Going to Norway (With Your Help)

In the style of Motorcycle Diaries…

• The plan: Travel in Summer 2007 to the northern tip of continental Europe, Nordkapp in Norway, up via Norway and back down through Finland (Planned Route)
• The method: Hitch-hiking, couch-surfing, improvisation
• The goal: To (re-)discover my identity by interacting with nature, people and challenges. And take lots of beautiful pictures

Last year, I was sitting in my room watching The Long Way Round, when a scene from the movie wowed me. If you don’t know The Long Way Round, it’s a video-documentary of Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman travelling from London to New York, but the long way round, basically around the world – through Western Europe, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada and USA. In the scene that wowed me, they’re in the middle of the Kazakh desert, staying in a camp for the night. It was the middle of absolute nowhere, the sun was setting, it was absolutely peaceful, and boom, I was envious. I wanted to experience something similar.

At the end of the series McGregor said, he hopes it inspires people that crazy adventures are possible, and that they should not worry about the what-ifs, because the what-ifs are what make it exciting.

I don’t remember how I decided I want to go to Nordkapp. It was a few months later, I think I was I was playing with Google Earth, when I wondered about Europe’s nothernmost point. Googling about the place and Norway, I fell more and more in love with the nature. Life was boring me and I felt I needed an adventure, so I began playing with the idea of hitchhiking to get there. I fantasized about the trip, spending hours looking up pictures and travel information on the internet. Sometimes I’d dismiss it as being impossible, just a fantasy. Yet sometimes I think I’d regret it if I drop yet another idea because of… the what-ifs.

So, here I am, making a decision to go ahead with this adventure.

Because this is supposed to be an adventure, I’d like to go low-budget as possible. Travel and accomodation will be free . But I still need to eat, and Scandinavia is an expensive part of the world, and according to my calculations, I will need about a thousand Euro for 2 months of supermarket food and some camping equipment. Expensive huh?

Unfortunately, I’m just a penniless student, struggling to survive. So as an experiment, I’d like to see if and how web-marketing really works. So I hereby ask you, citizens of the web, to donate to fund my trip.

Wait don’t stop reading! We all know nobody likes to give away money for nothing in return, so I’d like to offer you posters of, what else but, the beautiful Scandinavia. So here’s what I have in mind:

• for 20 Euro / 25 USD, you get 2 posters
• 40 Euro / 50 USD; 4 posters
• 60 Euro / 75 USD; 8 posters
• 80 Euro / 100 USD; 12 posters
• 100 Euro / 125 USD; 16 posters
• Even more money? Let’s negotiate.

The posters are approx. 16 ” x 12″ (45 x 30cm) big, and shipping is free.

What else do you get when you donate?

• my eternal gratitude
• an honorable mention on the website I will make documenting the trip
• did I mention cool posters?
• you also get to force me to go on this trip, because, hey, if you’ve donated expecting posters, then I have to keep my promise!

And, should I get more money than I need, I will donate anything extra to the Red Cross to help their efforts in Darfur.

So please, donate! And tell your friends!
Donate (Euro)^*/**
Donate (USD)^*

If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me. My adresss is netsharc at Google’s Mail service.

* Using PayPal. If you have better alternatives, please do let me know.
** If you are in Germany, you can also ask me for my bank details, a direct transfer would be cheaper.

Craziest Thing I’ve Ever Done?

I was in the shower just now when this memory popped into my head…

A few hundred meters away out in the open sea there was a giant yacht, it’s windows glowing in the pre-dusk sea, where a few hundred rich people were probably partying on board. Behind us were steep rocks, a small gate we probably trespassed to get here, and behind that, the richest small city and country in the world, Monaco. The water was cold and salty. We had been hitchhiking and fare-dodging for 27 hours, we were sweaty and stinky and there we were, our naked asses exposed in the open, trying to wash ourselves in the sea.

Some Italians watched us from above, amused. I wonder if there are pictures on the internet. It was the 2003 Formula One Grand Prix weekend, and the place was filled with tourists. Some were the filthy rich, most were just visiting from neighboring Italy, 2 were us who didn’t know where we’d sleep that night.

We did find a place to sleep, in a nice passageway that leads to a parking place, just outside a small theatre that shows “The Monaco Story”. Too bad it was too cold to sleep outside in the Mediterranean air.

