News archive

Hello there, I do not longer update this page. Please refer to my current blog. For the rest, enjoy the trip back in time. :)

I just came back from a small trip to Kavalla in north-eastern Greece and Ayvalik, a small fisher town built by Greek people on the Turkish Aegean coast. It was good to be on the road again for a while, eat some dust, camp out and get the kick of the car slowing down for you.

Along the way I was picked up by several old men in trucks or vans (only speaking Turkish/Greek), a burek baker delivering his stuff to the border station at night, a car trailer van (an interesting breed of drivers), a German couple driving a huge caravan with a tiny dog inside (caravans never stop usually, but this one I overtook a few times in faster cars, and the third time they thought that is quite amusing and picked me up), a young accountant paying the ferry for me (thanks again!), two times a police man off duty (one going to attend the heart transplantation of his four year old child, the other driving to the funeral of his sister), two bus wind shield technicians speeding down the roads carrying four wind shields 1000 EUR a piece and a gas truck driver ("When this blows up there is nothing you can do, but to drive away very fast. Several square kilometres will be wasteland.").

The border crossing into Greece was somewhat special (I had to leave and re-enter the country to renew my tourist visa after 3 months). It was dark already when I walked the last few kilometres towards the border and an enormous wind made it almost impossible to walk. There I was, flying around the empty straight road, slowly advancing forward, mummed up in my clothes, trying to hitch-hike while being pushed off the street. It must have been a frightening sight for the -- very few -- cars passing by. I had my fun and played with the storm until the baker man stopped and gave me a lift. The structures at the border station were shaking in the wind, toll bars breaking, things were flying around. Everyone had expressions of "yey, there is not going to be school tomorrow" in their faces and waved me through without hassle.

The night on my way to Ayvalik I was stuck at some petrol station in the middle of nowhere. There were about 150 km to go, so I camped on a field behind a little hill. The next morning, I walked down to the street, literally the first car stopped and brought me all the way to Ayvalik. Insert some cosmic energy here please. :)

Hitch-hiking worked very well during the trip, as soon as I was standing at the right spot I never waited longer than half an hour. But to get to the right spot sometimes took a few kilometres of walking. After Bengue joined me on the way back from Ayvalik to Istanbul today actually waiting times dramatically reduced to minutes and usually one of the first 5 cars stopped.

Oh, about the headline: It's my birthday today and on Friday I will have a little party at the Tuenel art cafe in Taksim, Istanbul. Come along if you read this!

I am selling a domain name on Ebay. Read the full story in the item description (scroll down for English version).

This is wonderful, Greenpeace started a bold campaign adressing the computer hardware industry and Apple computers in particular, who is ranking last on their list for green electronics, demanding their products to be better recyclable and free from toxic substances. The campaign uses all sorts of Web 2.0 viral channels including a fake keynote video on YouTube with Apple founder Steve Jobs announcing the Green Apple. Not to be missed is their special "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ad. As you would expect, Greenpeace takes the company by its weakest point -- their image -- and uses well-known symbols of Apple's fame and redirects their energy with the help of subvertising techniques. Very clever, and I am sure Steve will react to it as soon as "greenness" becomes a desired feature in computers. First reactions of the commercial Apple crowd were mixed though: A Greenpeace booth got evicted from MacExpo London last October, but activists could roam freely at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco a few days ago. So, help making the computer industry go sustainable by spreading the word!

Michael calls it Movement Research in Public Spaces. A bunch of people meet somewhere in the city, jump around, play imaginative scenes, roll around the floor and do other odd stuff that makes passers-by stop, kids cheer, groups of Japanese tourists clap. Today's improvisation meeting was the highlight of a series of get-togethers like that during this week. Ten moving improvisationists showed up, I was amongst them, and walked - partly with their eyes closed - to a small square next to the Hagia Sofia mosque/church and let everything out for about an hour. I met wonderful people and connected with them instantly. Michael contacted me through my friend Dante before he came to Istanbul a week ago and since then I am discovering the contemporary dance scene with him. There are more little studios hidden in the houses around the Galata tower than you would think. Expressing one's emotions and impulses through dance is such a pure and self-healing activity.

Another piece of generative animation called Workers out on a saturday night ;) can now be viewed. I spent most of last night trying to figure out how to rotate coordinates "by foot", then kind of understood and went on to the rotation functions build into processing which really make life much easier. Next up: Some 3D action!

A few weeks ago I attended a workshop about the Java based visual arts programming kit Processing. Have a look at my first Processing creations in my sandbox (you need Java enabled in your browser).

I got a warm jumper today. Bengue and me were digging through huge piles and big bags of old clothes hidden in a big shop in the very old merchant alleys near the spice market to find this masterpiece of knittery: Me happy with jumper

A few years ago a friend of mine and me started a small company called "netzteil", running coin-operated Linux Internet kiosks in German youth hostels. The burst of the first Internet bubble unfortunately took the company down with it two years later. One of the people involved now wrote an article about it (German only). You can see the cute machines in my sandbox. Enjoy!

Hey, did you know that Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia as a project within his "titty portal" (as The Register calls it) company back in 2000? And look what it has become now. Someone once told me about pornography having long been the driving force behind development of media technology. Hm, not sure about that, I said. Anyway, the initial project lead and hands-on creator of Wikipedia Larry Sanger recently announced Citizendium, a "fork", an independent clone of the current Wikipedia with a less hierarchic governing system and a lot of other changes. Let's see what it will become and where it leads us to. The future is so exciting! :)

"Richest 2% own half the world's wealth" says a recent study of the United Nations University (press release). And half of humanity owns only 1% of all capital. Hm, yes, that somehow sounds wrong. I wonder if global unregulated capitalism has anything to do with it.. OK, here is the plan: Take as much wealth out of the hands of the rich - if you can read this, you are probably one of them - and give it to the poor. Steal, if necessary! ;)

I am in this city almost a month now. I think. I have stopped counting the days. :) First I spent a few days with a group of 4 Canadian electronic artists and Kyd. They were part of the HTMLles Export 2 tour through Belgrade, Sofia and Istanbul and I had met them in Sofia. After they all left Istanbul - a big hello to Caroline who stayed a few more days [photos] - I met Bengue at a Halloween party in the cute Dogzstar club in Taksim, downtown Istanbul. Since then she is my generous host - thank you, Bengue. Sara, a friend from Denmark who was thinking to travel with me further south stayed with us for two weeks, but then followed her calling to start an apprenticeship in natural building in Oregon/USA. Sara, I wish you always a handful of clay and good luck with the course over there!

It has been a great month for the Free Software world so far. First Microsoft officially announces that they won't bother Free Software developers with patent lawsuits anymore and then partners up with a leading Linux company (see open letter). A few days later the omnipresent Java technology is being handed over to the Free Software community by its producer. This is big big news for the community and will change the industry towards an economy based on cooperation.

At the weekend I visited a VJ performance, took part in a presentation of the Artificicial Eyes VJ group and attended a processing.org workshop, a programming environment for electronic arts and visual design based on Java. Amongst little exercises I created a bubble generator and a kaleidoscopic drawing tool. Stay tuned for some examples.

The last weeks have given me an intense insight into the world of media/electronic art and its inhabitants. Interesting.. I wonder what that will do to me in the future. :)

I am giving a presentation next Tuesday, Oct 24th about Sustainable Computing (follow the link to see the announcement). Thanks to Vera and George for hosting me here and giving me their club space for the event. :)

I just arrived to Bucharest after a long car trip through the rain. I stood about 5 minutes chatting with a 10 year old boy that spoke fluent English next to the road in Sighisoara when a car stopped and brought me directly to a metro stop in the centre of Bucharest. Double luck, as it is lashing rain all over Romania. :) During the 6 hour ride the driver told me about his fight of him and his business against corrupt officials. They are trying to block his way whenever they can with imaginary fines, unneccessary formalities that take month etc. He gets this extra treatment, because he refuses to bribe them as it is common everywhere in Romania. He worked 10 years all over the world and has seen that things can be different. So he fights by bringing things infront of court (with corrupt judges), writing complaints to ministeries and informing the anti-corruption authorities. He told me that in his hometown the children of the mayor, main judges and police chiefs all own several luxuries sports cars, huge houses and lead a jet set lifestyle. I could only shake my head about such shameless and obvious corruption. A long way to go..

After something like 4 years I gave the design of this start page a little update. Also entries can have a headline and a time now. Like it?

After a long silence due to lots of soul-eating work on the computer, here some fresh text to my dear readers: Last Tuesday I went to the Maramures region in the very north of Romania [map]. It's the region of wooden churches, calm valleys, rivers and forests. Every Romanian person get sparkling eyes when the name is mentioned. I hitchhiked the whole trip, and most lifts were paid, something like 3 Euro per 100 km. I hardly waited more than 20 minutes, often the first or second car stopped. Almost everybody gave hand signs indicating that they were either from this town (point the index finger downwards) or would leave this road soon (point left or right). Just rasing the index finger from the steering wheel means "sorry dude, can't take you". Making a movement similar to screwing a very big light bulb in and out means "where do you want to go?". In other countries and places in Romania it's common to treat the hitchhiker as an invisible lowlife. Many fellow hitchhikers say the name of the place they are going to out loud as the car is approaching, so the drivers can lip-read, which works well. If there is an important turn near, people point up right or left to indicate their destination. When a car stops the crowd quickly rushes towards it, people get in or turn and tell the others what the driver said. Everybody was on the road again, the student, the granny, the old couple with a bunch of flowers, the fancy city chick with a wheely suitcase on the way to the family (they don't stick up their thumb, they just stand away a bit and wait until a fancy car stops ;) ).

I started in Sighisoara early in the afternoon, walked through Targu Mures for a while, then went 150km on to Cluj-Napoca where I met my host Anca from Hospitality Club in the centre. We joined her boyfriend and friends at a bar and stayed there until late. I had heard about many Hungarians living in the area, but that night I got the full experience. :) They make 20% of the population of Cluj and so Anca and me were the only non-Hungarians in the big crowd. Hungarians here tend to stay in their own circles (the bar place was Hungarian managed), some of them don't really speak Romanian and I heard a "this area was ours for 600 years and only belongs to Romania since 80 years" by a student on the table.

The next day I had a look around town, met Liviu from D Media (website hosted on our server) and Anca invited me for a nice lunch at a restaurant. She and her family were great hosts. We exchanged some web design and programming ideas, as she works in a similar field than I do. Actually this was my first classical Hospitality Club relationship of contacting someone for accommodation in a town I was visiting – so far I only met HC people at gatherings etc. Thanks for this nice start, Anca! :)

The next morning I left for Baia Mare (this is the first place on the map linked above), about 150 km away. The driver left the main road, showed me his hometown Targu Lapus, stopped at some rural police station, had a chat with the officers and dropped me at a crossing to Baia Mare. I walked a bit and two men in a Dacia picked me up. They went into a forest to visit a meadow in the middle of nowhere with about 30 huge marmor statues lined up. Quite bizarre. Baia Mare was not too thrilling to me, so I walked a few kilometers out of town, put up my tent near a river and enjoyed the cold(!) night in nature.

The sun heating up the tent woke me up, I washed my face in the river and went on. I heard about the "funny graveyard" in Sapinta near Sighetu Marmatie up close to the Ukraine border, so I went there. The border guards got a little nervous when I walked around the border area with a curious face. They checked my ID and let me go, looking puzzled about what I'm doing there walking around on my own. I got a lift to Sapinta and I wandered over the graveyard with colorful paintings and humourous poems about the lives and deaths of the people on the blue wooden gravestones for a while [picture]. One guy was obviously decapitated by a soldier during the war. Another got ran over by a tractor. Afterwards I went on to the "largest wooden structure in Europe". The great wooden church of Sapinta [picture]. I spent two hours around there and then went back to Baia Mare via Sighetu with a young person that was about to sell the car that he recently brought from Germany in Cluj the next day. In Baia Mare I walked through the Chesnut festival, but escaped the loud crowd soon towards the outskirts of town. I found a spot behind a hedge near a road.

Some road workers on their way to work woke me up by walking around my tent, musing who or what would be in it. They used some bad language in the process as far as I understood, but then left without knocking on my tent. In the darkness of the night before I didn't realise that the road was that busy and that my tent was that exposed. As it got warmer I also got some sleep. I was about to take a route through small villages and towns back to Sighisoara, when a driver pointed me to the wonderful Rohia monastery near Targu Lapus. I spend a few hours in the calm atmosphere of the place curing my inner unrest. From Rohia I walked into the unknown down a dirt road. There was a sign for Dej (a town on the way back) 25km, so the worst that could happen would be a two day walk. I had food with me and there were clear rivers, so I walked and walked in beautiful sunshine along fields, hills, meadows. See these pictures of a someone that obviously did a very similar trip. I arrived at a village on the other side of a mountain chain around dusk. I pitched my tent up meadow on a hill and listened to the dogs down in the village and the farmers on the other side of the valley talking to their cows and sheep while bringing them in for the night. I put on all clothes I had, two pairs of trousers, many socks, my big winter jacket, a hat and I was actually sweating during the cold (5 degrees?) night.

The farmer of the land that I was on woke me up by howling and whistling near my tent. Only as he addressed me in a proper manner with "domn" (mister) I reacted. I'm no dog, you know.. I unpealed and opened my tent and saw a small man standing in safe distance of about 5 metres. We had a little chat and when he was convinced that I would not steal his horses he left at an instant. Salut, and he was gone as he appeared. On my way out of the village I was greated friendly as the lonely person with the tent. A few hours down the road without cars and I was back on tarmac and then things went quickly. One lift was a bit weird. The car was decorated for a wedding and the driver turned out to be either very drunk or generally very rough in his movements. I'm not sure which I would have preferred. The criticism of his driving style by his wife with a wedding cake on her lap was really not appreciated by him at all. The poor girl.. I was back home in Sighisoara before dusk where Anisoara, Tino, and another "crazy" trucker (the one that brought my new external hard drive to Romania, another story) waited for me with some food. Those were some fine 5 days – Maramures: Check! ;)

I decided to join The First Church of the Grey Goo.

That was easy. Yesterday afternoon I packed my stuff and walked down the road a bit, away from the Ecotopia site in south-central Slovakia, got on a bus to main road, where I got picked up after a few minutes by a truck going to Romania. Bingo! The very good-hearted driver ("Don't ask what can take, ask what can give", "One person autostop alone - must be interesting person") gave me a lift to Arad and found me another truck to Sibiu, a town 90 km from here. Another few minutes and I was speeding down the windy roads to Sighisoara in an old Dacia car. Now I need to make my contribution to the GDP and work!

Ouch, ouch, mood level in my email box ranging from curious to annoyed and angry. Sorry, everyone, I am still in the forest and mountains at Ecotopia 2006. Internet ain't grow on trees, ya know.. ;) Bear with me for a few more days and excuse my highly unprofessional behaviour. Building a different world needs distance sometimes.

A quick hello from the Carpatian mountain in Slovakia. I'm at Ecotopia and I better rush back to the camp now to get some lunch. :)

After Barcelona for two weeks and a trip through Andorra to Toulouse I just arrived to the Global Village 2006 festival site in Maidstone, a bit south of London. I did not announce myself, so the people that I was working with over the last 6 months and that never met me in person looked kind of surprised when I suddenly stood infront of them and said "Hi, I am Meinhard." - I think I like doing the Houdini sometimes. :) Wonderful hitchhiking days and nights, lucky and unlucky spots, wonderful people all around, sunshine, sunshine, sunshine - It's the summer!

I was in Hamburg for the weekend to get an intense Hospitality Club treatment. We were working on the redesign of the website, coordinating tasks, defining goals, making drafts for all sub pages, and I was hacking some HTML and CSS. Have a look at the redesign page to get an idea of where we are going. Lupochens drafts are the ones that we base the new design on. Also there were two HC related partys, just to remind us what we are doing all this for. ;) Thanks to Wiebke, Micha, Simon, Veit, Matthias and all the others - it is great working with you and I see you soon. I'm off to Barcelona now. Sun is shining, roads are clear - go!

"A man needs to travel. By his own means, not by stories, images, books or TV. By his own, with his eyes and feet, to understand what is his. To some day plant his own trees and give them some value. To know the cold to enjoy the heat. To feel the distance and lack of shelter to be well under his own ceiling. A man needs to travel to places he doesn't know to break this arrogance that makes us see the world as we imagine it, and not simply as it is or may be. That makes us teachers and doctors of what we have never seen, when we should just be learners, and simply go see it." Amyr Klink – Sabina, thanks for sending this to me. :)

Bucharest! Busy with Internet work.. That's the thing about it, it follows you whereever you go. Is this good or bad? Anyway, I am in this nice block. See the funky patterns in the park? Bucharest is full of geometrical city planning. It's more than 30 degrees, so I actually prefer to sit inside. Click, click..

I left Schwerin a week ago to visit a friend's birthday party in Leipzig. The day after I went to Berlin to attend the Hospitality Club beach camp. I was only going to stay for a day and then go to Romania with a carsharing lift, but for various reasons I decided to stay with the 600 lost travellers until yesterday and joined a small nomadic tribe (Hello Sabina, hello Dante! :) on a mission through Berlin. It's not really clear yet when I will leave - I'm floating.. Thanks to Alex for hosting us all.

I'm about to leave Schwerin - another week or so? On my Sunday morning flight over the world with great grandfather Google I accidently zoomed into the Saudi Arabian desert and found this giant funky shit. Try to find Pacman and his big friends! :) Wikipedia tells me it's Center pivot irrigation, typical for Saudi Arabian agriculture. Aha!

On my way back from Amsterdam on a beatuiful spring morning two weeks ago I first encountered the total control over the motorways around the city by the police. I didn't even finish drawing my sign when already a police motorbike stopped right infront of me and sent me back a few kilometres towards the city. There I tried a petrol station with little luck, walked on a few hundred metres and found one of the shrouded in legends "Liftplaats" - a stopping area for hitchhikers created by Dutch city planners at the roads leading out of the cities. It has a big traffic sign with a thumb on it, a place to lock your bike, a bin and enough room for the cars to stop and accelerate (Google maps liftplats Amsterdam). Great! Ten minutes an I was on my way towards Germany with a cigar smoking bronze sculpture artist and art trader. At a petrol station I asked someone heading further towards to Germany. He told me his wife and him adopted three kids from Columbia whose parents had been killed in a fight over drugs. Like on my way into Holland I got a lift by an African person in a delivery van over the border. He was delivering goods for the afro shop in Osnabrück. It was afternoon already when I first walked to the wrong exit of town, and dusk when I got to the right one. I got a short lift by an (ex?) junkie couple towards the motorway. While she left the car to buy something he told me that his military service in the Kosovo war, with seeing how brutally people slaughtered each other left him no escape but drugs. They said they will come back in two hours and take me to Bremen. I decided to turn down their offer and after almost 2 hours waiting for lifts in the dark I jumped over a fence into a small forest and pitched my tent. The road was roaring all night and I could not resist to unpack my laptop to watch an episode of Futurama. Silly, I know..

