockholm, Sweden*
- Brighton, England*
- Antwerp, Belgium
- Amsterdam, the Netherlands*
See my list from 2008.
Life’s quite lovely here in Copenhagen. Last week was filled with gentle snow, mostly enjoyed from behind my office window. It all vanished on Sunday, however, and I strangely miss it
Therefore, albeit not quite, I’m headed up to Stockholm on Thursday to give two talks at Geek Meet. One on Web Typography and sIFR, and one on Homemade Ubicomp. An older version of that talk – which I gave at SHiFT ‘08 – is available at Supercollider.
I’ll be in Stockholm until Sunday, so if you want to hang out, ping me. I think Robert Nyman is doing a guided tour through Stockholm on Saturday, so if you don’t know the town either (or think that Robert doesn’t!) perhaps you should join us.
I won’t be back in Copenhagen for long, because I’ll be in London for business for a week and a half from Wednesday on. That means I’ll be there during the weekend as well, anything interesting going on then?
P.S. Regarding sIFR, there’s a lot of interesting things happening with web typography and web typography alternatives. I’ll be speaking about that in Stockholm, and can hopefully do a post on it here afterwards. As you may have noticed, nothing really has happened on sIFR since October. I’m thinking of moving the project onto GitHub, LightHouse and Stack Overflow so more people can be involved. (This, by itself, is too slow a process already, which is why I’m hiding this in a footnote.) Let me know if you’re interested in helping out.
P.P.S. The real me on Twitter is here, if you’re into that kind of thing.
P.P.P.S. Christian Heilmann diggs my favicon. All credit to Nadya Peek.
As per Kottke:
- Enschede, NL*
- Naaldwijk, NL*
- Amsterdam, NL*
- Copenhagen, DK*
- Roskilde, DK,
- Bogø, DK,
- London, UK*
- Brighton, UK
- Lisbon, PT
- Berlin, DE
- Lausanne, CH
- Geneva, CH
One or more nights were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. I lived in both Enschede and Copenhagen, but took trips to the other city after moving. Bogø isn’t necessarily a city, but it is a place 
Let’s see, where were we?
I went to Mediamatic Social RFID Hackers Camp at PICNIC in Amsterdam. Blogged about it on Supercollider.
Then I went to Lisbon, for SHiFT 08, and gave a talk on Home Made Ubicomp.
Sunday, I’m speaking at <head> on Web Typography with sIFR 3. It’s an online conference, so I’m presenting at home or perhaps with some friends, through my laptop. They’re using Adobe Acrobat Connect, which for some reason does not support PDF documents, nor does it support Keynote files, so I had a lot of fun converting to PowerPoint, opening in crappy software also known as OpenOffice, and patching the presentation to a reasonable level of sucktitude. We’ll see what happens.
On November 16th, I’m physically giving pretty much the same presentation, but with working slides, at DrupalCamp CPH. Henriette would not be amused.
I’m now also in the Danish systems, and started Twittering after not using my account for over two years. Then I reached 42 followers, so what choice did I have? Public for now, if that keeps working mentally.
That’s it then, short update. I suggest you subscribe to the Supercollider blog for more technical articles, as I’m turning Novemberborn into a more personal website. Which may mean that the posting activity may go down even further, we’ll see what happens.
I also blog at Toothless Tiger these days.
By the way, Supercollider is my freelance alter ego. Yes, I’m for hire.
Mark Hoekstra, hardwarke hacker and tinkerer extraordinaire, passed away last Friday.
Mark, you will be missed.
For more background, see:
Over the past 13 days I’ve been in five different countries. It started by taking the train down to Enschede, from Denmark, through Germany. After spending some time in The Netherlands, I boarded a flight for Brighton, in the UK. I got back to Copenhagen yesterday, and spent a few hours in Malmö, Sweden this evening.
I don’t have a very clear feeling anymore of being in a foreign country. The sense of wonder is gone. The excitement of being in Enschede, of being with my family, of being in Brighton or Copenhagen, it doesn’t start more than 24 hours prior to arrival.
(It could, however, be argued that this is because I go to countries I’ve been to before. Still, as a child, being somewhere else was just wonderful. Not so much, no more.)