What a great weekend that was. Some day I’m going to write the full story… ah, someday.

Idea of a Semi-Effective Way to Guard Access to Mature Content

Just as I try to watch an episode from the recently launched Fark TV, the site stopped me and told me I have to be over 18 to do so and asked me for my birthdate. Ok, no biggie, entered some fake date (gotta be careful of identity theft these days) and I got to the content.

Obviously, it’s basically legalese to protect their own ass, an 11 year old can calculate a date that would make him/her 18. But then I had a A-ha idea. What if you surprise them after the first form, and ask them to enter that birthdate again? Someone faking the date would just choose one randomly and not remember it when asked again. If they put something different the second time, ban their IP and prevent them from accessing the content.

Kinda clever, huh? Of course, it’s still easy to circumvent. Hitting the back button on some browsers gets you to the previous page with the date you enter still being there. Some people might still remember the date they put in the first time, they definitely would when they realize what’s going on. I’d say it would block 0.01% of all access attempts. Perhaps even higher, because it would catch out legitimate adults who put in fake dates and don’t know how to circumvent it. And in the end, the content provider would prefer that more people have access to the content, instead of less, anyway, not caring if they’re underage or not.

An idea not worth implementing…

Snap is Lame

After writing the previous entry, I was hovering my mouse over my meager blogroll when a Snap preview window popped up. “WTF!?” I thought. Well this blog’s a week old, it could be I just haven’t noticed this “feature” before. Apparently they just released the infection last night, i.e. WordPress.com decided to enable it on all their blogs.

I hate it. First it pops up, and then it realizes it needs to flip its silly little arrow, and then you get a “please wait while loading preview”. Only after you wait one or two seconds that you get the preview. Which doesn’t bring much either, you can only see the site’s design, and nothing else! And all that changing of content is like a f’ing TV ad, which just gives me a headache!

Luckily I have Proxomitron, where I can just treat the whole snap.com domain as an ad-provider, and filter it out Internet-wide! I only noticed the previews on this blog because it bypasses Proxomitron filters at the moment (to make sure all the Javascript/cookies work).

Anyway, the idea sucks and the implementation so far sucks (I’m sure I’d be able to engineer something that pops up (or maybe use fade to not hurt the eyes) after its contents are ready, not making the user wait for it). The company is just boasting that 600k WordPress blogs now have it. Well that’s because they just enabled it on on everybody. I wonder how many blogowners will disable it. Or, the more important metric is, how many readers will disable it. I’m pretty sure power-surfers have no use for tiny little windows popping up interrupting their reading and link-clicking. I wonder if they will publish such statistics as how many viewers disable their little feature/annoyance after encountering it. Or if they’ll let webmasters see if the reader of their particular site like this feature/annoyance or not.

I guess this really is Bubble 2.0. And I know one particular company I wouldn’t be putting my money on.

Web Two Point Ohhhhh!

So yesterday instead of doing my term project (as always) I wondered if I can make a Proxomitron filter to filter out all the crap you get when you visit a MySpace page (horrible abuse of CSS, cheesy animated GIFs, Flash, etc). So just now instead of doing my term project I logged in to the site to find some random profiles to see what needs to be filtered out. I realized what needs filtering is not the presentation, it’s the content. Who the hell needs blinking pink stars around a teddy bear with some text that says “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Birthday” or “Thanks for the add!” or “Best Friends Forever”?

How the hell do you communicate properly over that much noise? And this is supposed to be the premiere social networking site of the internet? I can’t stand staying one minute at any MySpace profile, how can anybody use it for hours to, hmm, communicate? Or even browse for people, because, well, when you go to view another profile, you get yet another “creative” use of CSS and then some other song will start playing. I think that’s how kids listen to music nowadays anyway, play one minute of it, listen to the part they like and then start pressing buttons on the iPod again, so I guess it fits the audience.

I guess I’m just an old-fashioned Web 1.0 guy. If I just knew what these version numbers meant. One definition I heard of Web 2.0 is that the web is now the web of people you are connected to. Via BlogRolls (which reminds me, gotta update mine), via buddy lists in YouTube, MySpace (of course), Flickr, or just about every other website nowadays. And that it’s user generated content (blog posts, videos, photos), that plays a role in the 2.0 world. (If you take out all the user-contributed contents of Flickr or YouTube, you’d have a pretty empty site.) I wonder if user comments count in that equation. Because if you see YouTube or Digg, most of the comments there are just unnecessary blather. Some are thoughtful, witty, helpful, insightful, but most of them are just expletives and insults.