The next morning it lasted about 10 minutes until a young driver on business travels took me to a petrol station outside Bremen, two hours further north. There I asked a young couple if they could give me a lift to Hamburg. They dropped me in the centre, I got the bus to the exit towards Berlin. Hamburg city planners decided to erase the favourite hitchhiking spot "Horner Kreisel" (a roundabout before the motorway to the East) from the map by building another car lane and high curbs in its place. Great! But fuck you (excuse me), city un-planners, after 15 minutes my female co-hitchhiker and me got a lift by a nice big caravan with a friendly driver at the bus stop just before the roundabout. She got off at a petrol station on the way and I went on with the caravan driver, a motor pilot and catamaran owner, right to the heart of Schwerin. Juicy smells of fresh green parfumed me on my walk through the castle's garden to the Mandarin office, my current shared office. A nice trip. :o)

I'm in Amsterdam since more than a week now. Slowly i am getting used to my beloved bicycles being the hero on the roads. Still I have a big smile in my face when I see a father cycling through traffic with his two kids in a huge box in the front and the mother sitting sidewards on the carrier in the back. I visited several squats or ex-squats, mainly with the EYFA crew for dinner or a night out. The ASCII hacklab and tech collective was one of the more interesting for me. Activist people, healthy food, organic beer, free wireless Internet all around. Yes, I think I stay a little longer, but I need to go to Germany soon to sort out some things before leaving for the summer.

What happened since Breakpoint? First see some pictures of the decoration team and the Inca statue that I helped building. On Tuesday morning after easter I started hitchhiking from the road to the motorway just outside the Breakpoint hall. After half an hour I started walking on a bit towards the motorway, because it was nice and sunny. After a few kilometer a courier driver in his private car stopped and took me to Frankfurt airport, doing his deliveries on the way. I went by metro to the main train station to pick up my tent which Miruna was so kind to send it to me from Romania by bus. Thanks, Miruna! :) Around the Atlassib office it felt like being back in Bucharest - Romanian language and customs amongst the people loading there many bags into the bus, the interior of the office, the dry and warm (polluted) air. I went out to a petrol station right before the motorway crossing towards south, after a while a friendly young man stopped and took me one hour south to Mannheim. His girlfriend had just quit with him after six years of relationship. Right before he got on the car! He was very calm, saying that it had not sunk in yet.. A while ago he started this cocktail bar - make sure to check it out, when you are around. :) In Mannheim I stood beside the main road towards Heidelberg when a Malaysian woman with her parents visiting stopped. I felt the urge to visit south-east Asia again when chatting to the parents. Such an exciting part of the world. In Heidelberg they were so kind to give me a lift right to the address that I was heading for. I met Cristina, a good friend from Bucharest that is studying in Heidelberg for a while. She was an excellent host, accomodated, fed and showed me around town.

Two mornings later I went to the drive-up of the motorway, where after one hour another hitchhiker joined me while waiting. Another hour or so later an Iraqi man who already had a carsharing passenger on board took me a few hours up to some motorway service area near Collogne. Phew, he had quite some style of driving, not keeping lanes, breaking way too late and so on. From the service area I got picked up after almost two hours by two young Arab people in a brand new fast car. There was something fishy about those two, the driver, a very smart guy, constantly talking into his headset, speeding like there's no tomorrow, and his co-driver something like an assistent. Probably there is no real tomorrow for them, they told me they were driving up and down Germany non-stop since four days without sleep, living of energy drinks and a few hundred Euros for petrol. The co-driver told me that the driver is being searched for by the police. I asked no further questions and was happy to get off at some petrol station an hour further north. Phew. After two hours (it really wasn't my day, I didn't care anymore which way people were going) a friendly man stopped, went a bit the wrong direction and dropped me off again at some road towards the motorway to Holland. At a bus stop I watched the sun going lower and lower, thinking about what my options were and how good chances to get to Amsterdam the same day are. Suddenly a black convertible of the latest and biggest kind with a star on the hood stopped. I squeezed my bag somewhere where there was naturally no room for it and we flew off with Genesis' "No son of mine" in repeat mode and a lot of fresh country air, some 400 horses pulling us down the empty motorway away from the sun. His mission was to pick up some cans of Dutch beer from a petrol station near the border and then to return to the Ruhr area to attend some football match "auf Schalke". Although he wasn't feeling well about it he took me right to the border. His feeling was right, there was a large scale police operation going on checking every car going in and out Holland. He forgot to pay a few fines in Holland some time ago, so he had to spend some extra time explaining things to the guards. I asked the driver of the car next to us if he is going towards Amsterdam, so he was and off I went. Bayo from Nigeria with his electronic gadgets took me to a town outside Amsterdam where I got the train to the station near the EYFA office. Dunja picked me up and we went to get food in a squat nearby, where I met some old and new friends. :)

Some quick news: I finished a two weeks course of teaching C++ at Schwerin's chamber of commerce and I got myself a new laptop (iBook 12"), because my other 7 year old one finally passed away. :( R.I.P., Weasel. Currently I am at the Breakpoint computer demo art gathering. Here I help with decorations - I spent all afternoon carving a golden mask for an Inca king out of polystyrene - and in the "info team", where I will guide people around the gathering during the weekend.

Hehe, our server got slashdotted today. A Slashdot front page article about Google and Biopiracy linked to the Captain Hook awards campaign hosted on our server. So this caused a little down-time due to quite a bit of traffic coming to us at once. Cool! :)

Nuclear power - clean, efficient, save enough. Many people have a different opinion. They say nuclear power:

• Still creates dangerous waste (for many generations to come)
• Is very expensive (and wouldn’t survive without taxpayer’s subsidies)
• Runs out of uranium (in 50 years if nuclear energy production is maintained at current level)
• Causes serious accidents with radioactive release (at least 22 since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986)
• Means nuclear weapons (through spreading technology)
• Emits CO2 (from cradle to grave as much CO2 as a modern gas-fired energy plant)

With rising prices for fossil fuels like oil and gas nuclear lobbyists prepare their comeback in Europe. To stop this from happening activists are collecting 1.000.000 signatures for a petition. So, if you think the arguments above are strong enough to make us use alternatives, please Sign the petition. It will only take a minute. How can a petition change anything? Well, this is how the European legislation works: If there are a certain number of people complaining about an issue, the EU is legally bound to do something about it.

Ich will eine Maschine sein. Arme zu greifen Beine zu gehn kein Gedanke kein Schmerz. - Heiner Müller "Die Hamletmaschine", in parts just on Cliqhop.

They look like a Web2.0 start up and they do stuff that those ventures usually do. Internet video, tagging, viral effects, rounded corners and colorful buttons - boring, welcome to Bubble2? But wait, Democracy Internet TV as part of the Participatory Culture Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation on a mission "to build an open and democratic television platform". Their plan is take some power over mass media back from big corporations into the hands of the people. Everyone is allowed to broadcast via their network and their software is 100% open source and GPL licensed. Besides, this is 0 day shit, man! They launched their massive project yesterday. Make sure to download their stuff, play around with it and to spread the word. They are also looking for volunteers.

Hey, that was quite some gap in this blog. Welcome back. I'm still in Schwerin and I am busy with things - obviously. During the weeks I work on various things like the EYFA website, the Global Village 2006 website, my form management software Informal, many things to do with our web server Mokey, the MAtours website, an independent video database project, quotes for new jobs, my taxes (my favourite!) and some smaller things that I forgot right now. There is a strong tide in my inbox that washes tasks into my todo list. I'm there with spades and sand bags - brave and every morning. On the weekends I do short trips to places nearby. I was in Berlin for New Year's, I went to Hamburg for Hauke's Balkan social movements talk, to Berlin again for a German Red Falcons meeting and a big communist march, to a video activist meeting in the Wendland, an area that is famous for its regular protests against transports to the local "temporary" nuclear dump. Thanks to the 84 year old man that took the time to do a big detour right to the place of the meeting. He fought in Africa for the Nazis and was POW in the USA and England. -- This weekend I visited my father in Rostock. On Saturday night I went out on a crawl through various places with Martin. It was a nice treat to be amongst a good crowd of students, something Schwerin is unfortunately lacking. Martin kept buying those cocktails, uh oh.

Today a friend was asking me if I could help her to find a new laptop to buy. Darn, I must have forgotten my "No, I won't help you to buy a new computer" t-shirt at home today. ;) So I went out to see what kind of green computers there are nowadays. See the delicious prey of my link hunt. To my surprise one of the major players seems to build the most ecologically sound computers. So if you go out and buy a shiny new PC make sure to have a look at these Fujitsu Siemens PCs. If you are in the USA, buy them at Green Personal Computers. They are actually quite cheap and the manufacturer follows these principles:

• Avoid hazardous substances
• Guarantee acceptance of returned equipment
• Modular and otherwise dismantle-friendly design
• Use recyclable plastics only
• Label all synthetic components
• Incorporate energy-saving power management features
• Produce quiet systems

I'm impressed. And I really hope other manufacturers will follow this example.

Last night I went to a weird art performance in Schwerin's centre for criticism and polka (Komplex). It was one of the most blatant things I've seen here. The dadaist poetry/comedy/embarrassment went on for more than two painful hours when it finally ended in the spectacular destruction of various old electronic equipment with the help of a chainsaw, an angle grinder and a sledge hammer - accompanies by minimalist techno and with audience participation. Lesson learned: Trumpets do not spark when cut with an angle grinder. Find the artists at azfilm (German).

The ethical christmas gift: A Blackspot Shoe brought to you by Adbusters. It's no joke, Adbusters is not just criticising blind consumerism and big corporations anymore, but takes the next step and offers an alternative. Why did this take so long to happen? ;) The Blackspot shoes are made from recycled and biodegradable materials, without leather and crafted by workers oranised in labour unions (in Portugal). With every shoe you buy a share of The Blackspot Anticorporation, which entitles you to vote on future decisions of the company. You, the consumer, get empowered. Besides that the shoes look nice and edgy. Maybe Santy reads this here and goes to the Back to Source "shop" in Hamburg and gets me a pair of the Blackspot sneaker (that's the low shoe, size 45 please).

Three days ago I arrived to Schwerin. Here some details about the frosty trip:

On Friday the 18th I got woken up by my host in Sighisoara, knocking on the door, phone in her hand: Miruna was telling me over the phone that the truck that I will take to get back to Germany is already just outside town and I have about 15 minutes to catch it on the main road. I was expecting the truck one or two days later, so I rushed, packed my stuff and got a lift to the main road. Three trucks from Germany were waiting there. They carried weird, big shiny machines with lots of pipes - cleaning devices for fluids for gas pumping sites. The convoy drove to a town near Bucharest. Unfortunately the customs office there had just closed for the weekend and so the trucks had to wait until Monday. I jumped off, got a chemical toilet cleaning car to Bucharest and spend the weekend with Miruna and her friends in the capital.

Monday the 21st, afternoon: I was struggling with problems on my server when I got another call. The convoy, with one truck less, is on it's way to the unload place for the machines somewhere in the middle of nowhere between Bucharest and Hungary. I can catch them on the motorway about 100 km from Bucharest in two hours. Get stuff from flat, cross Bucharest by metro to exit towards west, get on car in the dark, explain you have no money, kiss Miruna goodbye, leave for an unknown time - 1h. Drive to kilometre 73 - 45min. After 20 minutes waiting in cold darkness at a crossing near the motorway I see shiny machines go by in the distance. They stop, switch on their revolving lights, I start running. The same night we made it to the village where those monsters need to go. I have Tino's computer on my lap, following the satellite signal and giving directions. We pass through tiny curvy roads that barely fit the trucks, going by many little bridges infront of houses with small benches on both sides of the bridge, facing each other. There does not seem to be a single bridge in this part of the country without two benches on it - odd. We park the trucks, have some beers and go to sleep. Every truck has two little beds on top of each other in the back of the cabin. My favourite quote this day from driver Tino while on the road: "I sit here in front of the bed all day, watch out of the window and think about what to eat. And I just can't come up with anything good." :)

The next morning at 6am someone on his way to work at the gas pumping site knocks on the truck door until Tino looks out. "The site is just there", he is pointing out, "see you later!" We sleep another hour until someone else knocks. A little later we drive to the site, where an old crane and a dozen people work with what looks like improvised equipment on the new fossil fuel conveyour. We put the hundred thousand Euro device next to wooden barrows and axes and drive off towards the border to Hungary. It is dark when we arrive to the enormous truck queue of a few kilometres. Someone lurking around the foreign trucks offers a special service of skipping the queue for a hefty fee. We cross the border a little later, turn and go back into the no man's land. We need to wait for a truck coming from Hungary the next morning. The coming truck will load its track vehicle bulldozer onto Tino's truck and Tino will go back to Bucharest. I will get onto the other truck and go to Germany. This was the plan at least.

Sleeping on the Hungarian customs truck parking we get woken up by border guards knocking on the truck door very early. They insist on us leaving the parking towards Romania, they get quite angry. We park in the strip between the borders. Tino goes back to Hungary to help the other driver with customs papers, I stay in the truck for a few hours and observe poor Romanians stuffing dozens of duty free cigarette boxes into their socks, under their jumpers, skirts, into every possible enclosure of their Dacias. In broad daylight, 50 meters from the custom officers they do this all day long, going back and forth. We go for lunch in a sleezy hotel restaurant near the truck parking. This border at the edge of the European Union makes me feel sick somehow. The absense of moral thinking, everything is done through money. If you want to get something over the border it is just a matter of how much money you are willing to spend. You want a girl, how much? The unfriendly waiters overcharge, pocket the difference as if it is the most normal thing in the world. Drivers are frustrated from being delayed, guards are frustrated from seeing frustrated people. Border guards here can easily earn a few thousand Euros "on the side". They usually drive the biggest cars, have the biggest houses in town. Everything is so obvious! I find out that my trucks probably won't move for another 20 hours or so because of some missing papers.

This is when my actual trip home starts. At about 5pm on Wednesday I walk over the border to start hitchhiking to Germany at temperatures below zero. Let's see how it works out. :) After half an hour a Romanian truck driver took me towards Budapest. He is actually on his way to Austria, but needs to stay for the night at the Slovak/Czech border. During the last part of the trip we overtake another Romanian truck. My driver guides him through Bratislava over the radio. They call each other by the cities on their registration plate. Krk. Suceava can you still hear me? Krk. Yes, I'm right behind you, Pitesti. Krk. They will spend the night with their trucks parked next to each other on the big truck parking just before the Czech border because Suceava's truck does not start well in the mornings. It's 1am and minus 5 degrees. Pitesti offered me to stay in his truck, telling me it would really be no problem, but I decide to go on. For half an hour I stand on the motorway behind the customs where the car and the truck lanes meet again. Mummed border guards with torches come out of the forrest, check my passport once again, babble something about "stopnica" (little car stopper? I simply love Czech language) into their walkie talkie and walk off into the forrest on the other side of the motorway. A crazy old man in a old, well-decorated, small truck picks me up. Some hours later he drops me off in Prague near the metro. He nearly fell asleep a couple of times on the road, so I tried to keep myself awake and observed him, asking him useless things when the truck came a bit to close to the ditch on the right. I was so tired that I was hallucinating. The repetitive markings on the motorway can turn into all sorts of things I tell you. %) Sitting forward, backward again, drinking water, any move helps. The metro station was deserted, a few people gathered, the gates to the underground were openend, the fans started whirling. I took the first metro at 4:30am to the north of Prague. It got bright while I was waiting for 2 hours for a lift. Ah, the wrong exit, that's why. The young metal rock lover dropped me off in his hometown Teplice, a few kilometres from the German border towards Dresden. I just had myself wrapped up in clothes again when a small white car with three young Czech gipsies (?) and a tiny open trailer stopped and took me to the centre of Dresden. I took the tram and bus towards the Autobahn to Berlin. I stood at a small drive-up for almost two hours. No cars for Berlin. I asked some road contruction people for directions and walked over a field to a motorway crossing. Wasn't this supposed to be a drive-up? Hum, I watched the cars on the single lane road connecting the two motorways speeding by me. No one will ever stop. Ah well, sign up, the very first car stops and brings me 300 kilometres in 2 hours almost home. Hitch-hiking, I love thou. The young attactive woman driving is doing stock car races in her spare time, does not like trains and driving at less than 130 km/h. At the service area, again I was just finished closing my jacket, a young hanseatic business man walks towards me, asking where I want to go. He drops me off at a petrol station on the road towards Schwerin. The third person I ask, a man running a small gardening company in his van carrying a plough, takes me right into the centre of Schwerin. His company was just working on behalf of a mobile phone company, which is obliged to plant a certain amount of trees and bushes in compension for every sending mast they build along the fast train tracks. He tells me the secrets of good landscape gardening and drops me off at my favourite web design company in Schwerin: Mandarin Medien, where I will spend most of this winter I think. Summary: 26 hours from Romania to Schwerin, dispite ice and frost, well worth doing. :)

My server is up and running again. All websites were down from Monday to Friday - I am very very sorry for this. One reason for the long outage was that I was on the road during the week. Pretty bad timing.. -- Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day. Make sure to avoid shopping or at least feel "encouraged to reflect on the role money plays in your live and in society as a whole" (Japan Times).

It is definite. This weekend I will leave Romania and go to my hometown in Germany to start working as a part-time teacher in English and computers. I have no clue yet what exactly I will be teaching, but I like surprises. :) Apart from the teaching currently there are smaller and bigger freelance jobs coming in as well. A winter full of work - my wallet (that I don't have) will be very happy. Sighisoara is rainy, so it will be easy to leave.

Hard disk crash once again - yippie! (No important things lost this time.) I have no idea why this happens so often lately. I know that some geeks are reading this, so for those interested how it happened and how I fixed it (or "How a disk crash fixed my heat fan"): I was just working on my "laptop called Weasel" when the electricity went off - that happens here every now and then. Because my battery is broken Weasel switched off immediatly as well. When I booted back up, I got into X and KDE, when suddenly no applications would start. I switched to the text console and could not log in. Ext3 aborts were running over the screen. Very weird.. I booted with a Knoppix CD and checked the hard disk. All partitions (data, another linux installation) apart from my system partition were OK. Phew, I thought. The broken partition lost its superblock and obviously all its superblock backups - "fsck.ext3 -b xxxxx /dev/hda1" failed. So I went for the sledge hammer method that I read about and just created a new superblock with "mkfs.ext2 -S /dev/hda1" (don't try this at home kids). Now I could at least start fsck on the partition. Well, obviously everything on that drive is garbage now. Fsck is running since 10 min now and currently iteration over /lost+found because of unattached inodes again and again. Yuck. I only hope for a few pictures that are on that partition to appear back again. I have no idea how the filesystem on hda1 could be so messed up from just one power outage. The good thing is that the CPU got so hot now that Weasel's heat fan switched to its second speed level, which never happened before - I didn't know little Weasel is capable of making so much noise! The higher voltage on the fan engine unblocked the fan with a little rattle. Some dirt (or a fly as Jaromil's laptop trapped recently) jammed my fan a while ago and I never got around to open the thing and have a look. So, now the fan works again and the file check is still running, "fixing" my lost+found. Now, where was my Debian net-install CD?

