Author: Benjamin Mako Hill

Yesterday I arrived in the Netherlands. Until a few weeks ago, I thought that the Netherlands was home to the most fun looking written language in Europe. The long strings of double vowels in Dutch frequently make me smile.

After last week at Debconf5 in Helsinki, I’m ready to change my mind. Finnish has everything Dutch has and more.

I mentioned to Mika that I would be going out to dinner at a restaurant called Töölönranta. She mentioned that she thought the name was very cute because of all of the "eyes." I suggested that the might in fact be umlauts or separate umlautesque graphemes (as the case seems to be) but she remained confident that they were, in fact, eyes.

Linguistics aside, I think she’s right. Finnish wins.

Yesterday, I arrived early to my flight from Amsterdam to Helsinki. In fact, I arrived exactly three hours and one month early.

Apparently, the travel agent has booked me on flights on August 10th and 18th instead of July 10th and 18th as I’d asked and I had been a bit rushed and not examined the complete itinerary as well as I should have.

Most people in New York did not want the Olympics. In fact, many New Yorkers seemed to quite reasonably conclude than the only thing more completely insane than building a professional sports stadium in Manhattan would be using that stadium to hold the Olympics in Manhattan. When it came time to ask for volunteers to appear in an NYC2012 Olympic bid promotional video, there were of plenty of people that showed up — but they were from New Jersey.

Greg Pomerantz, who still stubbornly refuses a blog of his own, quite astutely pointed out the auspicious nature of July 6th for globally conscious New York hackers saying, "truly a day to celebrate — no euro software patents, and we lose the Olympic bid!"

Amen.

Today I received an email with the subject, "Difficulties in the bedroom?" I was almost surprised to find out it was not about Debconf5 room assignments.

When I was in high school, I saw more people using 35mm film cannisters to hold marijuana than to hold 35mm film. I still think of drugs every time I see the little black vessels.

With 35mm all but eliminated by the explosion of digital cameras — at least in the world of most teenagers — these small containers will soon become drug cannisters and the people who use them to store their film will appear as the quaint repurposers of technology. It is only the illegality of marijuana that will keep people from speaking openly and explicitly about this transformation.

I want to start selling clothes to club-going crowd. The first outfit I have in mind is a shear skirt designed with either built-in underwear (thong, etc.) or that comes with matching underwear of a sort that would encourage the owners to wear the skirt and the underwear together.

People are surprised, not always positively, by the selective luminescent of certain parts of clothing under ultraviolet lights in dance clubs. My outfit will be designed so that the underwear luminesceses powerfully through the sheer skirt which will not luminesce at all.

I haven’t yet decided whether I want to keep this aspect of the outfit a secret and sell these to club-goers as a sort of performance art project or to advertise the feature widely as a way to increase sales.

For everyone who reads my blog and participated in the large Ubuntu Down Under keysigning, the keysigning at LCA, or the large keysigning at Linuxtag, I’d like to point out that nobody remembered where my passport has been.

Points go to anyone who remembers at the Debconf keysigning party. Double points, and a good laugh afterward, go to anyone who remembers and does not tell their fellow keysigners.

Trucker hats have played an important role in the "indie" (e.g., indie music, short for independent) scene. My friend thought it would be really "indie" — and a bit recursive — if he wore a trucker hat with a picture of a trucker hat on it. We went down to the public market and asked the custom trucker-hat painter (we really have one in Seattle) about this. The painter said he could do it and added that he’d actually been commissioned to do them in the past.

My friend was immediately turned off knowing that they idea was not original. I think he was foolish to think that being indie had anything to do with being independent from other people in the indie crowd.

It drove home the interesting question about what being "indy," "indie" or "independent" as a group of people or as social or cultural movement really means. This is a question that I used to think about a lot when I did Indymedia; it’s not always entirely apparent what one is trying to be independent of. In many cases, I think is the concept of idea of independence that is central — not independence from anything or anyone in particular.

Of course, it was still a great idea for a hat and my friend was more foolish for not taking the opportunity to procure such a fine accessory.

Today I received an email from someone accusing me of being a bot due to my extremely consistent responses to repeated requests over long periods of time.

I was slightly offended until I realized that if the author of this email really believed I was a bot, emailing me would be very silly. The author is either lying and suspects I am a human or is the kind of person who writes personal emails to computer programs. Either possibility seems like a good reason not take the accusation too seriously.

I’m working out of Munich this week hanging out with Dögi and Michael Banck and having a great time.

I’m sure many visitors to Munich have stories that start this way but the last time I visited Munich, I had a funny experience that involved a series of 1 liter beers.

The night with the beers went smoothly. I met a number of Debian folks from Munich and had a great time. I woke up the next morning early and without a hangover. However, my feet were black and covered with dirt, my toenails were cracked and there was some blood on my feet. My shoes had come home with me just fine.

While I remembered the rest of the night quite cleary, I could not remember, and I never found out, how my feet got that way.

I think the only people I would refuse to date because of their names are people named "Mako." I haven’t decided if I would date people named "Meko," "Mayko," or "Meiko" whose names are spelled differently but pronounced identically to mine. I think they would have to be very attractive.