Another thing they said about Web 2.0 is that it’s enabled people to communicate the news on their own, independent of big media. Well I agree with this. Can you say “Macaca“? Then again, Webb’s campaign did talk to big media, generating hype before releasing the video on YouTube. I guess that’s a bad example, but there are other news items that big media really ignored and only talked about after it’s become big “on the internets”, or “the blogosphere”. But here’s another gripe I have with this: some people just post a link to the original content on their blog and write “Cool huh?”. Worse are people who just link to another blog that mention the original content “I saw this on X’s blog”, making it a hunt through the Blogosphere^TM! to get to the original content. I suppose if you don’t post it on your blog, your blog readers won’t see it, and the idea won’t spread. But hmm, at least comment about it, have some original content in your own blog! Heh, to be honest, it’s someone else’s blog, why do I have a say in what they want to put it in?

Anyway, I suck at writing essays, and it seems I’ve lost what I wanted to say. To restart/summarisize, it’s easier nowadays to have an online presence, and because of that easiness, a lot more people are now doing just that, have an online presence. Too bad that that means the same people that hang out at mall parking lots blasting loud music from their cars are now doing it, online! And I suppose the same goes for people who don’t have anything interesting to say in real life. Some of them come online, and guess what, they have nothing interesting to say online!¹ Luckily over here it’s easier to avoid these kinds of people: just close the tab. Still, there’s a lot of good content out there: great Flickr photos (whatever small percentage they are), encyclopedia-worthy articles, and interesting user discussions (Slashdot, Fark.com). Just got to sort out the noise from the signal.

1) I sometimes wonder if I fall into this category.

BSODOD

Or, “Blue Screen of Death – on Demand”.

Apparently Microsoft provides a way for you to generate BSOD’s when you wish, by modifying a registry entry and then pressing Ctrl+ScrollLock, ScrollLock . I can envision prank possibilities.

In Windows 98 it’s a lot easier: press the CD-ROM’s eject button while a CD is being read – instant BSOD. Well, death is not guaranteed, it usually is able to resume normally. So I guess it’s just BS?

ToDo’s & My New Robot

So, instead of working today, I stumbled upon Todo.txt, which is yet another To-Do-organizing system. It is based on plaintext though, so I was sold. I remember reading in this Library of Babel about a man who asked top hackers how they organize themselves. Most of the hackers responsed “plain text files”.

So I adopted this method. My problem is I’m sure I have at least 5 To-Dos.txt spread around the computers and storage systems (various remote filesystems, my GMail Drafts folder) I use. So, not well organized at all.

Todo.txt has its own concept, where each line of To-Do can have attributes (or are they tags? ) which makes it easy to filter accoriding to attributes. You can add, list and delete items using Bash commands, but I guess because the idea is simplification of life, someone made a bash script that makes it easy to manipulate the list.

And then someone got even more clever and made a Jabber-bot so you can play around with your ToDo’s over the internet. I’ve seen Jabber used by a server elsewhere once (an automatic build system that IMs you the build-status afterwards) and I loved the idea, so I decided to install it on my server.

It was trivial enough, and now there’s a new buddy in my Gaim buddy-list, the TodoBot.

Now I just have to feed it with data. And now that I have the basics, I’m wondering what other things I can do with the bot. Basically it just forwards everything I tell it to a bash script. It would be trivial to either modify the script, or modify the bot so it calls another script, e.g. to etherwake (that’s not a verb!) my desktop. Could one make a bot that accepts files and puts them online? One probably could.

I’m intrigued…

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

You have reached the very first post. Your journey ends here. Or begins here. Well, hi dear reader, I’m Louis, a 25 year old male living in Karlsruhe, Germany. Born in Jakarta, I got here 6 years ago after a detour from Sydney where I lived and went to highschool for 4 years (I miss that place).
This is probably my 4th blog (I was blogging before it became popular. ). The first ones ended up being filled with too personal content that aren’t really for strangers. Lately I’ve been reading so much junk on the internet that I’ve decided to throw myself into the ring and let my opinion be heard. So this is me going public. Let’s hope I’m not just adding to the junk.