A little update on the bicycle protest in Bucharest: It took place last Sunday and about 200 people attended. I couldn't make it unfortunately, but have a look at these pictures (pictures 2, pictures 3) and this Indymedia article (Romanian only). The protest was about a new fantastic law that forbids bicycle travel on main roads in the capital. However, plans about the protest made their rounds in the local media and in the morning before the protest it was announced that the law is being withdrawn from the agenda. Good stuff, eh?

Great news: As of today my eco activist friends of EYFA (European Youth for Action) run their website on my server! It is a very special moment for me, because through EYFA my life got a quite different direction about three years ago. In 2002 I first attended their annual Ecotopia camp in Ireand. There I met active, idealistic and positive thinking people that have a good understanding of what is going wrong in our western-style lifes, and for the best of it that have real-world solutions, as well as the strong beliefs to put them in action or to campaign for them. They do not expect anything in return but to see the world becoming a little better. I was long looking for people like these "Ecotopians". When at the camp I saw that also I can give a contribution and spontanously decided to give a small workshop about Open Source software. Since then every year I attended Ecotopia and gave similar workshops, until this year Arthur stepped in and gave his own workshop about the same topic. In 2004 I started hosting the EYFA wiki and discussion forum and I helped with the winter meeting in Pula/Croatia. In the beginning of 2005 EYFA sponsored the development of my Informal software, which they use to simplify the registration progress for their meetings. So now things finally come together on my server. :)

The bicycle protest was cancelled because of bad weather. I have no news yet about when it will happen. -- What am I working on at the moment? A web form manager called Informal - wow, how exciting I hear you say. Well, I think it is going to be a very useful thing for many people. My friends at EYFA are using it since a while for their meetings and it saves them a lot of work. I just put up a first project page, so if you like have a look to see what it's all about: Informal. If you have some ideas or comments, please let me know.

There will be a bicycle protest in Bucharest tomorrow, 1st of November. Pretty much like a Critical Mass. As far as I know it's the first thing like this in Bucharest, if not even in Romania. People will gather at the National Theatre in the centre at 6pm, block some street for a few minutes, holding up some signs and then cycle off on the street to the Eroilor park. The aim is to raise awareness about the lack of support for bicyclists from Bucharest city planners (there is almost no support at all) and to show to car drivers that "We are people like you, with the same rights. You have a lot metall around you, make noise and pump fumes into the air - we prefer not to". More info (in Romanian) at the Incepem mailing list. I will go down to Bucharest if I can organise a bike and post here how it went.

Latest news: No, no bird flu in Mangalia yet, and with good food from Miruna's mum I'm happily tapping away on my laptop to catch up with many things that piled up over the summer: freelance and voluntary projects, server/hosting related things and many emails. I'm on a dial-up connection, so not surfing around or blogging a lot. Also I'm not moving around too much, so there's nothing to write about anyway. ;) But I'm off to Bucharest for a few days now: Minibus to Constanta, trolley bus number 5 to the end right on the road towards Bucharest, waiting for a little, lift to a metro station in Bucharest - business as usual, hehe. Now that I seem a bit like a local to my drivers they usually expect the common fee for a lift of about half the price of the cheapest train ticket from me. And I am happy to pay, because it's not the adventure that I'm travelling for, but mere transportation.

Well, on the 9th the server got hacked again. We did not have the time to check if it was a consequence of the first worm infection, because we had to chance but to take the server offline and re-install Debian straight away. Now with a lot of care of what we are putting back online we slowly get running again. Sorry for the website downtimes to all.

I'm a wreck. My server fell apart and Matthew and me are now collecting the pieces to glue them back together. We caught a worm, a worm caught us. A lot of hacking last night and this morning. Things look good, most services will be online during the day again. And finally we have some motivation to tighten security dramatically. ;) Funny, Bucharest's parks are full of furry caterpillars. They are no worms, but still..

I am in Mangalia on the Romanian Black Sea coast since a few days now. We are visiting Miruna's mum and enjoy a life without worries, but with nice traditional food, good literature and fabulous weather. About a month ago we travelled from Schwerin to Berlin, from there separately to Iasi in Romania, to Ecotopia in the Republic Moldavia, back to Romania for a week, just over the border to Bulgaria for a few days and then to Mangalia. I hope I will soon find the time to post a detailed account of this trip, a journey often like travelling in time, between so many cicles of friends, families, cultures, between west and east, high tech glass and steel cities and peaceful villages without roads.

Last night Miruna and me arrived to my home in Pinnow near Schwerin. From Dijon Carol and me got a lift to Germany by the Saxonian hackers "20H" and "Tiger". Carol got off at Metz. From Frankfurt to Hagen I went with a doctor of Afghanian origin, and the last 20 km to Wuppertal I got a free train ride on someone else's ticket. Miruna and me stayed a few days in a small town near Wuppertal and started our trip to Schwerin very early in the morning. The friend of Miruna's family that we were staying with gave us a lift to a petrol station towards Bremen. After two hours of white-bread people driving by us a friendly couple on their way with a trailer to north-east Germany brought us to Bremen. The two had travelled off the beaten path since decades and quite some stories to tell about Romania, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan in the 80s. In Bremen we spent the afternoon with Antje, an old friend of mine from my village that I didn't see in years. Back on the road we waited 5 minutes until a salesman for luxury watches picked us up. Quote: "You know, diamonds easily make a watch cost more than a million." He dropped us in Hamburg at the exit towards Berlin. There were two other hitchhikers, which did not look too lucky. After 20 minutes a nomadic tattoo artist and painter brought us to somewhere near Wismar, 20 km from Schwerin. At a crossing in the middle of nowhere a young guy cruising around the villages picked us up in his really big old car, and drove us to Schwerin very slowly (to save petrol). We had a beer at a pond in the centre where my mum and my stepfather picked us up and brought us to Pinnow. They had prepared the guest appartment very nicely for us and we were happy to arrive. Good weather, nice lifts, nice people.. :)

I uploaded my LTSP presentation to the brand new Files section. The presentation went great and will be repeated tomorrow. Photos and a report will follow.

I arrived to Dijon last night. Leaving from Brussels I got delayed by the rain a lot, so I had to stay in a field somewhere between Luxemburg and Metz. It started to rain heavily as I was starting to put up my tent. In the hurry I must have bent the longer tent pole too much, so it broke with a loud crack - no, noooooo! Why now, why here, arghhh. Rain soaked everything and completed my misery. I covered my bag with the tarp, searching for the pegs in the dark. Then I found this small piece of pipe in the peg bag, which I never knew what it was for. Heureka! It exactly fits over the pole and fixes broken poles. :) In the morning rain forced me to sleep late, ah, there could be worse things. I arrived to Dijon late in the afternoon, a small film crew on their way to Barcelona gave me a lift from Nancy. I walked the last kilometres to the local squat, home of the pRINT! hacklab, which will be homing the nocturnes, the night events of the RMLL free/libre software meeting next week. OK, enough links.. The first vegan food has been cooked, the first organisers' meeting attended, going to bed now. The squat is huge! A childhood dream has come true, I am staying in a medium-size empty factory, inhabited by friendly people, with many rooms and a warehouse as the living room, full of all sorts of creative junk that has been moved around, worked with, abandoned, just to be picked up by another person walking through. First class graffiti everywhere and space, space, space.

Just to remind you of this year's Ecotopia, 1st to 14th of August.. It is the annual European summer camp of eco activists, taking place in a different country every year. The setting of the camp is comparable with a rainbow gathering, much smaller though and with the difference that Ecotopians have some more down-to-earth solutions for "another world". This year's topic is "Alternative Technologies" and the camp will take place in Moldova in the Saharna nature reserve. Find more information about Ecotopia on the official website. If you want to get travel and visa costs reimbursed, you should register within the next days, so the folks in Amsterdam have enough time to deal with it (application form). So, see you there? Miruna and me will arrive there only within the second week unfortunately..

It's Miruna's birthday! You can now visit her at Miruna.net. :)

I am in Brussels since almost three weeks now. I know, that is not quite around the corner from Bucharest. I had a nice trip via Sighisoara, Budapest, Prague and Leipzig to attend a wedding of a friend near my hometown Schwerin. From there I went straight to Belgium into Miruna's arms and it looks like I will stay a little longer than expected. :) The city is buzzing, life is easy, we have a lightening fast Internet cable right into our room and I need to work on some little things. So, why move around? In the beginning of July I will go to the Free Software event RMLL2005/Nocturnes in Dijon to help with the set up a little. I might post a little report about my trip from Pula to here in a few days.

On the road again. At least for a few days until I reach Bucharest. For today the weather forecast is sunny, then some showers. Let's see how it goes.

Last night the US American anarchist philosopher and author John Zerzan gave a talk about Primitivism in the Monteparadiso Hacklab. The concept is pretty radical, actually it is difficult to be more radical. Primitivists advocate a return to non-civilized ways of life through deindustrialisation, abolition of division of labour or specialization, and abandonment of technology. There you go.. Apart from that it was interesting to share the room with a friend of the Unabomber for a night. :)

There were several wild parties around the building and some rain and sun on the weekend. I had some leisure to tinker a little and the outcome is my brand new location indicator device (to the right, not to miss). :) For the techie in you: To use it I just type a little text for the bubble and click a point on the map. The wonderful ImageMagick cuts the big map, draws the circle, texts, my face and other things on the small map and writes the image files. The image editing has been done in Gimp, which I start to like more and more.

A few days ago I arrived back to Pula/Croatia - once again. Miruna left back towards Belgium yesterday and I found some time to write down what happened the last month. In mid March I started travelling from Romania to Serbia, Croatia, through Slovenia to Italy and back to Croatia. Here is the full report of the trip, it's a long text, enjoy:

2005-03-15: I left Sighisoara/Romania in the afternoon. I walked out of town town towards Sibiu for 2 km or so. I didn't even had the time to finish drawing my sign when an older man, on his way to pick up his daughter from the bus in Sibiu, collected me. Like so many other Romanians his daughter works in Italy. He was quite a speedy driver, but the laser and radar detector carefully fitted into a stuffed toy on his rear mirror made him immune to police force. From the centre of Sibiu I walked quite a bit again towards the road to Deva. After a little while a young truck driver, he is studying Economics, took me a bit further towards Timisoara. Driving the old truck of his dad is his passion and pays for his studies. When I got off it was still about 200 km to Timisoara and the sun set down. No reason to worry, a few minutes later another older man driving a truck picked me up. He did not speak any English and he had a pretty sleezy way to comment on women that we passed. After a few hours we finally made it to Timisoara. He wouldn't let me go without paying some money for the lift. He wasn't such a nice guy, but at least I made it to my sleeping place that night. I walked to the centre to the INCA social centre / bar place. I was lucky that Aaron, the the American that started the place, just came back.

2005-03-16: Early next morning I bought some food and took a tram to the street towards the Serbian border. I realised that this was the wrong exit of town, so I went to the right one, it took me an hour or so to walk there. Well, that's what you get from refusing to use maps. :) I was standing next to the wide road leading trough an industrial estate for about 20 minutes when a friendly truck driver with a broken front window and no licence for the truck stopped and took me to the last town before the border. From there I walked on. People stopped and offered to take me to the border for ridiculous amounts of money. Then it happened, I was on a sunny, empty road between two villages. Let's put it this way: What would you think if suddenly an old Dacia with tinted back windows pulls over, two gangster-type gipsies with dark clothes, missing teeth, scars, tattoos and golden rings jump out, look around to see if there is anyone around and hastily walk towards you.. Yes, exactly, this is it, this what they always warn you of, say goodbye to all your belongings. How silly of me to walk around this unknown patch of land with a big bag filled with all wonders of western civilisation. Passport please, we are from the police - yeah right. Don't have one - What do you mean, don't have one, raising his voice. - We have to call the police now - Yes, please, please, the police!, I was thinking to myself. After 20 minutes of me trying to keep the conversation up so they at least wouldn't beat me up when their friends come, indeed a police van came by. O my god! One can not imagine how happy I was to see the friendly man in the uniform. I pulled out my passport, the gipsies - apparently some freelance spies - were pretty angry with me. I tried to explain to the officer, look at these people, would you give them your passport? I think he understood and everybody left. And there I was, the happiest man in the whole of Romania, joyfully carrying my bag to the next village. Dear Romanian police: What are you thinking, giving gangsters the right to harrass people on your behalf?? Anyway, there it was again, the feeling that the worst thing had already happened to me now and that nothing can scare me any more. The postman took me to the border, charged me a little money. I walked through the empty border area, passed the checkpoints. It seems like the officers have not seen such a happy chap in a long time. :) After a good while someone working near the border took me to the next town. There after a few minutes a young business man took me all the way to Belgrade. He used to be a professional show dancer touring the world, now he is market coordinator for Serbia and Montenegro for a big multinational corporation. Like everyone here he had some stories about the war to tell. Once he saw a big rocket flying by his office window near the Danube, the NATO rocket flew low along the river, pulled up into the air to drop down with all force on the biggest bridge over the Danube to destroy it. He let me out right in the centre. I walked to the art school of my friend Ljubica. I met her on the street, she showed me her studio. Her fellow painters gave me a warm welcome and after some drinks I went to sleep in one of her friends' place.

2005-03-17: I walked around Belgrade's lively, warm centre a bit. Only here I noticed how unfriendly Bucharest, my home for the past months, is towards its pedestrians. In Romania's capital there is not one single real pedestrian shopping zone, apart from the neglected Lipskan area - but also there cars park wildly wherever there is some room. Bucharest shopping and walking happens in "malls" and along the monstrous motorway-like main streets cutting right through the heart of the inner city. Dirt, noise and narrow footpaths stress you. But here I was, sitting on one of the many benches in the sun for a while, and Sone from Bosnia started talking to me. He was very helpful, showed me around the city a bit and we met his Bosnian flatmate for a drink. We met Branko that I know from the old Belgrade squat two years ago and had a little look at the new squat. I went with the Bosnians to their place to cook some dinner and other Bosnians joined for a beer. Late at night we went to the riverside, talking and drinking beer in the cold all night. In an intense interview-like one-to-one talk I learned how a war leaves its marks on the self-confidence of a whole generation - thank you, Borislava. I stayed one more night in the Bosnians' flat and I will surely visit them in their home town.

2005-03-19: In the morning I started my way to Zagreb by taking the bus out towards west to the motorway tax stations - always a good place to hitchhike from, because the traffic is slowing down and everybody passing is going your direction. Someone told me it's very close to the last bus stop. It turned out that it was a 5 km walk.. I got picked up while walking on the motorway by very talkative, loud and a little too hyperactive guy in a van of a cigarette distribution company. He dropped me at his exit on the motorway some 50 km later. I waited there about an hour until a Croatian United Nations diplomat working as an Economic consultant in the Kosovo stopped with squeeking tires. We talked about workers owned businesses now and the way it was in former Yugoslavia. He bought me some ice cream on the way and explained to me why the Kosovo war will be known as the first European war over water resources - he has some very interesting views. Also it was interesting to see how the colourful registration plate on his car made police men waves us right through their controls. A good bit into Croatia he dropped me near his home town. After a short while I got a lift by an army special force parachute jumper. He was on his way to visit his brother. I got interviewed about my impressions and the living conditions in Serbia and Croatia, Romania and Germany. Again standing on the motorway a Bosnian guy on his way to Zagreb airport to pick up his uncle stopped for me. He dropped me outside Zagreb near a huge western super-market. Everybody here comes by car and it is those type of people that would never collect a hitchhiker. The next bus stop was hidden in a residential estate nearby. I asked a young person walking by to give me some directions. The poor guy somehow felt obliged to help me, but he could not speak any English, so he called a friend of his to talk to me over the phone and gave me the fare for the bus. At the bus stop another young person talked to bus driver to drop me off in the right place and made sure someone is going to walk me to the right tram stop. How kind. Once I got to the centre I walked to the anarchist book fair that I came to Zagreb for. I met some familiar faces from Belgrade and Pula and went to a party in the Kiseljak squat afterwards. Someone had reserved a place to sleep for me there as the "hacker from Romania". Uh, how quickly you get new labels.

2005-03-20: In the morning I walked from the squat to the centre and found a wireless Internet hotspot on the way and surfed a little. In the afternoon I prepared a presentation about Free Software for the book fair. Together with Edgar from Monteparadiso in Pula, speaking about Hacklab movement, I gave a short introduction about Free Software and showed an interview by Candida TV with Richard Stallman, founder of GNU Free Software movement. About 100 people attended, this was my biggest audience so far. It felt quite uplifting and gave me motivation for future presentations. I met Barbara from Pula and Ecotopia at the talk. Barbara left and with three other "Ecotopians" I went to a student bar. I joined the party in the squat later and went to sleep quite early.

2005-03-21: I spent the morning around the squat, then walked to the Sava river. I asked a girl for directions and we spent an hour talking. In the evening there was a "welcoming the spring" music bonfire happening on the shores of the Sava river with a nice crowd of interesting Zagreb people and those that came for the book fair. I went to meet my friend Sara from Pula in the city centre. She works part time at a bar and when I went to pick her up I met Alain, a Frenchman that I talked to a different art events in Bucharest, and we had a good chat.

2005-03-22: In the morning I helped to clean the squat from the parties on the weekend a little and then - it was 4pm already - I made my way to the end of town to go to Pula. I walked two hours or so when I realised it was the wrong end once again - I really must enjoy this - walked back one hour and started hitch-hiking from a spot 10 minutes away from the squat as the sun went down - very clever. ;) A young man picked me up and dropped me half the way to Rijeka. At dusk a friendly truck driver picked me up. He drove at a normal speed most of the way until something got him and he removed a fuse from the electronics box infront of me and then suddenly speeded like crazy. He overtook whole caravans of buses and cars. But he was a good driver and had the situation under full control all the time. He was just having his fun with the empty truck. He dropped me a few kilometres before Rijeka, 150 more kilometres to Pula.. Miraculously at darkness, in an impossible bend, with me standing on the wrong side of the road an old man stopped after only 10 minutes and took me into Rijeka to the best exit towards Pula. I stood there for another 15 minutes when a smaller truck carrying 3 tons of toilet paper took me all the way to Pula. The young driver was funny and a clever guy with long hair and friendly round glasses, but he had these slips when he could not control his laughing any more and was beating the steering wheel. He told me about the strange websites he is visiting regularly and also he was joking about him being a mass murderer a bit too many times for my taste. I was very happy to arrive to Pula and to get out of his truck. I walked through the centre up to the Rojc barracks that have been my home for three months last year. As I came into the Hacklab, Mitsho took me by the hand, showed me my new room, gave me keys for the showers and the kitchen. A nice welcome.

2005-03-23: I had a look around the Rojc building, many things have changed to the good. During the last nine months it became a much nicer place and it is not so trashy any more. But it is still trashy enough to allow young people all sorts of freedoms.. I had a walk around town, went to the sea side, breathed Pula air, looked at the Mediterranean plants and surfed in the Monteparadiso Hacklab in Rojc.

