I get started late after jetlag keeps me up between 2-5am. Then when I finally catch sleep, it’s time to rise and leave. The Fitbit clocks me at 3h47m of sleep.
Well before 7am I grab a quick breakfast at the local FamilyMart and supplies for the day ahead. I’m glad that these things are open 24 hours, but how is this possible? Maybe it’s better to not ask any questions1. No coffee to be found anywhere at this time, but the hotel espresso machine does a decent enough job.
Maps for where you’ve been in Europe and the US (via). Stayed means having spent a night there which means the only places I’ve visited and not spent the night are Slovenia (went over the border to hike a mountain there) and the Vatican.
In Germany for many transactions you need a proof of address which a Personalausweis provides for German citizens. Us foreigners don’t get one however often we ask for it. In the Netherlands moving through the country without a battery of chip cards (OV chipkaart, Bonuskaart, OV-fiets etc.), apps and associated services is costly and annoying.
There was a brief period where Foursquare based recommendations were good and drawn from your wider social graph. Now we’ve gone back to Yelp and Google Maps where reviews and ratings don’t mean anything. A lower than 4 star review on GMaps has netted me a cease-and-desist e-mail for defamation.
So I felt I couldn’t really bring myself to do Advent of Code this year since I have more than enough other things to do (and watch and play) and with work and the kids, it’s always pretty miserable to keep up.
I painstakingly built a bespoke Rust web application to host the Cuppings venue data and to add Google place_ids to almost 2000 Foursquare location. That’s been done for a while now but now we have the announcement of Foursquare open sourcing their location dataset.
I can’t believe I have to say this, but let’s do it anyway: Going to Mars is—just like the hyperloop—a distraction from the actual problems and solutions in front of us.
Finding time for side projects and putting out new versions of Cuppings is difficult as always, but I’m glad we have a new version out this week again.
But these subjects of the Islamic Emirate could not be kept from watching Stranger Things or Game of Thrones or Japanese anime; they had a better knowledge of Breaking Bad than I did. On Twitter—they, like so many Afghans, were avid users—shared soyjack memes and called themselves “sigma males.”They talked about feminism, “LGBTQ,”and pronouns—strange things to complain about in a country where women can’t go to school. They were becoming Westerners: culture war, America’s most successful soft-power export, was their induction. The younger members of the Taliban, online enough to follow Andrew Tate, were not immune.
I’ve had a number of amazing and unforgettable experiences with Couchsurfing mostly staying in Berlin way back in the day. This history of the site’s rise and fall fills in what happened after I lost track.
Als ik het verhaal over witwassen in de Amsterdamse binnenstad hier lees, denk ik dat het hier in Berlijn zonder overdrijven tien keer zo erg is (decennia armoede, corruptie en geen enkele prioriteit bij de lokale overheid).
A couple of years ago, I remember seeing at IST airport advertisements for connecting flights to Erbil (أربيل). The city seems to have continued growing and by now developed a vibrant nightlife.
An interesting bit of news did the rounds last week but I’ve personally heard of multiple cases where people leaving online reviews have been faced with legal action.
As the blisters develop and his feet start to bleed, Walton asks the right questions. What are the human and environmental costs of Singapore’s success, and are they sustainable?
A couple of weeks ago I took the train to Hamburg and back to present at the Good School. Here’s a picture of me in action courtesy of The Good School.
I used to travel between the Netherlands and Germany at least once a month and pretty quickly I grew tired of forgetting things. That’s why I made a list (in bold, comments added) with the things that I should take or at least consider taking. Whenever I pack my bag, I quickly scan the list and make sure I’ve covered the bases. Maybe it’ll be helpful to you as well.
Here are my notes from a couple of weeks of drinking coffee in Tokyo on a fact finding mission for Cuppings. With Cuppings we try to give you a guide of the best coffee places around the world based on our personal tastings. Some notable locales are still not as well represented as they should be. London and New York have their own excellent guides for coffee with Oliver Strand’s Coffee App and the London Coffee Map. Tokyo is one place that I thought we should fill in.
A new coffee place had reportedly opened up in the area and I went out searching for it. Concierge is tucked into a gate on Paul-Lincke-Ufer and they are really nice guys pulling quality shots. It is amazing both that this part of Berlin which was quite barren when it comes to coffee is shaping up so nicely and also that
This week was the week where we were in full sprint for the pilot launch of KAIGARA. Besides that we had a dinner off NEXT with some people involved and some speakers. What I managed to catch from NEXT’s program while working was nothing short of splendid. Bruce Sterling’s talk has been shared widely and I’m eagerly awaiting Anab Jain’s to be published as a video (the slides are already there).
Unbelievable how many weeks behind I am on these. That’s not wholly intended, but the last couple of weeks have been a bit busier than usual. This was the week of April 15th which I spent mostly in Amsterdam.
