Five years ago I spent each Tuesday in August here in Berlin – just up the street from where I type this, in fact – conceiving, designing, setting and printing a letterpress broadside. It was tremendous creative fun: having only 8 hours for the entire process focused my mind in a way that it hasn’t been focused since.

The manager of the print studio at Druckwerkstatt, where I was printing, was a man named Frank, who I introduced here at the time like this:

Fortunately at this point Frank turned up. Frank is the amiable manager of the print studio, and he sprang into action suggesting that although it would be nigh unto impossible to set smaller metal type, we could use the partially-functioning proof press – a Grafix-brand press and operates much like a Vandercook – with larger wooden type, manually inked with a brayer, to get me going (he also referred me to the neighbourhood Linotype shop; is there nothing that Kreuzberg cannot provide?).

Frank couldn’t tell me exactly where the Linotype shop was – “somewhere on Weiner Strasse” was the best he could do – and I never did find it.

On this trip I’m staying in the same neighbourhood, and I set out on Monday afternoon down Weiner Strasse to see if I could solve that problem And, sure enough, after 5 minutes I found this:

I copied down the email address and telephone and when I returned to my flat I sent a note of inquiry, a note that ultimately resulted in an invitation to visit the shop this morning.

And so shortly after 9:30 I headed through the front building:

and into the courtyard:

to find Setzerei Peter von Maikowski und Harald Weller:

Harald greeted me warmly at the door, and gave me a tour of his shop — two Linotype machines, a Heidelberg letterpress, an etching press, a plate maker – and showed me some of the beautiful work the shop has produced (their specialty is art books).

We ended up chatting about type and printing and related matters for a bit, and the topic of klischees came up (printing plates of ornamental material like logos and illustrations). I mentioned the large collection that Ian Scott loaned me, and how I needed to organize them better, perhaps producing some sort of index. At which point Harald pulled a book off the shelf showing me that he had done exactly that for his own collection:

I am now inspired to return to my shop and do the same, especially as Ian has continued to feed the collection and I’ve supplemented it myself, to the point where I may have two or three hundred examples to index.

It was a lovely visit, especially as it was yet another node in a long journey that started with my trip to the Cognitive Cities conference in February 2011, after which followed a casual mention by my friend Luisa about a print shop she noticed out of the corner of her eye, which led me to a plan to spend part of that summer in the city, spending Tuesdays printing, which led me to Frank, which led me to seek out Harald, finding him five years later (and, full circle, I first met Peter Bihr, in whose flat I type this, at Cognitive Cities).

Follow your curiousity.

What a feeling it is, going to the fridge of an overseas friend to retrieve the morning yogurt, to find a piece of your own craft work affixed thereto. Such a feeling washed over me this morning in the flat of Peter Bihr and Michelle Thorne, on loan to me this week I’m in Berlin: upon their fridge I found Act Quickly Summer Is Almost Over, a reminder I created, to myself and to others, three summers ago. The discovery was sweeter still as the flat is in the same neighbourhood where I spent August 2011 printing.

Michelle and Peter were very generous to loan me their lovely flat: truth be told, we’ve only met face-to-face a few times, the rest of our relationship mediated by a shared love of travel and readership of each other’s blogs. 

As it happens, summer has just arrived in Berlin this very week: every single person I’ve encountered has mentioned that I’ve come at exactly the right time, as the weather turned from cold and grey to warm and sunny just this past weekend. I’ve been a great beneficiary of this turn, having spent many lunches, suppers and drinks outside in the sunshine this week.

Berlin and the people I know here are a great tonic for the mind and the soul; it’s a good way to start the summer season.

Once of the things I love about Berlin is that walking its streets often presents you with such unexpected delightful things in the oddest places. I Like Paper, in Kreuzberg on Reichenberger Strasse, for example, which I stumbled across today.

They describe themselves like this (translated from German by Google):

A young Berlin label which specializes on designing with illustrators and designers unique collections and accessories.

They use a lot of Tyvek. And my favourite of their Tyvek products is the Pappwatch. While they have their own range of interesting watch designs, you can also design your own, using an elegant tool to upload and arrange your own imagery. Like this:

Neato!

On previous trips to Berlin I’ve waited until I’ve been set up in the city to search out a SIM for my phone, but for this trip I needed to be SMS-ready soon after landing to arrange for transfer of apartment keys. Fortunately there’s now a handy solution (that’s a double entendre for those bilingual of you paying attention!) in the Capi shop right in the terminal at Tegel Airport.

They sell prepaid SIM cards for the Blau Internet Flat plan that fits any GSM phone (it’s a universal mini, micro and nano SIM) for 19,95 EUR; this includes 20 minutes of calling and 1 GB of data; calls are 9 cents/minute and SMS are 9 cents each. It may not be the best deal in town, but it has the virtue of being (a) very easy to purchase, (b) not in need of any activation using a browser and (c) no wait for activation, so the number is active as soon as you put the SIM in the phone and power it on.

What a strange and wonderful ride this unlikely trans-Atlantic friendship with [[Olle]] and [[Luisa]] has turned out to be.

We are eleven years old now; one year after I first met Olle – and before I’d ever even met Luisa – they were married, an event we missed face-to-face, but marked with a gift of a MacAusland’s blanket and a visit (me, [[Catherine]], wee [[Oliver]]) the following month. A visit that culminated in a lovely supper in the garden at Luisa’s parents. We were all so much younger then, a decade ago:

Ten years on it seemed like I was going to repeat my missing of important wedding-related-commemoration, remaining in Canada for their 10th anniversary celebration. But fate and last-minute planning cooperated, and so last night I was not across an ocean, but right next door, for an epic celebration:

This morning, walking with Luisa to a morning-after brunch at her house, I characterized the gathering like this: it was as if Luisa and Olle have appeared in many Broadway shows, together and apart, and the party was an opportunity for all of the casts, flung across time zones, walks of life, sensibilities, to come together and meet each other. Can there be a better way to mark 10 years together than this, in a great overlapping of the Venn diagrams of a relationship?