2005-03-24: I am leaving Pula towards Venice at around 9am. I stood about 30 minutes at the roundabout near the bus station - a popular hitchhiking spot - when a young man picked me up and brought me about 30 km north. He had some hip hop attitude on him, Pula respect yo! In the summertime he is cleaning swimming pools at huge villas in the area. After he dropped me off he backwarded hundred metres to pick up two funny looking older women on their way to Rijeka with huge suitcases. I walked on a bit until a man delivering books stopped for me and brought me to Buje, the last town before the Slovenian border. In Buje I had no luck for a few hours so I decided to walk on to the border which is about 7 km away. There I stood another one or two hours, it really wasn't my best day, until a truck driver with very good English took me through Slovenia, into Italy and 40 km past Trieste to a motorway toll station. I heard hitchhiking in Italy does not work very well, so I was curious. After only 20 minutes of heavy traffic passing through the automatic gates another truck pulled over. The Moldavian driver of the Italian truck did not really speak English, but we communicated quite well with my bits of Romanian and Russian. He was a happy man, he fed me with yoghurt and gave me two big bottles of ice tea. After two hours he dropped me at the mainland part of Venice, it was about 7pm and getting dark. Once again I fell from a star right into a remote residential estate of a city, and people really can not understand what this guy with the enormous bag, not being able to understand their language, is doing at their back garden asking for the city centre. I found out what left and right means in Italian and made my way to the right bus stop and took off over a long bridge to the old Venice island. After some cris-cross walking through the confusing narrow roads and bridges I found the train station. Miruna should arrive here from Belgium soon. Because she went most of the way by car-sharing I didn't know when exactly she would come in. Sarah, an American girl that came over for her birthday and just "got dumped" by her German boyfriend, joined me and gave me some company for a few hours. I stayed with a group of students from Malaysia at the train station.

2005-03-25: In the morning I read in my e-mails (Internet cafes cost EUR 2.50 per 15 minutes here!!) that Miruna had to stay in Verona and will arrive around noon. We met and spent a wonderful day in Venice.

2005-03-26: In the late afternoon it started raining and we decided to take the train to Bologna. The train was very full so our tickets didn't even get checked. A bit lost we tried to find a place to stay and ended up in the B&B "Hope". What a rip-off! A flat in a apartment tower far outside the centre, expensive, improvised, and of course the breakfast is not included. Grr. We shared the dormitory with a prostitute from Romania. The poor young girl lives there with a few bags of stuff. She brought someone home after work late at night and he smoked some nasty stuff in the room.

2005-03-27: In the rain we walked through Bologna's centre and took the train to Florence. It was a nice journey and Miruna's friend Christina picked us up from the train station. We stayed at her place about 40 km from Florence. The next day we had a look around sunny Florence and went to a small medieval city near Christina's place in the evening.

2005-03-29: Christina gave us a lift to Sienna, a town towards Rome. From there we started hitchhiking. A young man stops, but as we get our bags, he just drives off. Hm? We agree that we have spotted another cultural difference here. An older man stops, in a weird style he drives us to some nice costal towns along the way, and invites us to stay at his place and go to Rome with him the next day. We go with him and I help him to drive his scooter from the local mechanic to his house. We can borrow the scooter to drive around the beautiful surroundings a bit. A hill with olive trees gives us a good view and we celebrate the end of the day. Back at his house we are having good wine and some food. At night our host drives us to hot springs in Saturnia 50 km away. It's actually not only a spring but a small hot river. Steam, noisy water, slippery grounds and the smell of the devil. We try to relax a little and after a while we drive back to his house. This is where he turned a bit funny and says he needs to drive us to a friend's house. We grab our bags and after half an hour driving on the road towards Rome he drops us at a service area with a small hotel. He said he will be back in an hour, of course he never returned. Let's say it's very difficult to decode those Italian people sometimes. ;) We were sitting on the terrace of the restaurant for some hours, trying to sleep, until someone waves us in and lets us sleep on a couch in a corner near the slot machines. After a while the last gamblers leave and we have a nice sleep. This is about the 10th time on this trip when I really regret that I left my tent in Bucharest. Ah, well..

2005-03-30: We got woken up by the monotonous sound of the cleaning ladies' noisy machines. After two hours of holding up our sign we get a lift by a yacht skipper who hitchhiked from Peru to the USA in the seventies. He drops us near his port at the toll stations. Two friendly police men guard us on our way off the motorway by driving behind us with their blinky lights going on. Now standing at the toll station leading onto the motorway a stylish young man working with gipsy minorities in Rome picks us up after an hour. He drops us at a metro line and finally we made it to Rome. We are trying to get in contact with Sarah, Miruna's friend from Belgium, in an Internet/phone place. A helpful man from the Phillipines tries to explain to the Arabic owner of the place in Italian that the Romanian girl and the German boy need to send an SMS to someone with a Belgium phone. In the end he gives us his bag with chocolate and a big Italian easter cake as a present. We meet Sarah, her sister and her uncle in the centre and go to their hostel where Miruna leaves her bag. I go and meet Kry from Candida TV (the circle is closing, eh?) who brings me to Forte Prenestino, the mega-squat in Rome. A friend of Kry who is very involved in the squat gives me a tour around the fortress and introduces me some people. I am having dinner in the squat's restaurant and go to bed in the guest's dormitory.

2005-03-31: Forte Prenestino is huge! A low fortress of green hills with something like 70 metres diameter, not including the big trench around the outer dyke. You actually cross a bridge to get into it. No crocodiles though. It has two big yards, long hallways, a huge basement under the whole structure, big stages, tents, a cinema, a two bars, two wireless Internet hotspots, a hacklab, a recording studio and many other things that I have not discovered yet. It exists 20 years and finances itself trough different types fundraising like concerts, the bar/restaurant or the cinema. I think about 10 people live here permanently in houses that have a door in the lower level, a windowless room in the middle level and something like an overgrown Hobbit hole at the top level. Only a few people have the key to the front door, so at times when the fortress is not open to the public small groups of people gather on both sides of the gate until someone with a key comes along. The squat is a quiet green island in busy Rome. I get a lift to the metro and meet the others in the centre.

2005-04-01: Miruna's friends left Rome and she joins me at Forte Prenestino. We find an uninhabited Hobbit hole and squat it for a few days. Cheap Italian food of divine quality and sightseeing fill our days. We left the Vatikan an hour before "Papa" died. Many pilgrams - some singing, some writing - but almost more journalists were waiting for the inevitable to happen.

2005-04-05: We are leaving Forte Prenestino in the morning and are starting our trip north to Pula. We take the bus to a bus stop at the north-south motorway. Many, many prostitutes are standing along the road in bright sunshine. Every now and then cars stop at them to check prices and quality. Probably that's why no one dared to stop for more than two hours. Slowly we are losing our patience, but suddenly a popular Italian Shakespeare actor picked us up and brought us all the way to Verona. As we arrive the sun had set and it is getting dark. We tried to get a lift at the toll stations for a while and then looked around for a place to stay in the nearby fields. A farmer kicked us off his land with harsh words of disregard. I tried to explain to him that his sign "Coop Sociale" might be a bit misleading, but as some Romanian words slipped out while I was trying to produce some Italian he finally lost his temper and we left. Behind some bushes next to a small road we built our little nest for the night and fell asleep.

2005-04-06: My sleeping bag was soaking from dew and we were a little stiff from the cold when we walked back to the Verona toll stations over a motorway bridge with high fences. After an hour a French speaking wine supplies person picked us up and brought us to Venice. We waited three hours at the motorway entrance towards Trieste. Many, many cars passed, no one stopped. A friendly man from the road construction team working next to us drove us to the next motorway service area in his lunch break and gave us some fruits. :) We freshened up at the bathrooms, had a little pick nick and started asking for lifts. The first people we asked were two Turkish truck drivers which took us straight away. Miruna went with one truck and me with the other. Turkish trucks are only allowed to go 80 km/h in Italy. After an impressive view over the city and the sea from the high bridges between the sourrounding hills and a drive on highways through the montrous industrial estate near the port with a huge open flame and big steamy, brown constructions of pipes and containers we arrived to Trieste's centre. It was warm and sunny. After only a few minutes at the entrance to the road south we arrived to Koper in Slovenia with a psychology student in a small car with a strong engine. From Koper we quickly got a lift with a young Croatian, driving his fish delivery van home after work. After he convinced the border police that we are trustworthy people he brought us over the border and down south to a place 30 km before Pula. The small road was not very busy at this time of the day. During the hour that we waited maybe 10 cars came by. An economics student stopped and brought us at light speed right to the steps of the Rojc building in Pula. And this is where we spent the last days together until yesterday afternoon.

The End.

After a nice trip to Venice, Florence and Rome with Miruna from Romania/Belgium I'm back in Pula/Croatia for a few days. Great journey, nice people, sun. Unfortunately I lost all my data through a hard disk crash during my travels. My last backup is three months old and safely stored in Bucharest. So I'm pretty f*cked here. All e-mails gone, my to-do list, the work on recent projects including 100 photos taken of tea bags. Argh.. :( If you sent me an e-mail before the 23rd of March 2005, please resend it. I think I like computers a little less now.

Last night I arrived to Zagreb. I found a free wireless Internet access point near the local branch of a big German phone company. Yippie! People walking by give me strange looks, and my battery is running out.. Update: The guards just waved me in and now I am sitting on comfotable couches in the lounge. :)

I just arrived to Sighisoara. In Bucharest I took the bus to a round-about near the airport, this is a popular hitchhiking spot towards Brasov in the north. A good crowd of old and young people was waiting for lifts already. I walked a bit further on. Drawing the sign took much longer than waiting for a lift. This time I was bold and wrote Sighisoara on the sign - usually I went to Brasov first (2.5h) and to Sighisoara from there (another 2h). A "slipper" stopped, a small Dacia pickup, it got the nickname after its form. The driver was a friendly man with long hair, but because he didn't speak a word of English or German our topics of conversation were limited to some number-related issues and geographical terms. ;) Here Anisoara welcomed we with a small dinner. I think I will have a comfortable week here before I go to Belgrade, Zagreb and Pula.

"Bohemia is a land over which hangs an endless fog, occasioned by much tobacco; a land of chambers, billiard-rooms, supper-rooms, oysters; a land of song ... of delicious reading of novels, magazines, and saunterings in many studios a land ... where most are poor, where almost all are young, and where, if a few oldsters do enter, it is because they have preserved ... their youthful spirits, and the delightful capacity to be idle." Welcome to Bohemia - an excellent resource about this much-quoted movement.

I just became member of the Hospitality Club! It's a network of currently 40.000 people all over the world, that are sharing accomodation amongst each other for free. I heard good things about it and this year I'm going to try it myself. Let's see how this institutionalised generosity works.. :) Apart from that all is fine here in Bucharest. I think I'm waiting for the sun to come out a bit more often to pack my bag again and move on.

For the 27th time: Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me! :) I can look back on a year of a lot travel, calm and love. And I'm looking forward to more years like this to come. Last year it was the Balkans and this year it might be Asia. Whereever the wind carries me.. I'd like to say thank you to my family, friends and strangers that helped me so much on my wicked ways. I couldn't have done without you. OK, OK, I'll stop now, Jeysus! :) -- Tonight there will be a screening of "The Corporation" in Bucharest's Underworld club. It will run from my laptop and together with the local Indymedia people I will lose some words on what IMCs do. Afterwards it's beer and punk music - Noroc!

Finally, I uploaded loads of photos from Romania to the gallery. Enjoy!

Generalissimo El Busho has declared War on Tsunamism - thank god!

The day before yesterday I arrived back to Bucharest. From Sighisoara I got a lift with my host Tino to Timisoara near the Hungarian and Serbian border. Thanks again, Tino! At 2am I got to the squat / bar / social centre "INCA" in Timisoara's centre. I opened the door and to loud drum and bass the last remaining guests were dancing on the benches. Wow, that's my kind of place I thought. Claudia from Portugal welcomed me and showed me around. I met her and her boyfriend with the van before a few times in Bucharest and Sibiu in Transsylvania. I put my mattress and my stuff behind the bar into the big, cosy, rustic living part of the place with a lot of improvised contructions, a big painting, black-and-white punk and activist posters and a small kitchen corner. There was another five Portuguese people, an American, two Romanians and a dog as well. The jolly crowd was partying late.. The next night there was a hard-core metal concert in the concert room, which was packed with many, many young people. It's kind of handy to have all this in one place and just step out of your sleeping room into a concert. ^_^ The night after was cinema night and because there was no movie scheduled I could put on 90 minutes of short movies, trailers, documentaries and music videos about alter-globalist activism that I had collected on my laptop. Brought to you by truely free software of course (Xine on Debian Linux)..

The morning after I got up very early, ugh, walked to the popular hitchhiking spot towards east. I knew I have 9 hours of driving alone infront of me, plus waiting for lifts. It was a few degrees below zero, thank god someone gave me a warm jacket the day before. It was like a bus stop, in fact it was a bus stop, people arrived, stood for a few minutes and got picked up. The people hitchhiking were students going home for the weekend, commuting or just coming from the open market. They saw my sign, looked at me again and wished me good luck. After an hour a man going to Craiova, that's half the way, stopped, took another person with him and went on towards the rising sun. We didn't talk much, every now and then he pointed out something along the road. My bits of Romanian were sufficient. I used the tram to get through Craiova to another busy, busy hitchhiking spot towards Bucharest. After half an hour a smaller truck stopped, the driver pointed at my sign and waved at me, sending away the other people that were quickly rushing towards the lorry. It was dark when we arrived and I had quite some problems orientating and finding a way from the big shopping centre outside Bucharest that I was dropped at to the centre. Monstrous Bucharest grunted and farted, infested by thousands of cars and ugly concrete structures. Big roads, bridges, trucks, darkness, city dirt, Romanian-style big unmarked gaps and holes in the paths - not a pedestrian-friendly place at all.

Yesterday Lavinia, a good friend that is quite familiar with the local electronic music scene, took me to a seven hour DJ/VJ performance with many local artists and some from abroad. The event took place in another old villa transformed into a mix of art exhibition and small concert venue. An interested changing crowd was sitting or standing on the floor infront of the stage and screen. About fifteen different DJ/VJ sets gave a good overview about what's going on in Romania's avant-garde clubs at the moment: IDM, Experimental, Breakbeat, Ambient, "Illbient", Noise, Gabba, Glitch, Punkability, "Extended Drones", 8bit Music.. My clear favourite was heavy-weight Gojura with Kosak who were playing their IDM/Illbient, a Breakbeat/Drum and Bass like mix with heart-stopping gaps, loops, delays and jumps and dirty, endlessly distorted beats and samples, spiced with pure electronic noise and things that sounded much like broken mp3 files. Hard to describe, but it was very uplifting and dancable. Listen to SomaFM's cliqhop and you'll get an idea. In the afternoon there was some talks and presentations. One remarkable thing was the Vegetable Orchestra of the Transacoutic Research Institute in Vienna. The song that was played from CD was an example of their dance music entirely made with the sounds of vegetables. After their concerts they chop up their instuments and cook a soup for the audience. Vegan music! ("Music not bombs"?) - Bon appetit!

Three days ago I went to the sweet little town Sighisoara in Transsylvania again. Hitchhiking from Bucharest with my flatmate Sasha was pretty easy. First we went by bus to the airport which is a bit outside directly at the road towards Brashov. Sasha put all her creative skills into drawing a wonderful sign for Brashov. We didn't even have to put out the sign when a delivery van carrying soya products already had stopped. The driver spoke very good English and told us about his plans to cross Russia and the Bering Sea to Alaska with a motorbike next year. We drove through wonderful mountains, he made some deliveries on the way and dropped us on the other side of Brashov directly at the road to Sighisoara at a petrol station. A new sign, snow falls, 20 minutes later we were driving on with an older truck driver in a small lorry. The snow on the street made it quite difficult to drive the truck through the mountains. With blaring traditional Manele music, the cozy growl of the engine and hair-drier like heating we crawled through wintery landscapes into the dark. We were dropped right in the centre of Sighisoara and walked to Tino's house. Tino is one of the many Germans in Transsylvania building up their existence based on the traditionally good relationships of the area with Germany and the admiration of everything German. He was showing us our room in his newly build small guesthouse and the computers that I should take care of during the next days. Tino took Sasha and me to the sourrounding villages on his way to different constuction sites that he is involved in. So here I am enjoying my little break from life in Bucharest, tinkering on computers, having traditional food and going for walks.. ^_^

Ha ha ha, ich lach mich schlapp! I couldn't stop laughing at the absurdity of the course of last night. First I went to Jean's farewell party, he is going to hitchhike to India. Then Raluca, a friend that I was helping out as a lay actor in her short film the last two weekends, took me to a private party of Wesley Snipes, who happens to shoot a movie in Romania at the moment. The huge rented villa was a wonderful classic building fitted out with finest funiture and a lot of antique kitsch. Some stuff was pushed aside to make room for various folded up body building equipment. A sweet smell of vanilla insense was in the air. The rest of the scene was like taken out of some American hiphop music video. A lot of wanna-be mixed with a little sincerity. At least all of the equipment, drinks and music was top shelf. There was a big table filled with classy wines, spirits, juices and a lot of Red Bull cans. The man himself - I was mixing up the huge bodyguard at the entrace with him in the beginning - was DJing most of the night. He has quite some skill and really seemed to enjoy himself. Still he was very distant to what was happening around him, to the people that all knew him, but that he didn't know and maybe not wanted to know. Someone else took over the turntables and after a while Elvis had left the building. We stayed until around 5 and then took a taxi home. Ha, first we were celebrating someone that went off to live in poverty and a little later we found ourselves amongst this celebration of luxury and fame. (Thanks for pointing that out, Raluca)

I found a place, a place found me! Later today I will move into my first own room since I got to Bucharest nearly two months ago. The first few days I was living in an empty house a bit outside, then I was staying in a small exhibition space at night when there were no visitors, during this time I also spent some days in Monika's Erasmus student flat, the last week with the lovely French couple Maylis and Raymond, and now I'm moving in with Sasha, an American girl living in Romania for an undetermined time. All is good and I have a lot of time to read and to work a little, and to cruise around the city's nightlife with Avant Garde clubs in old villas, pubs, private parties, dinners, cheap cinemas and theatres. It was a bright day today, the cold wind and the sun had a nice play with each other. I got an old German book with Japanese poetry in a small, dark bookshop. There are friendly dogs everywhere. When you are walking by they peer at you with mistrust and have a cautious eye on your every movement. They watch entrances of appartment towers, accompany soldiers and security guards on duty and even around the heavily guarded American embassy they are tolerated and rest curled up on foilage piles.

After looking around for a while I found an Internet cafe in Bucharest that allows me to hook up my laptop. It seems to be the only one in town and to my surprise laptop access is free of charge! Happy days! It's called EarthNet, find it in the basement of Bd. Nicolae Balcescu Nr.24.

Things get more and more exciting here: Last night we had an earthquake! People say it was more than 6 on the scale. Pretty scary when you are on the 9th floor of a tower block, built up in big hurry in the seventies. I was in a jolly round with a group of french people, Monika, Oana and Gabriela. First we didn't realise what was going on, because someone was dancing and we thought that made things swing. I like the way everybody sits in the same boat in this kind of moments. It's everywhere, you can't escape it, everybody feels the power of our Great Mother, there is no other worry for a few minutes, no matter how poor or how rich you are. -- A few hours later we had a lunar eclipse with the appendant full moon. Some people on the street said the it's related to each other.

