1. Beware of Tricksters

One of those translations from German into English that adds a hint of intrigue.

2. Orange Crates in Sunshine

At the Motel One near the window on the fourth floor.

3. KANT Berlin Office

The Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering.

4. Smokestack through Dusty Window

At the NYU Berlin office in the fourth floor.

5. Patching Pavement

In Berlin when they use hot tar to patch a hole in the street or sidewalk they spread sand on top to avoid the problem of sticky tar sticking to everything that walks or rolls over it.

My friend [[Luisa]] is helping to organize the Alibis for Interaction conference this fall in southern Sweden. It’s a conference that, once you hear its name, you either thing “yes!” or “huh?” and thus self-selects participants very nicely. From the description of the conference:

Designing for participation is giving the participants alibis for interaction. Designing for participation is designing experiences that take into account that humans have bodies, senses, fears, motivations; social hierarchies, prior knowledge, expectations, curiosity, and an innate urge to find out how the story ends. That we need to understand what we’re expected to do, to feel safe trying, to trust in the reward for braving something new.

Packed into that paragraph is as concise a description of the challenges I have interacting with the world as I’ve ever read.

Follow the conference blog (in English and deliciously well-written) to play along from home.

I’m about to check out of Motel One at Moritzplatz (a hotel that is labelled “Motel One Berlin-Mitte” but that is only in the most generous sense anywhere near Mitte); I’ve been here for the last 6 nights and it’s my second stay here (I was here last July as well). I’ve stayed in several neighbourhoods over the years that I’ve been coming to Berlin: Prenzlauer Berg, Mitte and Mitte again and Kreuzberg; while all are pleasant, here at Moritzplatz, on the fringes of Kreuzberg, is by far and away my favourite.

The Motel One is nothing to write home about, but it’s clean, cheap (about 60 EURO a night with breakfast included), has servicable wifi (4 Mbps down, 1Mbps up) and it’s quiet (especially if you request a room at the back). The staff are friendly and there’s a nice lounge on the first floor.

What sets Moritzplatz apart as a Berlin base, though, is everything that surrounds:

1. The Moritzplatz U-Bahn stop is steps from the door of the hotel, and the U8 that stops there can take you quickly up to Mitte or down into Neukölln and, with a connection, you can be almost anywhere you need to go in central Berlin in 30 minutes or less.
2. Betahaus, with its coworking desks, café, bandwidth and workshops, is just around the corner. And it’s open on Saturdays now.
3. Modulor is right on Moritzplatz. It is, I think, the greatest store on earth: you can buy pens, paper, notebooks, architectural supplies, magnets, books, clay, rope, table saws, masking tape, suction cups… everything. And it’s all expertly organized.
4. There’s a Deutsche Post office on Ritterstrasse, about 5 minutes walk away, and they’re skilled at helping English-speakers send letters, postcards and parcels home.
5. Prinzessinnengarten is right on Moritzplatz: it’s a peaceful oasis in the city, a demonstration garden cum restaurant cum coffee shop. A lovely place to spend a morning or an afternoon.
6. There is excellent coffee available nearby at Companion and Concierge.
7. An infinite number of restaurants are within easy walking distance.
8. The Wäscherei am Moritzplatz will wash, dry and fold your laundry and wrap it all up in a nice paper package for pick-up.
9. Tegel Airport is a quick ride up the U8 and then a quick ride over on the 128 bus. Total cost: 2,40 EUR.

There are other neighbourhoods that are more happening, and other hotels that are more luxurious or hip, but for a straight-ahead Berlin experience, with all the services and supports a nomad needs, Moritzplatz can’t be beat.

I’ll be back.

There in an English liqueur called Pimm’s, used to make an English drink called Pimm’s, a potent mixture of alcohol and fruit. I was warned to tread carefully: wallops were hidden in for the unitiated.

But that all came later.

First thing Saturday morning, after a quick breakfast with Luisa, Olle and I hurried up the U8 to Bernauer Straße and through the empty back streets of the neighbourhood — not a coffee place open in sight — heading toward Berlin Kulturbrauerie, the Berlin base of NYU and the home of PirateBox Camp.

An interesting cast of geeks and hackers were gathered in the aerie on the 4th floor, huddled around laptops and ready for conferring.