Neither do I see myself as being primarily Dutch. I’ve begun describing myself as a European Dutchman. Yes, I have Dutch roots, and the more time I spend abroad, the more cultural differences I notice, the more I recognize these roots. Being Dutch is part of my identity. But, also, being European. Especially European, for within Europe, I don’t think in countries anymore. I think in cities, in places, in people.
And even on a global scale, I think in cities, places and people more than I think in terms of countries. It’s just the experience of crossing the border, with extensive questions, that make it clear that you really are in a different country.
(Again, I’ll interject, and state that if I were to go to Seoul, I’d really feel that I’m going to South Korea, and not just Seoul.)
In Europe, most countries have signed the Schengen treaty, which means that there is no border control. And even for the few countries that haven’t, like the UK, showing a simple ID card is enough to get in. No questions asked. Heck, the Danish border control only glanced at my ID card before waiving me through.
The ease of travel, and for me, the experiences of living abroad, with two months in the Bay area, and now moving to Copenhagen, they change how I feel about the world and about travel. They change my Location Identity. I’m Dutch, but I don’t live there. I’m not yet a Copenhagen person, and will never be Danish. Where does that leave me?
For now, European Dutchman will do.
What is your Location Identity?
(For the best introspective thinking, reply late at night after a train ride home from a foreign country, to a somewhat foreign country.)
So, I’m in Copenhagen now. It’s been a long while since my last post here, and people have been asking me to update more frequently – especially now that I’m an expat! Luckily I set the bar quite low, so no problem there
I got here last Tuesday, courtesy of Ton Zijlstra and Elmine Wijnia (thanks!). I’m in a temporary place, until August, so in desperate need of slightly more permanent housing. Going to check out two apartments on Thursday, hopefully that works out.
This past week was spent on Reboot, which again was pretty awesome. Spoke a lot of Danes, who were extremely kind – thanks for making me feel welcome! Next week I’m going to be at Roskilde. If there’d be a Danish integration course for foreign geeks, I’d have passed by now!
On a somewhat more professional level, I’m still figuring out what to do. I’d like to stay flexible though, so freelancing seems like the obvious answer. Consider this my Mark is on the market announcement. Read what I wrote about myself back in February. One of the things I’d like to do is finish sIFR – and given the cost of living in Copenhagen, it’d be great if I could find a (few) sponsors to enable me to do that. If possible, Danish sponsors, since I do need a residence permit in order to stay here. If you’re interested, get in touch.
Besides finishing sIFR, I want to finally write server-side code again. I’ve got some pretty neat ideas for this website, as well as a dedicated sIFR website. More on that later. A new site should also stimulate me to write more, which I really need to do – too many great (or I’d like to think so) ideas go to waste cause I don’t write about them.
In other news, I’ll be in the Netherlands end of August / early September. Then Brighton for dConstruct. I’ll be in Amsterdam around PICNIC to work on RFID stuff with Mediamatic. And, of course, I’ll be in Lisbon for SHIFT in October, followed a week later by Singularity, where I’ll give a presentation about web typography and sIFR. That’s probably in Copenhagen.
I’m going to see where life takes me, and where I can take life. Mark out
Tomorrow morning, 9am, final exam of the year. Immediately thereafter I’m off to the parents, carrying a suitcase full of clothes and a backpack filled with tech. I’ve only got a few hours to be with my family, because Friday morning the flight to San Francisco awaits me!
Two months of sunny Bay area, working with – if IM impressions serve, and no doubt they will – the great people from Jot. I’m staying at Stanford, with Kurt Peek (brother of Nadya), who happens to be from Twente University as well, and who’s doing physics research (now that’s way too complicated for me!).
Aside from work, I’m looking forward to meeting old contacts in the Bay area, I’m curious whether Jason Speck wears nice pants, how Dunstan is doing, et cetera, et cetera.
See you all on the other side of the pond. And continent.
P.S. If you happen to have my Dutch mobile number, I won’t be using it until I get back in September. My US number is +1 650 669 2654.
Hey I’m back, still alive, still kicking. University started for real this week (posting this from the Telematics class). The professor here has a real thing for Netscape, say, if you don’t have Netscape on your PC you can’t get on the internet.
Of course Netscape sucks even more than IE, and I don’t know of any PC without IE… oh well.
By the way, he also mentioned Eudora mail, and I quote:
Some use Internet Explorer (laughter).
I’ll forgive him the browser stuff if he can tell me interesting things about the network though 