Still cruising around Bucuresti! I helped some friends with an exhibition about the domestic life in communist Romania and I spend a lot of time with them. A website should be up soon as well. Swedish Monika that I met in Sibiu and the other Erasmus people in her flat are very hospitable, so I am staying here every now and then. Also I went to different cultural happenings, there is always a way to sneak in for free.. Days go by and something is holding me here. Maybe it's the wonderful people, maybe the simple life? Anyway, I'm not planning to leave during the next days..

Sebastian and Matthias from the fortified church in Apold took me with them to Bucarest. A pretty big city.. Romania's former dictator put huge, huge parks, roads and buildings everywhere. The people's palast is supposed to be the third largest building in the world. Yesterday evening after accompanying Sebastian at a cultural heritage management seminar organised by the British Council I ended up going to a reception at the residence of some very important person in the british embassy. The three of us felt a little displaced between all the suits and there were people with machine guns guarding the place. I might go to the mountains tomorrow with some Antropology students that I met through Sebastian yesterday in the pub. All good, it's nice and sunny.

Imagine: We are staying in an old fortified castle in the middle of a small village in the hills and forrests near Sighisoara at the moment. And tomorrow it's full moon. Spooky, eh? We are hanging up the garlic around the doors. You never know.. =)

We are in Sibiu in Transsylvania now. Stanciova, the village we were in before, was actually in the Banat area. We went to hot springs in Baile Herculane on the way to Sibui and are heading off to more hot springs a few kilometres up, because it's getting a bit cold here. I still need to post my big travel report here, stay tuned..

I savely arrived in the very rural village Stanciova in Transsilvania, Romania after a quite interesting trip through Slovakia and Hungary. I went with Lilly, Anka, Emma and Jim - some people that I met at Permalot. It's phantastic, all details later..

Hello from the wonderful organic apple farm Permalot in the Czech Republic! Will have some more to say in a couple of days. It was a great seminar so far..

Berlin-Friedrichshain seems a like nice place for a little work break. I'm settling in here for a week. Thank you, wonderful 7! The last two days of Read_Me in Arhus were pretty exciting: Apart from a lot of visual and conceptional stuff there was an Oriental Slackers Salon serving tea and various sweets done by Lisa and Patrice, a live gig with a reprogrammed dot matrix printer functioning as a synthesizer playing along various intruments made out of old hardware by Lauren and Paul, a radio station playing randomly created music, a movie mincer, a concert with automated window blinds, another one with Lego Mindstorms robots and VJ sets on self-made software. The first time I saw thrilling live-coding music sessions, meaning people writing and modifying several little programs that generate melodies, hammering beats and flashy visuals while the music is playing. You can watch them coding on a projector. Mostly two or more programmers' screens are overlayed, so that looks pretty funky already. Here is a very good article by one of the live coders on Perl Music. -- Also I talked to Trevor, a rather interesting intellectual with his very own, brusk attitude.

On Saturday Yew-Sun from China/Australia/UK and me started to go back to Germany pretty late in the afternoon. After only a few minutes standing on a road going out of the centre we were picked up by a very friendly and relaxed young doctor that used to hitchhike a lot as well. He brought us to Kolding. Getting out of Kolding was harder than we thought. At the spot that we walked to people were only going to the west coast but not down to Germany. So we walked back into town. Yew-Sun did not enjoy living on the roads as much as me, so she decided to check into a hostel and take the train the next morning. I said goodbye, had a look at a citymap and walked out of the centre towards the motorway. It was getting dark and I found a nice meadow to tent. I thought of the big East Germany party near my hometown that I would miss that night, watched the moon and went to bed.

The next morning I picked some apples from a tree on the way and walked towards the motorway. The bridge over the motorway that I saw on the map the night before turned out to be a small road going through a valley under a huge bridge. No chance of getting up there. So there I was wandering the forests of Kolding, walking through rivers, cow meadows and up hills, looking up at the trees, thinking about how I could get rid of the heavy laptop in my bag through virtual desktop computing. ;) There seemed to be a lot of horse riding in this forrest, so the paths were pretty good to walk. Finally I could see some signs of the busy service area I was aiming for. Of course the folks in their safe cars, feeling generally unsafe in this unknown, unfriendly, loud environment they have just been dropped in, gave me strange looks when I came out of the bushes with muddy feet, my walking stick and a happy face. I asked two or three drivers for lifts until shortly after an IT technician from southern Germany gave me a lift to Hamburg. He was on his way back from a fishing holiday with his friends in Denmark, and he was telling a lot of stories from his time at the German army. Shooting wooden huts to flames with big machine guns and giving out to younger soldiers obviously is good fun, I must try that some time. It was very sunny when I crossed Hamburg from west to east by public transport and on foot. I stood at the infamous Hamburg hitchhiking spot "Horner Kreisel" for only 20 minutes when a shiny Mercedes with wide tires stopped. Very, very fast we drove to Berlin. There was a big traffic jam some kilometres before Berlin, but the clever navigational system with its soft, yet a little dull and robotic woman's voice safely directed us around it. As we talked, the driver - a young IT business man - showed interest in my technical skills and as it looks I might do a small job for him soon. Hitchhiking is like a box of chocolates!

cam.benn.org is online again. I was looking around for a good Linux webcam software for a while and for the people interested, now I use camE and I'm very hapy with it. :) It gives you tons of options and runs reliable in the background. -- The event started off nicely with the presentation of many different computer art projects. processing.org I found was one of the interesting (check out moovl from the exhibition). Many projects use automated Google queries as their data source and display the output in colorful ways - hmm. I suppose it's the comfort of not having to write your own spider that makes people accept that Google filters out resp. censors many pages. Ui, tech talk! Well, good night then.. Oh, talking about Google, someone just told me he is going to start working in their research centre in Switzerland. He is one of the people with a Google query art project here. There you go..

I haven't been blogging a lot lately, you are right.. But now I'm back in the very networked world. I left Ecotopia a couple of days ago and hitched to Kolding in Denmark where my mum finally got married to her long-time boyfriend Heino. Claudia from Berlin, a fellow Ecotopian came with me until Hanover. (Hello Claudia, I had a really, really funny time with you!) The wedding in Kolding was small and cozy, and I had lots of food. I stayed two more days with Heino and my mum at a holiday house a bit outside. Today they gave me a lift to Arhus. Now I'm here at the Read Me 2004 city camp on arts and software. I didn't know where it takes place, but a friendly person near the university invited me to her house to find out the location on the Internet. I met Patrice and Salsaman from the Transhackmeeting in Pula in June. The camp starts tomorrow morning and is timed by a computer, the red button has been pressed, no human intervention is possible anymore at this point! ;) Some people have already arrived and there are strange images flickering over their laptop screens and every now and then you can hear squeaky noises and distorted sounds coming from around the small, historical building. I need to cut some network cables now for the poor souls without a wireless card.. ;)

A short hello from Ecotopia! There are people from over 40 countries around the camp site and I met many friends from the years before. It was sunny the first days this week but today it's raining all day.. I'm writing this from the nice and cute castle Loewenstein, a couple of metres from the camp. Just printed some pages for my workshop about Free Software. Have to go now, so that's it for today.. :)

The Eustory summer academy is over. It was a great experience and I had a very good time with all the youngsters and the other "teamers". My group did a good job and the presentation of our Eustory website was a great laugh for everyone. Well done, Sindre, Dana, Juraj, Ruth, Janis, Valeriya and Tomek! I really hope to see you some time again!

Next I am going to Ecotopia in Holland and to Read Me 2004 in Denmark. It's nice weather to start travelling again, so I better go.. =)

I finally switched over from Suse Linux to Debian Linux. The result is that my laptop runs a lot faster and more stabile and also some things work now that didn't before. So for example my little PenCam that I use for snapshots on my travels also is a webcam now. Check cam.benn.org to see me and the "website group" working at the EUstory seminar in the Wannsee Forum Berlin.

I'm Berlin since a couple of days now. Together with my friend Lan I work at a summer seminar a bit outside at the Wannsee Forum. It keeps me busy most of the day. My group is a little quiet, but I'm sure they will defrost soon. Tomorrow we are going on an excursion to the city centre. We will meet and interview a person and include the results in the website that we are building during the week.

Belgrade once again! I arrived here last night on my way back to Berlin, coming from the Rainbow Gathering in the very south of Bulgaria. I'm staying two days at the People's Global Action (PGA) conference. Here is a short summary of my journey:

2004-07-16
The party the night before was quite interesting. The independent party scene in Albania is just building up, so I talked to the first Drum and Bass DJ in the country and other music pioneers. On my last day in Tirana I visited the mosque at the main square. Small and pretty. I found a piece of wrapped chocolate on the nice carpets upstairs, holy chocolate - yum. I walked to the farmers market to get some food for the bus journey. Albanians say "jo" and nod if they mean "no". "Yes" is shaking your head in a strange way and saying "po". So buying some cheese becomes a funny adventure and needs as much concentration as a drinking game. In the remote corners of the market local fruits and vegetables are really cheap and you can get some free stuff that is rotten a bit. I went back to the National Gallery to pick up my stuff and say goodbye to some people. My bus left just before sunset and the way out of the city along slow and ruinous highways was tinted in warm colors. The empty bus went to the coastal town of Duerres first where it got filled with people. After some good roads the bus went on a busy small rocky path through the mountains. One time I woke up from my head banging against the window again and I could see some roadworks in the dark some 20 metres below me just next to the bus. Of course there was no barriers at all..

2004-07-17
I arrived to Tetovo in Macedonia near the border to Kosovo just after sunrise. The patrolling tanks with big machine guns on the empty roads added to the strange feeling about this unknown country. Ah, militant rebels have better things to do at this time of the morning.. I walked to the exit of town where after a few minutes a Macedonian man in a car from Berlin stopped and took me to Skopje. He was on his way back to Berlin where he owns a small pizza place. I walked a couple of kilometres into the centre of Skopje to the bus station. The ticket offices were on strike so it was quite hard to find out about the different busses going to Bulgaria. There was only busses in the afternoon. A Red Cross doctor from the south of Macedonia helped me to find a shared car to her hometown. People that go long distances with their car always go to the bus station first to collect people going the same direction. Usually you pay a price similar to the bus fare. After two hours through wine and tabacco fields I arrived to Strumica in the south-east of Macedonia. For a little more money the driver took me to the border. Another friendly passenger accompanied me on my way over the border and gave me some advice. I was about to leave all the advertising taxi drivers behind and hitch to the next town when I met two Japanese students speaking fluent Bulgarian. I took a photo of them doing strange poses indication "south-west Bulgaria". They plan to visit all 4 corners of the country.. They had rented a taxi and we visited a small castle nearby and went on to Petric. They took a bus to their hostel and I got a lift by a truck driver and two women with their little daughters to Melnik some kilometres east. A man that reminded me of my father a bit took me to a small road that I walked along quite a while. It got a bit hilly but I passed through beautifully old and quiet villages and fields with fruit trees (yummy) and wine, and I had calming views over the Toscana like countryside. "Das muss ein schlechter Mueller sein, dem niemals fiel das Wandern ein, das Waahaandern!" After an hour the first car passed by and the two old men coming from their work in the fields brought me to the next village. Friendly villagers pointed me in the right direction and gave me vegetables and water. A bus stopped and took me a few kilometres further. At a stop patrolling border police checked my passport. I watched the life at the central square of the village that I arrived to. I tried to hitch on, but decided after a while to end the day, have a nice, cold beer in the bar across the road and find somewhere to sleep. But someone that stopped at the restaurant took me 2 hours further through the high uninhabited mountains to Goce Delchev on the other side. The driver did a delivery at a petrol station and brought me to the end of town. I put up my tent in a field near the road. That was a very long day.

2004-07-18
I woke up by goats and cows being herded around and something big sniffing at my tent. A big old dump truck driver with his little son stopped right away and took me a few kilometres further. I watched the heavy horse and carts traffic in the village for a while and the lazybones of the village talked to me a bit. A man with his small son took me an hour further trough the mountains and picked up two more hitchhikers coming from the Rainbow. We got off in Dospat and crossed a big dam. They bought me a bottle of water and went home to Plovdiv and I went on towards the Rainbow, now only a few kilometres away! A man in his old Lada looking like some kind of farmer's association official took me a village further. Here once again many Bulgarians in shiny western cars drove by without even noticing me. With only a few acceptions it's always the simple country side people who stop. A big truck carrying many of the local "Devin" water bottles, mastering every bend of the narrow road with ease, took me the last kilometres to the small road that leads to Jagodina and on the Rainbow camp. In a small tunnel a taxi with other Rainbow people stopped and took me to the car park of the gathering. On the way we collected Roland from the Worldwide Peace Petition. There were about 30 cars and vans from Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Switzerland and Bulgaria. We walked 20 up the hills to the Welcome Home. We had our fist small "food circle", rested a bit and walked up the hill another 30 minutes until we reached the main meadow, an area covering nearly a square kilometre with forrest, grass meadows, hills, a spring and a few small houses. There are many temporary structures like the huge central fire place, the big kitchen tent, tipis, flags and signs. And then there are numerous individual tents, tarp constructions and hammocks all around the forrests. We put up our tents on a hill overviewing the valley with the main fire and the kitchen. I had a wander around and met the first people. I helped in the kitchen and ate at the big food circle with all people sitting in a huge circle around the main fire. At that time there were around 300 people present. A sat at the fire a bit and went to bed early.

2004-07-19 to 2004-07-21
I dove into the world of the Rainbow family. Find more about what Rainbow gatherings are like at this Rainbow Family Homepage. I attended a workshop on edible plants in the area, went for a cold bath in the river, helped cooking, serving at the food circle, building a roof for the bread oven, cleaning up and rebuilding the fire place after the night, and had many inspiring talks and met good people. I'd like to mention here and say hello to Pinnih from somewhere in between Zimbabwe/SouthAfrica/UK, Maik and his girlfriend (sorry, forgot the name) from UK and Bulgaria, Hagai from Israel, Roland, Sascha and his girlfriend from Switzerland. It was a short stay at the 4 week camp but I'll definitively visit more Rainbows in future.

2004-07-22
The people going with Gael's van towards Belgrade gathered at the main fire early in the morning. A couple of hours later we had packed everything in the van and the seven of us took off towards Sofia. After a nice journey with many stops through the summery Bulgaria we arrived to Sofia and four people got off and Gael from France, Leo from Croatia and me went on to Serbia. After sunset we arrived at the border where all border staff obviously had a very good time examining us and the van packed full of all sorts of stuff from all around Europe very closely. Gael played some of the instruments in his car for the Bulgarian customs people in the garage. "Marijuana? Marijuana? - No, we don't have any in the car, really!" and so on. Everybody thought we were a crazy, a little suspicious looking bunch, but let us pass after a while with shaking heads and a smile. After an hour we were back on the road looking for somewhere to sleep. We went down a small path just off the main road, tried to turn, but backed off into a ditch and could not move the van anymore. We'll deal with that tomorrow we thought and went to sleep in a small apple garden with a lot of moskitos behind the ditch.

2004-07-23
A neighbour who heard what was going on the night before called someone else from the village with a tractor and after a little while we could go on. It was really hot but I had the back of the van for myself and could open the windows, lie down, sleep and read. The motorways were blocked through a miner's protest, so all the holiday and cargo traffic coming from western Europe (every second car was German) was redirected through little towns and villages. A pretty ugly and smelly picture. After many, many hours we arrived to Belgrade and the PGA conference area around a primary school that is empty for holidays. I met some people from the TransHackMeeting in Pula, put up my tent and had dinner. I'm really just travelling through, so unfortunately I don't have too much time to get really involved. I hitchhiked to the city centre to meet some of my friends from Belgrade. I tried to meet Ljubica and some friends of her, but unfortunately the arranged meeting point has been closed the week before and all signs had been removed. Until I found out about all this it was pretty late and so I'll try to meet them again today. On my quest for the place that disappeared infront of everybody's eyes I met Sanya. She just finished working at a kiosk and brought me to the closed down place and then we went on to the city centre. She showed me my bus station and we chatted a bit about her life in Belgrade. People are really helpful here.

Today I spent most of my time typing this here and now I'll have a look around the conference and go to the centre again. Phew, it's so hot. It feels good to be back here..

Albania is wild, man, wild! I'm in Tirana the second day now. At the moment I'm in a TV/media building in the city centre. I will go on later today to Skopje/Macedonia and south Bulgaria. Here is how I got here from Pula:

I got a lift of my friends Virna and Tatjana from Pula to Rijeka. At the last minute I jumped on the ferry to Dubrovnik where I met with Barbara from Pula who got the tickets for me. It was evening and we found a nice spot for our bags and matrasses on the outside deck where hundreds of people had already prepared their camp for the night.

Arriving in Dubrovnik the next afternoon we saw the opening of the 55th annual theatre festival. The mayor handed over the key of the city for one month to the artists in a big ceremony with fireworks and all. I slept in a crack in the rocks at the beach. The nearby huge abondoned hotel was too scary and I didn't dare to put myself there.

The next day Barbara and me spend all day on the island Lokrum near the city, sunbathing, reading and swimming. Barbara dived for some things on the ground and I saw a sea cucumber for the first time. What an ugly thing, yuk! At night I met some fire juggler's from Rijeka in the streets and I stayed with them in the storage room of a club in a former hospital.

I started hitchhiking to Montenegro the next morning. Village by village people took me closer to the border 30 km away. A kinda funny Hungarian couple in a pickup took me over the border and 100 km to Kotor. From there I to the bus to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. I walked around the city centre looking for a place to stay. Their main roads in the centre are car-free every evening from 5pm! I started raining a bit and I ended up in the students resident house where a warden, after some haggling, let me stay on the couch in the lobby. He took my passport as a refund..

The next morning around 6am I walked out of the city towards the Albanian border. There are no busses, trains or even signs to the border, hmm.. For a small fee someone in an old Lada took me and the guy standing next to me to the next town. This is the common way of public transport here. Just stand at the road, looking at the drivers passing and someone will stop and ask you where you want to go. In a bakery someone paid for me because I did not have the small change for the stuff I bought. Everybody pays in Euros here btw. An Albanian driver trading some goods took me over the border for a little money again. At the border I met a young couple from Berlin in a shiny yellow car. They were on their way to Greece and took me all the way near Tirana. We were passing through chaotic towns with all sorts of funky stuff happening beside the very bad roads. There were car wrecks every 50 metres, burned out and picked to pieces, some with many bullet holes.. On the road pigs, goats and cows were doing their animal thing, standing around, grasing, looking. The further south we got the better the roads and everything around got. It is said that governmental forces have not yet regained full control of things in the north after the riots in the nineties. Starting early this day paid out and so I arrived to Tirana at noon in a local minibus. I called Claude, a friend of a Danish guy that I met in Pula, and stayed with his family and met his friends. Claude's father is a well known Albanian painter. He showed me some of his work in the studio ontop of their flat and I fixed a small thing on his computer.