While it was 100% men — sadly not atypical for this sort of gathering — it was a diverse group of men: USA, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Ghana, France and Hungary were all represented.

While the hierarchy was pretty loose, PirateBox instigator David Darts and PirateBox coder Matthias Strubel, along with enthusiastic Frenchman Augustin Delaporte variously took the tentative helm.

We got a good grounding in the technical aspects of PirateBox from Matthias, a good grounding in the inspiration and history of PirateBox from David, and a good push toward organization and UI improvments from Augustin. We ate pizza, debated CMS platforms and GitHub repository layouts and talked about our favourite features-to-be.

There’s a lot in the “coming soon” column for PirateBox: easier installation, new website, an “extensions” framework, a shared core codebase with LibraryBox (which has blown through its Kickstarter plateau impressively), and better code organization in GitHub.

As I’d hoped, there was a lot of the spirit of Internet 1.0 in the room: smart minds concentrating on a mixture of the cool and the practical with no concern for anythingization. I came away energized and invigorated about the PirateBox idea, and even found some time to write up some documentation for a method for creating standalone “OpenStreetBoxes”, building on some work done here by Gael Musquet.

When things wrapped up on Saturday night, Olle and I bought some beer at the nearby grocery store and took the M10 tram to Hausburgpark where a barbeque organized by our friend (and consummate host and partygiver) Morgan was already underway, with a motely collection of Morgan’s friend from far and wide (including, as it turned out, 10% of the attendees from Zap Your PRAM 2008) eating grilled meat, fish and vegetables. And drinking beer, wine, and Pimm’s. Remember Pimm’s?

The barbecue continued on into the night, and I got a chance to meet many interesting people.

When it was all over we helped Morgan move things back to his nearby apartment and then Olle and I hopped in a cab (magically conjured up by Morgan’s iPhone) and were back at our Motel One base 15 minutes later.

Sunday morning PirateBox Camp was scheduled for a second day, and we planned with more care and eeked out coffee at Bonanza on the way there.

Leaving Luisa to wander, we joined our PirateBox compatriots for some more down-to-brass-tacks talk about the future organization of the project, shared a BitTorrent Sync secret (using a PirateBox, of course), and quietly hacked away in the spare moments.

Olle and I said our farewells and ducked out at 1:00 p.m., just as lunch was arriving, so as to spend Olle and Luisa’s last afternoon in the city together.

We grabbed lunch at November (good food; dreadful service from overtaxed servers), coffee at The Barn Roastery (dreamy coffee and equally dreamy baristas), made a quick late-afternoon stop at the Makers Market and, finally, had a nice light supper at ChénChè.

We piled back to Moritzplatz so that Olle and Luisa good head to Tegel for their evening flight home to Malmö, leaving me to fend for myself until I head back to Canada on Wednesday morning.

Not content to simply stew in my hotel for the evening, I walked up Oranienstrasse to Eiszeit Kino for a late showing of UNPLUGGED: Leben Guaia Guaia, a rollicking German documentary (with English subtitles) about the band Guaia Guaia and their approach to life and music. Eiszeit Kino is a great little cinema with really friendly staff and two screens located off Zeughofstrasse down and alley and up the stairs. I was the only person in the theatre, which was a shame because it was a good movie and it deserves a bigger audience than just me (perhaps I am leading or following the pack?). See it if you can.

For my last two days in Berlin I’ve got a crowded dance card: I’m having a surgically-organized one-hour date with Martin Röll while he is on the way from Helsinki to meetings north of Berlin, coffee with Igor and a tour of the Third Wave office and, on Tuesday, drinks with my old Plazes compatriots Jeanny and Til.

It’s a whirlwind trip, but I’m so glad I came: Olle told me of some advice he received recently which was, in essence, “when the workshop is set up, don’t wait, start working.” I’m a strong believer in not waiting until eventually to travel and see friends and engage with interesting projects; my workshop — an income, my health, a great network of generous friends — is set up, and while it takes some effort to get over the inertia (and comfort) of everyday life up and down Richmond Street, it’s important to leave the home orbit once in a while.

Which is, in part, why I write all this down: to remind myself to do it again soon.

While nominally here in Berlin for PirateBox Camp, which starts tomorrow, arriving two days early allowed me to spend today with [[Olle]] and [[Luisa]], here in the same last-minute serendipitous spirit from their home in Malmö.