The party was grand: hosted at a community hall of two rooms bisected by an expansive bar. Well-stocked with a rainbow of alcohols. All in attendance following the dictate on the invitation to dress colourfully and comfortably. There was a klezmer band to animate the proceedings. Singing. Dancing. Much conversation about many things. I met new people, got reacquainted with people I hadn’t seen for years (in some cases forgetting entirely that we’d met before). I had a moment of “I must get out of here; this isn’t working out!!” panic that, fortunately, subsided quickly.

After the party proper there was a decamp to a nearby office for an after-party, more subdued but no less interesting. Where else would I learn about the challenges of being a Scandinavian writer of erotic fiction?

We finished off in fine tradition, with Olle and [[Jonas]] and I heading out for falafel at Sara on Bergsgatan (time stamp on photo I took: 3:35 a.m.).

Jonas and Olle got me to within shouting distance of my rental flat and I rolled into bed just after 4:00 a.m.

This morning in the beautiful garden behind Olle and Luisa’s apartment there was the aforementioned reconstitution with many of the same cast of characters. There was a generous tendency to skew English when I was within earshot and discussion of Gothenburg sushi, Donald Trump, Nordic alcohol policy, and a long and high-spirited mondegreen stemming from a confusion of “emu oil” with “eagle oil” in which a squeegee was prominent. And interconnecting writhing snakes.

As I type I am cloistered in my flat, trying and failing to have a restorative nap. In the morning I fly to Berlin for more adventures. 

I hope to be here, in this place, with these people, in 10 years for the 20th commemoration.

A snippet of the klezmer band that played at Luisa and Olle’s 10th anniversary party. They were very good and very spirited.

[[Luisa]] and [[Olle]] held their 10th anniversary party in this city-owned hall. In a previous incarnation the building was the original home to Klubb Bongo, a music club that hosted everyone from BB King to Ella Fitzgerald to Led Zepplin to The Who. The club is commemorated with a plaque embedded in the sidewalk out front.

I stopped for a snack at Malmö C (the central train station in the city) last night. There’s a piano in the waiting room and a group of young people were clustered around it picking out tunes, the last of which was the opening refrain from Celine Dion’s Titanic theme. Or was it?

When we are sending messages — messages of any sort, be they SMS, morse code, messages in a bottle, waving hello across a crowded street — we need a protocol, a set of expectations for how the exchange of messages will play out.  Key to such protocols are two types of protocol messages, NAK and ACK.

NAK, or “negative acknowledgement,” is a protocol message sent when something’s gone wrong. “I can’t hear you.” “Noise on the line.” “I don’t understand.” “Please explain.” 

ACK, or “acknowledgement,” is a protocol message that signifies ”okay, got that, next…”

NAK and ACK can be used together, but, more often than not, their use anchors two fundamentally different methods for communicating.

Think of giving your credit card number over the phone. You can simply rhyme out the digits — “4111 1111 1111 1111” — and wait for the other party to interrupt or to reply, when you’re done, “could you repeat that.” A NAK, in other words. Or simply to proceed. Which allows you to assume they got the number.

Or you could spool out the credit card number digit by digit, waiting for confirmation from the other party. “4” (they say “4” or “OK”), “1” (they say “4” or “OK”), and so on. ACK ACK ACK.

These protocol messages are not only part of human communication, but also part of the very lifeblood of the Internet upon which you read this post. It comes to you, down in the engine room, via TCP/IP, a “reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets between applications running on hosts communicating over an IP network.”

Which is to say, a way of getting these words from my server to your browser in a way that works out for all concerned.

In the human realm the messaging systems we use most often, outside of face to face communication, are email and texting, and in both of these there is a fog of confusion surrounding whether we’re expected to use ACK protocol messages or NAK protocol messages.

I notice this fog most often with generations younger than mine: I will send a text message or email and never receive a reply. I’ve deduced that this isn’t because the message isn’t received, nor because it isn’t read, taken to heart, acted on. It’s simply that younger people than I have switched to only sending NAK when needed, and never sending ACK: they’ll let you know when there’s noise on the line, but otherwise it’s faith-based communication.

The contrast with my generation, which is more ACK-based, is more palpable because many of my peers over-ACK. So they not only reply to messages that cry out for an ACK, but they will often add a coda message, something like “Have a Great Day!” or “Thanks for doing this!” or “Great.” The youngers consider this, from the first ACK onward, wasteful over-communication.

As I sit almost exactly in the DMZ separating the ACKers and the NAKers, I have the most confusing position of all, as I need to decide, on a message by message basis, which way to go. And, especially in recent years, as I try to trend younger and fight off my impending agedness, I opt for NAK. Which is a mistake when there’s a clear expectation of ACK.

This all came to a head in March during a protracted, stressful flurry of ACKnessless for which I was socially called to task.

As a result, I’ve jumped over to the other side, going so far as to not only always ACK, but to prophylactically establish an expectation of impending ACK by engaging in pre-message messaging. “I’m heading to the train station now. I will text you once I’m on the platform and then, again, when the train arrives.” That sort of thing.

If you’re going to commit messaging faux pas, I ration, it’s better to err on the side of being annoyingly over-communicative than annoyingly under-communicative.

Please acknowledge that you’ve read and understood this post.

In the lobby of the Form/Design Center in Malmö, benches that are easy to move.