The next day I met many different people at the National Art Gallery, where Claude's friends meet. Also Martin and two other people from Denmark arrived. They are on their way to south Bulgaria as well, unfortunately the car is more than full. I helped Elisabeth from Berlin to prepare her radio show today on Oxygen FM, a local free, low/budget music station. I will also talk in the show about the Transhackmeeting in Pula. I will go to pick up my bag now, come back to the radio station, go to an opening at the gallery and then take the bus. I think I'll be offline for two weeks or so - read you then! =)

[Update:] I just decided to stay another day in Tirana to see the opening and be at the big party afterwards tonight. :) My radio interview went well. It talked about the Transhackmeeting, my travel route, sustainable development and free software. Let's go party!

Hah, three days ago Alex, a close friend and travel partner of mine from my hometown arrived! It was quite a surprise as I totally forgot that he was planning to visit me. There he was knocking on my door in the morning. Funny. We had a lot of fun exploring beaches and the night life of Rojc and Pula. Now he is gone back to Germany and he forgot his fancy hiking shoes. Ah, well. Last night's concert at the Ethno Jazz festival in a village some kilometres away from Pula and the after party with pool and many DINKs (Double Income No Kids ;) were a nice experience. Alex, me and another guy from Pula started the interesting part of the party by jumping into the pool naked and with a lot of noise. People were filming and taking pictures - haha! Today I'm off to Rijeka, where I will take the boat all along the coast to Dubrovnik in the very south of Croatia. From there I might go over Albania and Macedonia to Bulgaria. Ahhh, really excited already!

There is the 10th "Puf" theatre festival on at the moment. Many of the events take place in and around Rojc, so in my courtyard. It started off three days ago with a performance in the huge empty part of the building. Around 20 large rooms have been cleared out and transformed into sets of various acting scenes. Each show was 5 minutes long and has been repeated 9 times. The audience was scattered all over the building and had exactly one minute time to walk from show to show. So during the breaks, starting and ending with loud ringing tones, there was hectic rush on the corridors. Shows ranged from audience participation over classical acting to singing and dance performances. Each room had its own atmosphere through music, light and set. Very inspiring.. The next day I went to a show of The Forgotten Fish Memory Orchestra in the Monteparadiso Austro-Hungarian fortress a few minutes from Rojc. Again it was several short shows with a small audience. The set was done with a lot of love to details, the costumes and music were flawless. The Forgotten Fish people live in Rojc and I met them some times before. It was funny to see them all dressed up and really living their performance. The best thing about the theatre festival is that all shows are free of charge! Last night I went to a neo-hippie type jugglers in vans wedding with lots of bongos, fire acrobatic, food, drink and smoking at another old Austro-Hungarian fortress. I met many familiar faces and ended up sleeping wrapped in a big kitchen cloth ontop of one of the watch hills..

The hackmeeting is over. Have a look at the THK photos to get a little impression what it was like. I definitively had a lot of fun! To my surprise the crowd was not too techie, actually many people spent most of the day at the beaches. =) Many media activists and artists were around, still Linux was by far the most popular operating system used. A lot of people moved around with their laptops enjoying the wireless freedom in the shade outside or somewhere around the building. A pitty that my battery is broken. The self-organisation of the meeting went pretty well, but still I ran around a lot to see if there is anything on fire. My workshop about "sustainable computing" was quite a success I thought. Fifteen people showed up and in the end there was a good discussion going about how to use your machines in a sustainable manner. I'll post the minutes soon. Uh, another one of those promises.. ;)

Two days ago Barbara brought me to a cave near Pula's Stoja. It was absolutely amazing! We went in.. You can only reach it from the sea. So you swim into the rocks along a small corridor for 30 metres or so. It's getting darker and darker around you until you can't see anything anymore. It's so scary, but you are too curious to return. Waves are moving you up and down. After a while you can hear a little shore further inside the cave. Now even when you look back you can't see anything anymore. THAT is scary! It's only you and your fears in the cave now. Guess who needs to leave? Finally you get to the little beach and you have reached the end of the cave. It's getting cold, after some minutes your eyes get accustomed to the dark and you see the shapes of the dome surrounding you. You move your hand through the water and the algae glow! I won't forget this so soon..

The meeting has started, some kind of a routine has come to the daily chaos with meals, tasks, meetings and people arriving. I went for a swim this morning and when I arrived back to the Rojc barracks there were already people sitting with laptops everywhere around the building. So far around 100 hacktivists have arrived. I'm pretty involved in the organisation of the meeting, so that's why I'm not writing many e-mails at the moment. Next week I will have time to catch up.

More and more people arrive for the TransHackMeeting. We are having meetings, are cooking, planning stuff. Everybody is very motivated to create a functioning meeting and auto-organisation works great!

Two days ago we arrived to Pula. We were a little exhausted and so it was good to stay in one place for more than a day. Seppel is going to stay here one more week for the TransHackMeeting, I'll probably be here some more weeks. Here is the report of our hitchhiking tour through Cratia and Bosnia - again a lotta text. Do people really want to read all this? I'll try to keep it short (haha), but there was just too many things happening:

From Pula to Rijeka (2004-06-11): Our last odyssey in mind we had mixed feelings about this route. We started quite late in the afternoon, but everything went well. From the roundabout in the centre of Pula we were taken by a young man in his tuned BMW to a crossing 15 km outside. Like many pupils here he used to hitchhike to school a lot. After a little while a construction engineer took us to a motorway crossing near an emergency lay-by. From there a professional basketball player living in Berlin and running a little tourism business in a town nearby took us all the way to a service area just outside Rijeka. We stood there for a while and walked on along the motorway a bit until a young breathtaking woman just finishing her psychology studies picked us up at a drive-up and took us some kilometres around Rijeka. Spellbound we got off the car, walked a bit on and because it got dark we looked for a little green near the motorway, put up our tent, had dinner and went to sleep.

From Rijeka to Bihac/Bosnia (2004-06-12): Our spot to start was quite bad, because we were on the motorway already. We walked up the road a bit and back because we didn't find anywhere where cars could stop and see us long enough beforehand. After two or three hours a Bosnian guy on his way to near Bihac picked us up. Actually we were going to go to Zagreb and on to Serbia, but why not Bosnia? After three hours drive we stopped for food in the first town in Bosnia. Our driver was a bit in a hurry and went on. When we were going to pay the waitress told us he already had paid for all of us. What a sincere man! We walked on through the town a bit. Bosnia feels more like Serbia than Croatia. The war has left its marks on the people, the buildings and the economy. When we started hitchhiking the second car stopped and took us two villages further. Waiting for half an hour and a window maker in a small Dacia with no English at all stopped. Trying not to break any of the wooden laths in his car we went some more kilometres and stopped at a little cafe-bar place. He insisted on paying for our beer and let us off in the next village. From there we walked a bit trough the Alp-like countryside. People bringing in there hay all around. Then Elvira, a young woman on her way to a town near Bihac stopped while talking to someone on the phone. With her still talking on the phone we went on. There was water in the petrol of the car, so the engine kept stopping. She could not speak much English, but she obviously was delighted to have so strange passengers onboard. We got off and a shady looking guy brought us into Bihac. He was very friendly and in a good mood. We had a little walk through town and crossed the river Una and bought some food. We went to the road to Banja Luka and after a very short time a car stopped with squeaking tires. We got into the car and the young driver speeded up. He said he is doing a race and he overtook before bends and hills at a very high speed. Also I had the feeling he is not fully aware of everything that's happening around him. [..] We were telling him we are very afraid, he replied that he is, too.. Panic! After begging him and his girlfriend for a while they would eventually stop and let us off. Pretty shocked we decided not to go on. We found a small camping ground near the river and went to bed after a little dinner. It started raining at night.

From Bihac / Bosnia to Sarajevo (2004-06-13): We walked from the camp ground to the small road to Banja Luka and waited in the rain infront of a tiny bus stop like shop only selling one type of cigarettes and one type of beer. It had no customers in the hour that we waited there. Were we scaring away the people? A man took us in his old Lada the windy path with many rocks on the road to a town 20 km further. We warmed up and had some really cheap and rich food in a muslim fast food place. While walking to a good spot to go on we noticed a big jeep of an German aid association. We thought they would give two Germans some aid by giving a lift but "nix!" accompanied by a shaking pointing finger was everything we could get out of the Bosnian driving crew. We tramped further though the rainy town until a young man picked us up and gave us a lift to the next village. No car stopped and our clothes were soaked so we decided to stop a bus to Banja Luka. We had a little tour through town, it was still cold and wet. We went to an Internet cafe and found out that if we go south a bit lovely sun and high temperatures are waiting for us. We discarded our Serbia plans and took the bus to Sarajevo late at night.

From Banja Luka to somewhere near Metcovic / Croatia: We arrived to Sarajevo early in the morning. After another little rainy city tour trough the cute city centre with medieval shopping streets we took a bus to Mostar. We stepped out of the bus at high noon. There it was, burning sun and tropic temperatures - yes! :) We walked through the city, passing by houses, lampposts, gates riddled from bullets of various sizes coming from all sides. We had a small meal, observed the summery street life and circled the city along the bypass road. At the end we got our first lift from a truck driver on this tour. It was a farmer with a small lorry carrying vegetables. He pointed to some ruins along the road and told us Serbs used to live there. He himself was Muslim. He left us at a wide crossing near the Croatian border. From there an older French smokers couple in a rented car took us to the road towards north Croatia. After some walking and waiting for lifts on the quiet road an older man coming back from cultivating his garden brought us some kilometres north towards Split. He let us off at his village. It was dark now, so we looked for a nice spot for our camp. There was a beautiful lake not far from the sea. [photo] Listening to the frog's drowsy chant we fell asleep.

Still more text to come, please check back later..

We are moving up north along the Croatian coast. It is really sunny and the coast is great! We arrived to Zadar yesterday. Now we are off to Rijeka and back to Pula. It was a crazy tour so far. We will post a detailed report later..

We are in Banja Luka / Bosnia now. People are amazingly friendly! Hitchhiking is very easy, but we took a bus from near Bihac/Bosnia because it was raining all day. Our clothes are soaked, so now we're off south to the Bosnian coast to get some sun again and dry our clothes. Seppel's cyrillic skills are getting better and better. :)

This morning Petra, her friend, her dog [photo], Seppel and me went to Premantura in the Kamenjak region at the tip ("Spitz" as they say here) of the Istrian peninsula. Petra's friend works as the handyman of a small hippy-style open-air beach restaurant called "Safari Bar", so this was our base for the day. The bar area is a collection of handmade tables and small huts hidden in high grass, bushes and flowers [photo]. It's a fantastic place and it takes a while to explore all the small paths and corners of the bar. They also have toys like a carousel [photo], swings, a slide and a hamster wheel for humans.. We spent the day climbing around the rocky coast [photo], swimming in the crystal-clear sea [photo], sunbathing and resting in shade of the remote areas of the Safari Bar. We all got pretty sunburned and stuffed our faces at the dinner back in Petra's place. Tomorrow we will be off for another week travelling through the region.

We arrived to Pula! It's boiling hot and I couldn't spot a single cloud all day. We went straight to the Rojc barracks where I lived for nearly two months at the beginning of the year. We left our bags and had a little stroll around town and to the coast. So much more is happening in the streets at this time of the year.. Tourists everywhere and people sitting in cafes, in parks and around the monuments, kids showing off on their scooters. We met Petra on the street. She is the woman that did my fancy pocket belt, maybe someone has seen me wearing it before. ;) She invited us to her place, we had some tea, made plans for a trip to the countryside and she shortened the belt a little. Now we are back in Rojc and I said hello to all the dudes and duderinas. OK, here is a little wrap-up of how we got here:

From Prague to Wels near Linz, Austria (2004-06-05): At around noon we went to a busy hitchhiker's spot south of Prague. People coming and being picked up all the time. In finest car chase style a young trumpet player drove us the first 30 km to the main road towards Austria. After a little while a steam engine enthusiast took us three villages further. He well used the time to promote the sights of his home: "Boys, I recommend you to visit ..", "Boys, you should really look at ..". At a bus stop in the middle of nowhere a junior architect picked us up and drove all the way to Ceske Budovice, 20 km from the Austrian border. We stopped, had another Knedliki meal and went on in lashing rain - yuck. Under a pedestrian bridge we found shelter and a few minutes later a fallen DJ equipment dealer now growing weed for living brought us to his boring hometown 10 km from the border in his 30 year old Lada. We got off at a petrol station with little to no traffic. After the rain stopped we walked some kilometres along the road towards the border and were picked up by an older Austrian man that just returned from a small shopping tour. With his glazzy eyes he looked at us and muttered something about German citizens being allowed to take 10 packs of cigarettes over the border. We stopped at the duty free, bought 20 packs and went over the border passing waving working girls standing beside the road. He offered us a beer and had one himself while driving. 20 km after the border we got off and were immediately picked up by the only Georgian translator in Austria. ;) He looked more like a DJ or something though. He was so kind to make an extra trip of 50 km to bring us directly to Wels "because it's raining and getting dark". At a petrol station Seppel's sister picked us up and brought us to her place where we stayed for the night.

From Wels to Rijeka, Croatia (2004-06-06): We had a nice breakfast and before noon we stood at the drive-up to the motorway to Salzburg, after 45 min a DJ Bobo look-alike took us to a busy motorway service area some kilometres before Salzburg. Waiting for an hour.. Then a nervous Indian-type guy with searching eyes behind big sun glasses brought us to the next service area near Salzburg. Some minutes later two young guys in a station wagon picked us up. After half an hour of Drum and Bass, Raga and Minimal house from the biggest car bass box that I have seen in my life we were dropped at a petrol station with friendly signs [photo]. We waited for around one and a half hours there, playing Frisbee, making jokes about passing cars. Then we were very lucky, a former Punk-Rock guy now building Irish pubs and selling exclusive rock star watches and sun glasses was on his way to south Croatia. We decided to skip Ljubljana and go with him to Rijeka, one hour from Pula. At the Slovenian-Croatian border though there was some trouble with the watches and glasses that he had in his car and so he was delayed for a longer time. We were a little confused about what was happening, but our driver assured us: "You are free". So we decided to go on because it was getting dark. The second car, a frenchman working at an oil company in Rijeka, stopped and took us to Icici, a fancy beach town a bit outside Rijeka on the road to Pula. It was dark by now and cars did not stop. We met a group of young people on their way to the pub. We had some beers with them and went to their place a bit up the hill in some kind of student bungalow. We drank Bambus, wine and cola - the local student speciality, and then I don't remember much.. ;) Drinking games, swimming in the sea at sunrise, stumbling to someone else's place, staying there for the night.

From Rijeka to Pula (2004-06-07): In the morning we stepped out of Oz's cave-like place without windows and unbelievable sun was beating down on us. The view over the Rijeka bay was amazing. We got a free meal at the restaurant where some of the students work that we met the night before. We said goodbye and started hitchhiking again. On the street we met more people from last night. Now the odyssey began.. There is a busy road to Pula and then there is the small, touristy path meandering 80 km along the coast. We walked along the slow road until after 5 hours or so a German couple stopped and brought us some kilometres. Stranded again somewhere in the middle of nowhere we stood an hour until a local bus came by. He gave us a free lift to the next bigger town. When we arrived there it was dark. We walked some kilometres to the bus station. No more busses this night. Some more kilometres in the dark along a narrow serpentine road until we reached a village that had some even ground to sleep on. A little monument gave us some shelter [photo].

From Rijeka to Pula part II / with a vengeance (2004-06-08): In the morning I got up and got some food from the local shop. Some local guy with perfect German gave me a short lift. After our picknick we went on walking in glowing heat. Walking for ages, no car would stop, noone would even look at us. What's wrong with this road?? We will mark it with a big skull on hitchhiker's maps. After 4 hours of walking along the narrow and actually quite busy road we stopped a bus to Pula because our feet hurt and our backs were sore from the heavy weight. An unexpected end of our hitchhiking trip, but by the time I'm writing this it's already forgotten and I'm happy to be in Pula! :)

Carbusters office Prague. Yesterday we started quite late from Berlin, around 4pm. We tried to get lifts at this way too busy, way too fast, way too many lanes carriage way towards south for way too long time. Eventually a backpacker that just came back from South America picked us up with his rental car. He said something about being sick of travelling by trains and that he is in a hurry, so he rented a car. Good for us, we got ultrafast to Dresden. Just before Dresden we got a lift through the city. Waiting for it Randy and Lutra from Carbusters passed by in a local bus on their way to Berlin. A small hitchhikers world, eh?

Outside Dresden a roadman picked us up with his pick up (haha). Some kilometers towards the border, standing one hour in the dreaded "DW" registration plate place (don't ask). Playing Frisbee beside the road, across the border with a sports diver from Dresden that was going to get cheaper and better petrol in the Czech Republic. Just after the border, it was getting dark, a worldly wise professor for statistical physics picked us up and speeded towards Prague. He was telling us about his wild hitchhiking youth in 68/69 and the Russian occupation of the Prague spring.

In Prague Roeland and Janneke, two Dutch living in the Czech Republic picked us up at our dropping point and went for a beer with us. 30c for a good beer! sorry, I had to mention this.

We are in Berlin at Jakob's place. He is a friend of Seppel and ultradigitally equipped. I think it's going to be the last place with wireless Internet until we reach Pula. Yesterday we only waited 15 min in the sun at the Autobahn in Schwerin before someone picked the two of us up in a tiny car. He brought us all the way to Potsdam where I needed to go for an interview. We're off to Prague now where we should meet Roeland and Barbara from Carbusters / The Ecotopia Bike Tour / the EYFA winter meeting.

Finally my work here in Schwerin is done and I'm off south again. Seppel and me will hitchhike to Berlin first, then Prague, then somewhere in between and finally Pula/Croatia again. Can't wait to jump into the Adriatic sea.. Wish us luck!

My web log kept getting longer and longer. Now it only shows the last 10 entries and the older entries can be found in the News Archive. It's sunny outside today.

Cycling Mecklenburg! Last Thursday some old friends of mine gathered [photo], as every Herrentag (Ascension Day) since ten years or so. We decorated our bicycles with lilac and cruised around the countryside of my home village Pinnow all day and got pretty drunk from the beer that we brought with us in bottles, and we did many silly things as usual. Food was served from the grill that we carried with us in a small trolley [photo]. This is by far the silliest tradition that I'm involved in when home. The next day a friend and me cycled some 60 km towards the Baltic sea to join a small barbecue. The day after we went back the same way. And again we realised how beautiful our home is. At night I joined the traditional Rider's Ball in Pinnow. Sunday morning I helped putting up and down jumps at the annual horse jumping tournament in Pinnow. I cycled back to Schwerin to play Frisby in the castle's park. What an active weekend - I still have sore muscles. ;)

On popular demand: My hosting page is up! Have a look if you would like to put your website on my Linux server.

This year's art movie festival "FilmKunstFest" in Schwerin is over. I enjoyed the films and the parties a lot, sneaked into many movies and I was happy to see how many interesting people from all over Germany it brings to my pretty hometown every year. Four exhilarating days passed by quickly and many of the interesting people are gone again. Some stayed, some will come back more often..