With no specific plans in mind, we set out after breakfast to see what we could see, and ended up contructing what amounted to an almost-perfect agenda of meals and snacks and coffee connected by walking and talking.

While we have workshopped this play before, in different cities and under different circumstances, this was the big time: coffee at Companion Coffee, lunch at 3 Schwestern, more coffee at KANT (lovingly crafted by Alper), ice cream at Eismanufaktur, cake and drinks at Hudson’s, a well-deserved break, followed by drinks at Suzie Fu and a late, late supper on the canal at Chan.

We did, I admit, take a detour into the Museum der Dinge mid-afternoon, and into Modulor in the early morning. And there was the unfortunate Yelp-mismanaged journey to a no-longer-operating Indian restaurant. But otherwise it was a day of walking and talking and eating.

It don’t get much better than that.

If you’ve been keeping abreast of all the hijinks over at my Hacker in Residence blog you’ll know that I’ve become interested in the PirateBox project, an ingenious “make a wireless webserver on a $35 box” project. I love the project for many reasons, perhaps most for how much it evokes the spirit of Internet 1.0, back before SEO and “social media marketing” and analytics and monetization, the Internet driven by View | Source. The notion of creating a box that is not connected to the Internet, on purpose, is an oddly powerful idea.

As such, when PirateBox Camp was announced, I knew in my heart-of-hearts that I had to attend. Besides, it’s in Berlin. In the summer. How could I not go.

I must admit that the notion of a “camp” for PirateBox seems, on the surface, completely absurd. Of course that only increases the attraction: only absurd people will go to an absurd camp, and so I’m sure there will be all sorts of interesting discussion and hacking happening on Saturday and Sunday.

As an added bonus, Olle and Luisa are jetting down from Sweden for the weekend, and Morgan is already there, so it will be like old home week.

That all of this is the result of a single photo that Mita (Zap Your PRAM alumnus) pushed to Flickr in April, a photo that piqued my curiousity, ties the knot of the happenstancery of it all.

I’m off to Berlin tomorrow night, and I’m there until next Wednesday morning.

Let the absurdity begin!

I got my first POTS (plain old telephone service) line when I was 17. I had it installed in my room at my parents house. I used it mostly for dialing into the various BBS systems of the day. But it was also the line I used to (nervously) call Ruth Lane-Smith to ask her out on a date (in the end I’m not sure she completely realized it was a date).

When I moved to Trent University I had a line installed in my room in Champlain College and from there, with a brief summer off when I went telephone-free in the destroyed ruins of 107 Hazlitt Street, I’ve had an analog telephone line running into wherever I’ve lived.

Over those 30 years I had 2-party lines and 4-party lines, lines from Bell and lines from Island Tel and lines from Eastlink. I used dial up at 150 baud. I remember when it cost 25 cents a minute to call Summerside from Charlottetown. And when calling “overseas” was a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime thing.

On Monday, with the the porting of our number at home to Vitelity (an Englewood, CO voice-over-IP provider I’ve been a happy customer of here at the office for many years), that all came to an end. Vitelity just started to offer local number porting for Charlottetown numbers this year, and when I heard I jumped at the opportunity to consolidate all my phone service onto one bill and feeding into one PBX (an Asterisk box sitting in the server room over at silverorange HQ).

So my monthly phone bill now looks like this:

• Home phone: $2.99/month plus $1.49/month E911
• Office phone in Charlottetown: $2.99/month
• Local number in Dublin, NH for clients: $1.49/month

Those monthly fees appear artificially low compared to what I’m used to paying Eastlink (about $25/month depending on how you yank it out of the bundle with Internet) because I also pay Vitelity $0.011/minute for all calls in and out. But I’d have to talk for about 36 hours straight to have those minute-by-minute charges add up to the old bills.

It’s not like I’m not giving up anything in the process either: I am now my own phone company, for most intents and purposes. So if the Internet goes out, or my Asterisk box goes down, then my phone goes away. There’s none of the battery-backup-phone-never-stops-working I got when I was 17. But with responsibility comes freedom too: not only are all “calling features” free here at RukTel, but I can code up new ones in PHP.

Best of all, I can now call home from the office by dialing “100”.

(If you’re interesting in telephony history, I highly recommend Voices of the Island, Walter Auld’s history of Island Tel and telephony in general on Prince Edward Island; it’s a great read).