Oops, my server was down yesterday for most of the day. My provider moved my machine from one data centre to another. That took some hours and unfortunately the hard disk got a little damage when the machine was shut down for the move. It took me a while to find out what's wrong and until I could fix it. But everything is back now and no data was lost. Some e-mails might have been delayed a bit and the websites were offline. Sorry for that, people.. Before yesterday the server was running about a year without a single reboot.

Something else: A whole bunch of us went to a concert of "Die Sterne" at the Komplex - my personal highlight in Schwerin since years! The crowd was raving, drinks cheap and the music great. Die Sterne changed my life. :)

A short hello from the fabulous Polish countryside near Poznan. Everything went well in Warzaw. More details as soon as I'm back in Schwerin. :)

Something interesting I read in the news today: myClimate is a small Swiss NGO that tries to neutralise the environmental effects of air travel, "The climate killer number one", by taking donations for every flight that you take. Yes, you are buying letters of indulgence for your sins from them! ;) They put the money into projects for climate protection and preservation. So if you really can't avoid plane travel, fly with myClimate. The idea might be questionable, but the myClimate website has some compact information on the effects of air travel on our climate.

Now that more and more countries are leaving the US "Coalition of the Willing" I was wondering who is actually left. And I noticed that according to PWHCE the US have 130.000 troops in Iraq and all others together ca. 25.000. What a farce!

I'm going to the Alternative Economic Summit in Warsaw from the 28th to 30th of April. Join me! :) Latest news: The films on the 26-27th of April will not be shown in Kino Praha, but in an alternative location.

Maybe some of you found out that my entry from the 1st of April was a hoax. For the ones of you that didn't: well, it was. :) I had a nice easter weekend. On Friday Seppl, Höhni, Sophie and me went to the beach on the island at Poel near Wismar at the baltic sea half an hour away. After playing around with a frisby and all the cameras we brought, we collected loads of wood from the nearby forrest and lit a fire. Thank god, because quickly after the sun went down Grandpa Frost creeped out from behind some stones to say hello. He brought along his mate Freezing Cold Wind. After we went to our tents we had some rain as well. Well, yeah, you know, I still believe it was a good idea to go camping. The next day the three of us boys hitchhiked back to Schwerin. It was great fun in the sun between some burned down (in our minds) NCC super-commercial cottages next to some trees mutilated by the multi-national NCC, bottles of wine, loads of garlic, picknicks, an abandoned mill with a storehouse, wind turbine parks, smoked fish, fields to cross and an Easter bonfire with free beer. At night we went to a nice Drum and Bass party in Schwerin's Komplex.

Don't know what I did on Sunday, but on Monday I drove my mum to Danmark to let her have a look at their puppy dog which they will take home in a couple of weeks. The breeder has a nice little house in the Danish country side four hours away from here. The eight little dogs found some great fun in eating my trousers, my shoes and my jumper. Silly little things. Must be some kind of reflex to chew stuff when it's attached to tall two legged other things. On the way back we stopped in Kolding, a cute little city. But man, Denmark is so expensive! I didn't steer a car in such a long time. Hmm, strange feeling to be behind the wheel. I only saw one two people hitchhiking..

I'm in my hometown four weeks now. The project that I came here for still didn't start. D'oh! But as it looks I can start working on it pretty soon. Until then I'll enjoy the springtime in Schwerin.

Wow, United Internet, the holding company that owns my web provider 1&1 announced in an internal letter to their customers today that they have been bought by some Internet consortium from Dubai. They seem to prepare for the post-oil era there and are investing in western technology companies. Anyway, the consortium seems to have some strange policies on foreign domain names. They need to own the domain names that they are hosting. Must be some Arab thing.. In practice this means the Dubai company is currently offering the 1&1 customers to buy their domain names for 1.400 Euros each! The 1&1 customers, and therefore my customers as well, will sign a contract which guarantees them full rights to use the domain names, so just the owner will change. Domain owners that do not agree with this new policy will have to change their web provider. But for me this is a welcome addition to my travel budget. :) I have 5 days (4 + 1) now to decide what to do..

Hitch dee dop, a hip dee bop - that was easy! Got to Berlin one day ahead of schedule, and now I'm in Schwerin. On Friday Dragan woke me up with some drumming and around noon I started started hitchhiking to Ljubljana from Pula's central roundabout. A friendly craftsman took me to the petrol station at the exit of town. From there a rock carrying truck took me to an intersection some 20 km away. After two minutes a part-time salesman took me to an intersection 3 towns further. The first car - another craftsman - stopped and brought me to the next town. From there someone with very dirty hands and a slight garlic odour took me all the way to Ljubljana and I arrived at 4 in the afternoon. On the way I saw Pera (Dragan's girlfriend) standing beside the road in the other direction. It's a small hitchhiking world. I stayed at Ursa's, someone I know from a movie set of a mass battle scene with dozens of blue painted naked people three years ago near Berlin (another story). Thanks again, Ursa! :)

The next morning at 10 o'clock I went by bus to the motorway drive-up to Austria. There I stood for about an hour when a young(ish) couple picked up me and a fellow hitchhiker. The wife used to live four years in New York and was the manager of a fashion shop in "the frozen zone" up until a few days after September the 11th. Anyway, they dropped me off infront of the tunnel that leads to Austria. There Jedo, the first person I asked took me at lightspeed all the way through Austria and up until Nuremberg - yippie! At a motorway service area I drew my "Berlin" sign, put it out and the third car stopped and took me all the way up. I was telling Birgit und Ralf I have to go to the centre of Berlin to stay there with some friends and that I want to go on to Schwerin the next morning. They offered me to stay in their cute little country house a bit outside Berlin. Wow, thanks! Eleven hours from Ljubljana to Berlin dispite some traffic jam - not bad..

In the morning Ralf brought me to the nearby motorway. After an hour (5 cars passed me so far) an elderly couple picked me up, took a couple of wrong turns because they were going a different way than me, and let me out at a little busier drive-up. Another couple picked me up, told me it's a bad spot and brought me a little further. I had a lot of time so I enjoyed the play in amusement. :) At the petrol station I got a "sorry, don't take hitchhikers as a matter of priciple" by someone from Ludwigslust. Pah, Ludwigslust, who wants to go there anyway? ;) Shortly after the next person took me close to my hometown. He was a sales consultant and we had a very good talk about what drives humankind to do what it does (ruin our planet), and the hour flew by in no time. Finally at the road to Schwerin Ingo in his red Alpha racer took me right to the Schwerin castle, the heart of my fair city. What a nice journey, always again!

The meeting is over and everything is cleaned up and now has some activist flair to it. A sticker here, a tag there, some leaflets in forgotten places, announcements.. Also people inside the building got to know each other better through the international visitors. For me personally and I believe for EYFA as well it was great fun and very successful. So many interesting minds met and created new ideas. For now my job here is done, I will leave to my hometown tomorrow morning. But I'm planning to be back in Pula in April to ... Well, don't really know why. Just sounds like the right thing to do at the moment.

Phew, a lot of things to do during the meeting. Because I arrived some weeks ago I know the place quite well and can help with fixing and finding things. It keeps me busy and I hardly find the time to check my email. The activist crowd is fantastic. We're all on pretty much the same wave length and it's great fun to be creative and productive together. So many colourful influences and new ideas from everywhere. It's hard to put it into words. Good to see that "we are many"! :) Over the next days we will redefine how we can do stuff together in the EYFA network.

Yesterday the old Rojc barracks that I'm living in got a whole new side to it. The theatre group in the third floor had their open day and so there were screenings of their performances, concerts, exhibitions and all sorts of creative activity all day. Food was being served and there was some kind of electronic music party at the end. I met a lot of people that I have seen around the building before. So that was a nice addition to the trashy punk culture going on in the basement.

Tomorrow the EYFA winter meeting with around 50 activists from all over Europe officially starts and there is many little things to be done and organised before. More and more participants arrive and give the barracks a nice breeze of international air, which was long-awaited by me.

"Now that the show is over, and we have jointly exercised our constitutional rights, we would like to leave you with one very important thought: Some time in the future, you may have the opportunity to serve as a juror in a censorship case, or a so-called obscenity case. It would be wise to remember that the same people who would stop you from listening to "Boards of Canada" may be back next year to complain about a book, or even a TV programme. If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think. Defend your constitutionally-protected rights. No one else will do it for you. Thank you."

A fancy dress carnival party on Saturday and a trip to the mountains today - a fun weekend! Yesterday the punk crowd exchanged their rivet leather jackets and combat trousers with Star Trek uniforms and pink tutus. They met for the "Maskenbal" in the club right under the place that I sleep in. Not the MP3 jukebox was playing the ever same tunes again and again, but a DJ. Karaoke all night, dear god, give me a break. The rest was business as usual: Many people dancing and pogoing until early in the morning, the music way too loud (aua, my ears are still sore) and much, much "Bambus", a mix of cheap cola and cheap wine, brought in (multi)litre bottles from home. All in all I (dressed as a Buddhist monk collecting contributions - including black ombrella so the sun doesn't burn my shaved head which is not shaved at the moment) had great fun. (Last night I decided to use a lot of brackets in future because they are very easy to read)

Today early in the morning, after 2 hours of sleep or so - no clue how I managed to get up on time, oh I set a cron job on my laptop to play an MP3, alarm clock broken - I was picked up by Barbara and three other people from Zelena Istra in order "to go to the snow". The word snow sounded interesting enough to accept the invitation the night before without knowing what's going to happen. We drove to the mountains near Rijeka some 60 km away and got off near a ski lift. Wow, I felt like being teleported to a different world: Many people in strange colourful space suits flying by over the ground without moving their feet! Others speeded around on loud, completely useless machines that look like big scooters but have chains instead of weels in the back and a pair of skis for steering. Man, haven't been in a ski resort in ten years or so. We ignored all this and walked up to a peak 1500 metres high, enjoyed the view, passed life threatening icy steep rises, fell an laughed a lot and plumped back into the car completely knackered five hours later. Just beemed back to the mother ship. What a tour. Didn't expect *that*!

Today was the first real hands-on action in preparation to the EYFA winter meeting here in Pula. We were bringing some 40 mattrasses from a place 10 min away to here. Great, eh? Apart from that I'm spending my days enjoying the fast Internet connection, working a little bit and strolling around town or walking to the seaside. Every Saturday and Sunday I collect the garbage from the area around the punk club. Javier left to Belgrade for some days. So nothing too exciting happening, but it's very relaxing.

Last night's birthday party (mine) was great. Javier, my Spanish/Ecotopian roommate, is an amazing vegetarian cook and so we went to the market in the morning to buy loads and loads of veggies and other nice ingredients. After preparing the place with candles and a little clean-up and cooking for 2 hours or so, the random people that I invited from around the building arrived to the kitchen and started eating, drinking and chatting. Later on more people from the punk club in the basement came along and after a while we all went to the club. By accident I found out that it was someone else' birthday as well, so we all had great fun together - nice one. :)

Ahh, just came back from swimming in the sea at cosy 9 degrees temperature outside and 12 degrees in the water. The sea was a little rough, but it was really sunny and not too windy. Tomorrow again?

Last weekend finally the bearing of the enourmous noise coming from rehearsal rooms all around the building and especially the punk club that I am sleeping right on top paid out! There was a great concert of a weird music combo from South Africa in the very same club that causes so many sleepless nights. The band was called Boo. Pretty clever to call a band Boo, the whole audience was booing them out loud and Boo loved it. They were actually asking for it. I got in for free, had great fun and the club was packed.

More great things happened during the week. After messing aound with a lot of antenna equipment, wireless access points and wardriving through the city we finally got our wireless Internet link. This means I now have very, very fast Internet all day long! Also I got an old 486DX2-66 computer with 16MB RAM running as a diskless thin client with LinuxTSP. We now can use this one in the HackLab here for Internet surfing. And did you know: 0100110101011010! So, now you know what state of mind I'm in..

I'm in Pula one week now. It has been sunny three of these days and I even got a light sunburn from cycling in the sun too much. I feel quite happy here. I have not done much work on the EYFA meeting preparation yet, but I'm sure there is loads to do soon. When I'm not cycling around town I am in the Monte Paradiso building cooking in the kitchen, doing stuff with my laptop or reading. Things are quite relaxed. I started messing around with some ten years old computers to make them running as Internet surf terminals in the HackLab here. Some things are quite tricky to get running. Loads of research on the Linux Terminal Server Project software and tinkering around needed. Put the fun back into computing - Use Linux! ;) Sorry the link below to the Pula map doesn't work anymore because they updated their site, no time to fix this now. OK, that's all.

Pula is beautiful! Feels just like being somewhere in Italy - really confusing. Roman buildings all around, palm trees, hilly narrow streets with scooters, a big Amphitheatre, mediterranean flair, plus a huge port and beaches. Yeah!

Two days ago I took the train from Belgrade to Zagreb. Big thanks to all the wonderful people in Beograd that helped me with accomodation and having great two weeks in the city of Danube and Save after all: Ljubica, Sasha, Branka, Jelena & Milosh, Goran, Sanya, Igor, Hauke, Tanya & Djole, Milan, Dina, Maya, Branko, Ivana & Mauro (and many more). No thanks to the brutal airheads in the former "Rebel house" and the bus ticket inspector that tried to rip me off for using a wrong (more expensive!) ticket. After some 20 minutes of haggling and him threatening to call the police I just walked off telling him I will call my "advokat" now. He gave up and handed me back my ID card.

In Zagreb Javier who just came from Barcelona picked me up from the train station and we went to the "Villa Kiseljak". Finally a real squat! A nice house with some green around it, loads of arty junk in the garden and on the walls. Nice music coming from an old record player, the little outlandish residents sitting beside the oven in the central room, a library, a working kitchen, water from canisters and a dog.

This morning Javier and me hitchhiked the 250 km to Pula in just 5 hours. We had a look around the huge Roitsh barracs and "Monte Paradiso" (a floor inside the baracks) where we will stay for the next six weeks until the EYFA winter meeting. At the moment I am in the HackLab inside the baracks which provides free Internet to the people, on Linux computers. I will now see if I can connect my laptop here.. :)

Leaving Las Belgrade, just can't let go. I'm staying again with Sasha in another abandoned place (I wouldn't really call it a squat). This time it's an office building of a former consulate. We have electricity, two big heaters hungry for lots of watts, warm water, clean rooms, a door we can lock, desks from finest woods, a conference room and a couple fancy leather armchairs big enough for some consul's ass. :) After picking up some metres of film reel from the Lord of the Rings from a footpath near the city centre - someone must have put it there for me to find - I went to see the movie with Dina last night. The show lasted until 3am. A great flick. Maybe a bit confusing for the non-reader, but I've heard they took out a lot of scenes to bring the movie down to "just" 3 hours. That's all for the moment, will meet another Ecotopian now.

It's christmas - again! Am I in a Bill Murry movie? Over the next three days the Serbs celebrate their Orthodox christmas with more dinners, presents, friends. And a couple of days later it's their New Years. Super, super! I was planning to leave Belgrade tonight but luckily I decided to call Dina last night. She is a good friend of Amir from my hometown Schwerin. After an exchange machine ate 10 Euros of mine and a service technichian with perfect English gave them back to me with many words of sorry Dina and I met for a cup of tea. We talked fast and a lot and she offered me to let me stay in her beautiful and warm appartment for some days. A nice christmas present. Snow is covering the ugly things in town. Om.

I'm still in Belgrade. Had pretty rough and good times. The first night I stayed in the Rebel House squat. Maybe I shouldn't have.. Since I stayed there two months ago some people moved out and some new people moved in. Well, these new people are pretty violent and desperate for drugs and money. Combined with the intake of the first a dangerous cocktail. After things escalated that night Sasha, the last remaining old inhabitant, and me had to escape from the house. It's now declared dissolved, don't go there anymore! I am still in one piece but Sasha has a new scar on his head. Man, those fuckers really have no brain. What I have learned from that: If in doubt, stay somewhere else or leave before things get funny. Junkies do not look like junkies (This one I actually learned before, but I forgot). OK, everything else was fun, I went to a punk New Year's party a bit outside town and had a great time. I met Hauke from Hamburg (Hello Hauke!) From the party I went to a friend's place where I can stay some more days. Thanks, Djole! I met Branka from Ecotopia twice, everybody seems to know each other here - nice. But as it looks I will go on to Pula within the next days.[...] Weather is a little grey and rainy with temperatures around 3 degrees.

Aaaaaand: ..Belgrade! It's nice and sunny and the people are friendly. In Prague I stayed in the Milada squat. Unfortunately there was hardly anyone there. It was pretty cold, people hid in their rooms, the water in the kettle in the kitchen was frozen. Probably the wrong time of the year to visit. It's a very nice building and I'm sure in the summertime it's luvly. I fired up a little oven and put on as many layers of clothes as possible and had a nice few hours of sleep. In the early morning I went to Budapest. And I'm so glad that I decided to fill some of the waiting hours with watching the movie "Dogville". A lot of food for thoughts. Haven't seen such a good film/play in a while. After a comfortable train journey through the night here I am, Red Star Belgrade! Looking forward to the days to come and new year's.

Yippie, on the road again! Off to Prague now. More news later

I have a photo gallery now! Come in, have a look and leave comments. I put up some pictures of my travels through the Ukraine and Turkey first. More things to follow, I need to do some scanning.

I'm organising a little Debian Linux event thing for December 13th at Komplex, an alternative youth centre in town. See here for more info: DePlex (sorry, German only)

Die Zeit is auch weg. Abends geht sie schlafen und morgens is sie.. morgens wacht sie auf. Genau wie ich. Das mach ich auch. Das machen im Moment ganz viele. (DJ Koze)

Time is gone as well. It goes to sleep at night and in the morning it is.. in the morning it wakes up. Just like me. I do it, too. A lot of people do it at the moment. (DJ Koze)

I arrived two my hometown Schwerin two days ago. It's good to be back and see people that I know for years. I moved in to Florian's in the centre of town above a cinema. I unpacked my stuff and made the room comfortable for a couple of months lasting living and working stay. Laptop, fast Internet, a room, central heating, clean clothes, gadgets all around. Different knifes for different things to cut, for Ford's sake! How easy it is to be a cave man. Choose life.

OK, my way back to here: I hitch-hiked from Olympos in the very south of Turkey to somewhere 100km north of Isparta. Among many different people a young woman gave me a lift for a couple of kilometers. First she passed, then stopped a good bit away and reversed. She was on her way to see the mayor of the next town. I was invited for some tea and shook the mayor's hand. Next to the higher citizens meeting and discussing various issues in the office I felt a bit underdressed in my manky pyjama trousers, smelly shirt and dirty face - but they just gave me understanding smiles. The woman collected a big stash of money and got back with me in the car and brought me to the next crossroads. How confiding, I thought. Later the next day (Brr, the night in the tent was cold, continental climate struck) I got stuck for a couple of hours in some kind of steppe in the middle of nowhere. Cars and trucks just wouldn't stop. Must be one of those days I said to myself and stopped a bus to Istanbul, as I wanted to be there by the end of the day. I spent two more days in Istanbul, staying for cheap on the balcony of the nice "Chill out" hostel. Here I met back two Germans that stayed in the Olympos cave with us for one night. Small world, eh?