When I wrote about my lunch with David Ramsden earlier in the week, I took a flyer and uploaded a couple of tracks from his albums – two versions of come Inside – to Soundcloud. David found his way to my post, and wrote a kind note on Facebook where he said, in part:

When you read this, you will hear two versions of my song “Come Inside” with the lovely Rebecca Jenkins, one recorded live at the Cameron House in Toronto in 1990, the second from my CD “The Rhythm of the Lonely Road”, produced by Ken Myhr and released in 2001. Reading this today before I venture out onto the island brought a flood of memories back to me, as did our lunch yesterday.

The tracks themselves have been listened to almost 200 times since I posted them, and I asked David if he’d like me to post the complete albums to Soundcloud, to which he quickly replied “yes.”  After some futzing around bringing his Soundcloud account back to life, I’m happy to announce that you can now listen to the complete albums of Quiet Please! There’s a Lady on Stage and The Rhythm of the Lonely Road on Soundcloud:

This is such a great gift to the world from David: they are great album and deserve a wide audience. Please share!

So I’ve ended up in the temporary care of 62 boxes that look like this:

Each box is 8.75” x 3” x 1.75” and weighs about 1 kg. They are wooden boxes of punches¹, used to punch Monotype matrices. They are a part of the typographic heritage of North America, and my friend Heather rescued them from the dump in Mount Stewart². I have found someone, a noble soul, in the northeast USA, who is willing to take on their stewardship, but for this to happen I need to ship the 62 boxes to him.

Canada Post tells me that the maximum weight they will ship is 25 kg, so I would need to ship them in at least three boxes. They quoted me the following prices to ship a 21 kg box:

• Expedited USA: $72.14 x 3 = $216.42
• Xpresspost USA: $123.15 x 3 = $369.45
• Priority Worldwide: $384.78 x 3 = $1154.34

I’m looking for advice from the crowd as to whether there are alternatives to Canada Post that would be less expensive; we’re doing this as a heritage-preserving non-profit effort, so the money is coming out of our own pockets. Please leave advice in the comments if you have any.

––––

1. Inside the look like this:

2. After Gerald Giampa held his auction in Mount Stewart (after he was flooded out by a tidal surge) he hauled the items that didn’t sell to the Mount Stewart dump; Heather, keen of eye and present of mind, followed him and waded in amongst the rats and the garbage to rescue these boxes. She deserves and award.

Yes, I know, I go on about this (For Public Public Spaces, Public Space should be Public, The Chieftains in Charlottetown: Is Borrowing Public Spaces Okay?).

But it’s something I believe strongly in, and I think it bears repeating: public spaces should be for the public.

With the Joel Plasket concert set to close off Victoria Row to all but paying customers this weekend, it again means that a public space that Islanders deserve free and unfettered access to will get walled off to those willing and able to afford a $25 ticket.

Whether it’s streets or parks or squares, and whether it’s rock shows or jazz shows or theatre shows, public spaces should be public.

Ironically, there was another model for holding an event on Victoria Row that played out this week: the Open Repositories conference held a Wednesday night event on the street, booking out all of the restaurants and bringing in entertainment (Colour Code, Ten Strings and a Goatskin, among others). And yet the street itself remained open, so we residents of the neighbourhood could enjoy the music – and access to the street – as we have a right to. Private space in support of public space: that’s a good model (disclaimer: Mark Leggott, who chaired the conference, oversees Robertson Library where I am Hacker in Residence).

And last year’s Island Fringe Festival used public squares effectively, sold tickets, and yet saw no need to wall off the squares for paying customers only.

All appearances to the contrary, I’ve no problems with music filling up my neighbourhood: Wednesday’s event, and last year revivified PEI Jazz and Blues Festival were both credits to the area, and used the street effectively as a venue in a way that was open to all.

I just think it’s wrong that public spaces get walled off for the preserve of the ticketed; it’s especially egregious in a neighbourhood where many residents can’t afford the cost of a $25 concert ticket, and so must look on from outside the prison gates at the use of spaces they’ve paid for, spaces we all own, are used for the the entertainment of the privileged few.

This is entirely within the control of the City Council, for events like this require a permit; if you agree with me on this, perhaps you could let your councillor know?