I took the train to the Bulgarian border where I found a truck in the queue that would take me directly to Hamburg. Jackpot! Anyway, I had to walk over the border on my own in order to meet my truck on the other side, which for the first Turkish border controller was a "BIG PROBLEM!", whereby taking a seat in a passing car was "guezel" for him again. After I passed the 8 checkpoints I waited 9 hours (!) sitting on my bag, munching the food I brought. The truck came but for some silly misunderstanding I missed it - argh! So my heavy bag and me walked to the 4km away truck overnight parking to look for him. I couldn't see him anywhere, so I entered the trucker bar in the basement of the building nearby. -- God, this story is getting long -- Of course he wasn't there, but another driver, a very sincere man, gave me food and drink and took me to a motorway crossing near Sofia the next morning. He left me with two US Army field food rations "MRE" (Meal, Ready-to-Eat, no joke) which he brought from a tour into the Iraq. Again stranded, this time in cold windy rain, I took the bus to the centre of Sofia and from there to Belgrade.

O beloved Belgrade! In an Internet cafe I met Mark from Australia who I spent the rest of the day with drinking beer from 1.5 litre bottles and asking people for sights that we were standing infront of. Milan, a friend of Cathie (a friend from Dublin, ciao Cathie!) showed me the squat called "Rebel House" where I decided to stay for 3 nights. This is where I met Ljubica, who became a very special friend in such short time. :)

On the evening of the fourth day I took the bus to Budapest. I spent all day in the Szechenyi thermal bath - ahhhh, how I needed that. The same night I went on to Prague by bus, took the train to the German border and got back home with friendly weekend group train ticket people that took me with them. What a tour! Over and out..

Belgrade it is! I'm staying in a pretty big but empty squat and I love the people in it. The city is beautifully friendly. To Mark in Budapest: Sorry, won't be able to meet you tomorrow as I will stay here one or two days longer. I don't have your e-mail address, so please e-mail me and we could meet later in Budapest or Prague?

Sun, beach, relaxation - and a cave. A couple of days ago Yvonna, Daniel, Deniz from Ankara and me hitch-hiked down south to a nice place called Olympos. We went together in one group and it was amazing that people were picking up 4 people with big bags, at night, even in regular cars. The first day we started at 4pm from Ankara and made it 5 or so lifts later to Antalya by 4am the next morning. We never waited more than an hour for a lift. In Antalya we slept at the beach, went for a walk in town next day and made our way to Olympos, which is "situated" around 60km south. Olympos is usually very crowded with head-wrecker package holiday tourists, but because the season is over and people are afraid to make holidays in the warzone Turkey, everything is pretty quiet and hostels and food places look very empty. Tumbleweeds and all. From 2pm to 5pm though there are around 50 million tourist day-tour-cruise boats arriving to Olympos for a little stop-over, spilling out a hundred white-skinned, silly dressed anti-tourists each, stumbling through the sand, intaking their quick bath+tan, looking under every stone in a distance of 100m from their boat, getting on the nerve of everyone, but bringing the well-needed shower of money. The scene is accompanied with some nice summer hit pop music blaring from the overheated speakers on the boats. The spectacle is getting smaller and smaller every day though, phew.. Oh, got to go. Will write some more about the cave we are living in some other time. Please, friends, don't be upset if I don't find the time to reply to you by e-mail individually.. This here is for all of you. :)

Don't have much to tell, but some time before tonight's Klezmer concert in Ankara's university concert hall. We spend the last days chilling out in different student flats near the campus with short visits to town - eating, sleeping, hanging around the campus, letting off countless "Kak djela?" (Russian for "How are you?" - our universal catch-phrase since Ecotopia), being really silly, sleeping, eating.. Yvonna from England joined our retard club (Kak Delaaaaaaa?) after Rori left back towards the hazy rains of Eire. Last night we went to a Hamam (Turkish bath). Very nice and refreshing! In the overall rating it's losing some points though at "How good do homosexual perverts behave inside the bath?". What the f..?! No respect of free will whatsoever. But they leave you alone if you shout at them for a while. Hehe. -- I got my appetite back after another diarrhea attack. Wow, great news, wasn't it? Concert starts now..

Women's Volleyball European Cup Final! We went to see it live! A beautiful sport.. ;) Before the final we saw the match Germany - Nederlands. Germany won very, very closely. The poor German girls had a pretty tough time though. The Turkish audience absolutely hated them, every serve was being wisseled and boo-ed at with an enormous volume and good strikes were only honoured by a handful of people clapping (including me). Germany won against Turkey some days before.

Back in Ankara after some lifts by weirdo truck drivers.. I don't know, I think it's going to be no more trucks in turkey. We felt a bit uncomfortable after one guy asking for special favours. :( Anyway, back in town this morning we went to a peace protest. The amount of police (a lot of them with massive machine guns or riot gear), tanks and controls was just unbelievable. They really don't like the idea of something getting out of control here. The protest zone was completely locked off. When I was picking up a stick for my peace flag in a park a cop ran over and asked me for my passport. I showed him my German ID card, but he wouldn't accept it and told me I would have a "býg problem!" now. After hours being presented to people of ever higher rank and being transported to the police headquarter in a neutral van by people without uniform I was given lovely food and released without any charges. Interesting account with the officials here.. :)

Two days ago Daniel and me hitch-hiked from Ankara towards south. The first lift was given by a Police van - cool! They tend to do this here sometimes for foreigners. At night we arrived by truck in Aksaray were we put our tent (thanks again for the lend, Maura! :) near the main street between some houses and shops. After getting up in the morning we were already putting out the thumb again when a shop owner's family invited us for breakfast - dobre! We went on by slow, slow, superslow truck to the Cappadocia destrict that is famous for its man made caves in (kind of) beehive-shaped rocks. In Uchisar we saw the first beautiful example of this strange housing. After watching a wonderful sunset from an elevated viewpoint we picked our cave for the night. I bought some breakfast for the next morning, dobre pivo and wine, and went up to our shelter in the citadelle of the town, which is completely carved out of a massive rock. It looks a bit like a Swiss cheese. People here don't seem to mind travellers sleeping in the caves, so we enjoyed the splendid view over towns, canyons, rocks and hills from high up while it was getting dark and at sunrise. Wow, nothing like I've ever seen before. Today Daniel went off to the nearby Ortahisar and I will meet him there later. I walked through the cave-riddled canyon to Goereme. Many people still live in these caves and equipped them with satellite dishes and windows. A bizarre picture. We will go back to Ankara tomorrow and to the south coast early next week. Alright, will get more Doener now..

The four of us hitch-hiked to Ankara yesterday in two teams. It took us around eight hours and gave me a nice insight in the kindness of the people here. Everybody was very friendly and helped us whereever they could with food, money and extra lifts. Most probably Alper's story of coming back robbed, pennyless and without passport from the Ukraine did it's own magic. ;) Going to get one of the nice Doeners they have here now..

Now in Turkey with Yaser and Alper! Kak delaaa?? Had to take the ferry from Odessa to Istanbul earlier than planned because our visas ran out. More news later..

The Turkish people have arrived! As usual we met Yaser and Alper from Ecotopia on the street walking by while we were having a beer (this happened twice before in Kosiv and Kiev). We are still in Odessa and today we went to a mad bath place. It was an old, small, very, very hot ecalyptus sauna filled with people hitting each other with oak branches as if there is no tomorrow. They also have a cold basin, 20 showers and a little pub. Pivo, pivo, pivo - in the morning, after the sauna, in the evening. I like it here. ;) Tomorrow we will explore the catacombs under Odessa.

This morning, after four relaxing days in Kiev, Daniel, a friend from Jokkmokk in Sweden, and me arrived by night sleeper train (very convenient!) in the wonderful coastal town of Odessa. Wow, how nice it is to be here. When you get off the train the first thing you hear is classical music that is played over the platform speakers to welcome you. I like their style.. The streets are full of trees and life that somehow reminds me of past colonial scenes in Hanoi or Cambodia. Hard to explain this warm and relaxed feeling. Something between the end of a great aera and the beginning of something big. Waiting for things to happen. -- Ectopia seems so long ago already.. Only a handful of people stayed until the very end of the camp. Because of heavy rain and an unsecure feeling in the thinned out rows of tents a lot of people stayed with Babushkas in their houses. So did we. It was amazing to see how good life without running water and other luxury works. According to herself our Babushka does the best food in the village. No doubts about that! I stayed with people from Spain, Poland, Belgium, Belorussia, New Mexico and Germany - what a party we were, delighted she was, our Babushka. After Odessa we plan to go to Krimea and from there to Istanbul and up north to Belgrad and somehow hitchhiking back home to Schwerin. I hope I don't run out of money or time before.. ;) Having a great time! Ok, will log off for today. Big thanks to the people that hosted us silly westeners (that know nothing about manners in this country and are so chilled out that it hurts sometimes) so far: Helen & family and Stac in Kiev and Mitje in Odessa.

Today is the first time in 10 days that I got out of Ecotopia. The camp is great, got loads to tell. Wonderful landscape, people etc. Will post a summary here after the 6th of september. Until then: Dobrey djen!

We arrived in Kosiv/Ukraine! From here it is only 20min by bus to the camp of Ecotopia. Wow, that was a trip. The day before yesterday Alicia and me hitchhiked from Berlin to Teplice, the first town in the Czech Republic. We went directly - thanks to Michael that picked us up after only standing less than a minute at the Autobahn! From Teplice to Prague it was only EUR2.50 for the train and it took us 2 hours or so. We nearly slept through our stop in Prague.. In Prague we went to the main square and spent some time listening to a Momo reading and doing street theatre with 3 other Germans under _the_ clock. After some beers we went to an island on the river and slept under the open sky. In the morning we nearly missed our bus to the Ukraine and got ripped off by a friendly taxi driver (he shall rot in hell for his sins). Well, we could stop the bus in the nearby traffic jam. Hmm, we have to work on our timing I think. :) 20 hours, EUR45 and 2 border crossings later we arrived to Ivano-Frankivsk in the Ukraine. Things are very different and remind me of South East Asia a bit (squat toilets, mini buses, overloaded vehicles). With some bits of Russian and continous repeating of the places we want to go to we made our way to here, Kosiv. The Internet cafe is around 1.20 per hour, so I will keep you updated. Happy to be here! :)

Berlin again, praise my host Alex! :) Yesterday I went with Markus and some friends of his to the new luxurious Kempinsky Hotel in Heiligendamm near Rostock. Not really my kind of places but what they have made out of some old derelict beach villas looks very impressive and attracts a lot of tourists, which are well needed to bring forward the region a bit more. Celeb spotting: We saw Wolfgang Joop standing around near the cafe - wow. Kempinski kicked the local design school off the ground before they started building. I robbed a pen, I feel like such an anarchist now! ;)

I left Schwerin and hitchhiked to Rostock in company of Alicia, an Irish girl that is on the way down to Ecotopia as well. I went to Markus' birthday party in the evening and I will visit my dad tomorrow. Alicia went to the IGA Gardening Exhibition and on to Berlin.

Phew, my server is getting up and running again after my provider switched it off for security reasons (see below) and after I decided to let them wipe the hard disk for the same reasons. ;) All this kept me busy the last days. I am not fully there yet, so a "Sorry for any inconvenience caused" flys out to the people that I host stuff for (Eimeir, mash, Paco, Sustainable Ireland). Apart from doing all this fun stuff I am enjoying a beautiful summer in my home town Schwerin - including beach parties, swimming in crystal clear lakes, endless silly-talk nights with Mischa in my favourite pub "Freischütz", barbecues etc. - until next week.

I'm in Berlin since two days now (thanks for the hospitality, Ronald!). Always good to be here. I just realised that someone hacked my server this morning. Kudos to BloodBR. Probably wasn't too hard, but why me?? I'm trying to fix this now. Man, I don't have time for this just now..

Did some Urban Exploring today: The usual Spot a tall building, walk by the security with a straight face, get the lift to the top floor, take the nearest fire exit, walk up a bit, try some doors, find the roof access (is *always* unlocked) and have a phantastic view over the city (bring food and drink if you like) just worked fine again. Memories of the good old days in San Francisco.. ;)

Holidays are great! You have loads of time for things that you normally don't get a chance to. For me now this is reading. Apart from my book I was just reading on the Internet about "Blogs" (weB logs, so something like this page here), which brought me to blogger.com, which brought me to Google's jobs page. They eat organic at Google! When people asked me what's so great about [the programming language] Python, I usually waffled a bit in tech talk and then mentioned that by the way Google uses it a lot. Talking about organic or bio food I now have great new card to play as well. ;) OK, enough blogging for today and back into the sun.

Arrived to Madrid. Even hotter. Will stay 11 days until the 1st of August.

Went with Sylvain and Sebastien (two Frenchies that I used to work with in Dublin and that moved here a couple of weeks ago) to the beach this night to talk and drink. Hundreds of people from all over the world were doing the same. So much nicer than the pub. :)

Eco nerds: I met Erik from Sustainable Ireland today in Barcelona. We went to the sustainability department of a huge university campus in the north of the city. After this we visited an eco info centre in town and met the former sustainability counceler of Barcelona, also organising the yearly Earth Day. Muchos sostenible and good fun. Is this green tourism?

I wrote some "Beatnik poetry" with a group of young Americans and slept well at Europe's biggest free hostel - Stansted Airport. Walking through Girona I bumped into a wall with beautiful grafitti of some Kanastah heads from my hometown Schwerin. Respect, boys! Girona was also my first encounter with spanish summer heat - Jeysus bullets, fucken boilin down here!

"Auf zu neuen Ufern!" - My last day in Dublin. I moved out of the house OK and said Goodbye to a lot of people at my leaving party 3 days ago (thanks to all for coming). Tonight I'll fly to London, in the morning on to Barcelona, a couple of days later on to Madrid, Koeln, Berlin, Schwerin, Prague, Ecotopia2003 and then I don't know. :) I'll keep you updated here. Slan go foill, Eire!

The best things in life are free: Just enjoyed a Lunchtime Concert with traditional Irish music presented by a young quartett called Slide. Over the next few summer weeks there will be a series of *free* cultural events in Dublin's pub quarter Temple Bar. It's called Diversions and will end on August 31st. So if you fancy a visit to Dublin - this is the time to come! Also I would like to express that I currently feel extraordinary well. A lot of things just work out very good at the moment.. Yeah! :)

Wow, no message for 2 months. Have been pretty busy working on some freelance projects and getting comfortable in Dublin. Also during the last weeks I have been working a lot in Cultivate. Yesterday Sustainable Ireland's Convergence Festival started. I'm helping out at its Media Centre. So there is plenty to do here for the next two weeks.

St. Patrick's Day! A big parade in town, sunshine, free things and drunk people with strange hats everywhere in the streets. Slainte!

Back in Dublin I found our House "Winston Ville" derelict. Only Hernan the Argentinian is still staying here. With paniced eyes he tells me about the mice in the house and the landlord knocking down the place very soon. Well, I moved to a smaller room that has a fireplace, I put up the Italian peace flag that I got of Andrea's sister Chiara in Naples. Very cosy and the best thing is it's *free*. :)

After travelling by train from Florence to Bologna and on to Forli I took the plane to London-Stansted. I slept at the airport which changed into the largest hostel in Europe just after 11pm. So many people sleeping everywhere! I met back two Americans living in Dublin that I met at a organised pub crawl in Rome, a small world it is. Thanks Stansted Airport for letting us stay! :)

Florence today. It's common knowledge that it is a beautiful place to be, so I won't write much on that.. I got paid to attend a medical conference. Some guy was asking people sitting at one of the many piazzas if there were in for it. Not bad, cocktails in the "Art Bar" tonight! :)

I saw the pope in Rome today! Well, I saw a little dot in a massive window high up in a giant building. It's true, there is an "uuhh" or "aaah" at every corner of Rome.

Today I enjoyed legendary pizza in Napoli's most famous pizzeria "Da Michele". Well, famous for locals. It is a tiny inconspicious shop that doesn't look any different to any other of the hundreds of pizzarias in Napoli. Accept this one exists more than 200 years and has a massive crowd queuing for a seat infront of it most of the day. Da Michele refuses to expand their business or even to fix up the place a bit. They do good pizza and that's it. They only offer two types of pizza and of course it's really cheap. See this guide for more information.

..and here I am, city of Napoli. Andrea (a friend from Dublin) and his family gave me a warm welcome in their city. I shared last night's accomodation and todays train with two guys from Mississipi. Hi Lucas, hi Gerald, nice meeting yous. :) The train journey was nicely slow and scenic. On the first sight Napoli looks quite industrial. I will have a look at the historical city centre tomorrow.

Just arrived to Pescara/Italy. Had my first pizza and learned my first essential Italian words: "ostello" and "mangiare". :) I flew with Ryanair from Frankfurt-Hahn. Btw.: When you are coming from somewhere in northern Germany the best way to get to the airport is a "Bohr" bus from Cologne central station. It's only 5 euros and takes 2:15h. Off to Napoli tomorrow..

I went by weekend train ticket to Rosbach in the southern Rheinland to stay at my family there before I fly to Italy. Thanks to the lovely weekend ticket people and to Regine for hosting me.

500,000 and 1 participants in Berlin at the big protest for a peaceful solution to the Iraq issue - yeah! "Hoch die internationale Solidaritaet!" :)

Happy birthday to me! :)

After being in Berlin, some places in Poland and Rostock over Chrismas and New Year's I'm now working away in my hometown Schwerin/Germany for a while. Maddin and Kev host me and my laptop in the mandarin/Friko office. Thanks!

I'm in Düsseldorf! Thomas who I used to work with at Giga TV in 1999 celebrates his birthday. For fixing their Linux internet router they let me stay in their flat and give me food.

benn.org version 1.0 alpha is up! The portfolio will be greatly extended and more main categories are about to be finished. So check back soon.

For a number of reasons I found it more convenient to return to Dublin and work on my portfolio and my website from here. So here I am, tinkering on my laptop since 2 weeks now. New plans for Galway are the beginning of the new year.

My last day at Vivendi. I'll go to Galway early next week to find somewhere to live and work. Eimeir stays in Dublin to concentrate on her thesis and her last college projects. But for now it's a couple of days holidays and freedom, feels good. :)

Vivendi sent me and some other testers to Dewsbury near Leeds to work directly with a games developer for 6 days. Interesting experience..

I went to Ecotopia for 10 days. It was a gathering of people interested in sustainable living from all over Europe. The camp was set in a beautiful countryside near the lake Lough Derg. I had a great time. :-) I also spontaneously decided to give a little workshop about Open Source.

I changed job and am now working at Vivendi Universal Games as a video game tester.

Mokey is born - I got my own server again. It's a "root server" from 1&1 and it's located in Karlsruhe/Germany.

I started working at HP/Compaq as a technical support agent - Call centre, yeah!

I moved to Dublin, Ireland! I share accomodation with my girlfriend Eimeir and 6 other people. It is a nice Georgian house known as Winston Ville on the north side of town.