Without a Traceroute

I bought another bike yesterday. This one cost me €50, plus €10 for a clamp-style lock for the rear wheel (I’m going to get a second, even heftier lock soon). It’s somewhat worse than the bike that was stolen, and it rattles a lot. My hope is that I will be able to sell it at the end of my time in the Netherlands for most of the purchase price.

You can see the lock on the wheel

I also met with one of the guys from PUSCII. He seemed like a very interesting, intelligent guy, but also very intense. He apparently spent 10 days in jail for chaining himself to railroad tracks along with other protestors to block the movement of trains carrying equipment for the war in Iraq. The charges were eventually dropped in response to bad press. He’s a true old-school computer guy, he even has a Commodore 64. He seemed to feel like the hacktivism scene in Europe was getting stale from a peak in the late 90s with the tech bubble. PUSCII at this point doesn’t have much of a physical presence, and he said it’s been hard attracting volunteers. He did give me some tips on other groups that might be more active (including a couple in nearby Amsterdam). So I’ll probably try to check that out.

The PUSCII sign

For dinner I cooked up this thing that’s sort of a Turkish equivalent of the frozen burrito. It was actually fairly tasty with vegetables and spices and stuff (I cooked it in the oven instead of the microwave, which usually helps). But what was really bizarre is that actually printed(?) onto the wrapper/tortilla part of it is the word “Mmm”. You can see it in the photo below. When I first saw it, I thought I was imagining it, or that I’d somehow failed to remove all the plastic covering. But no, it’s actually printed on there with food coloring or something. As a general rule, I try to avoid readable food, with special exemptions for alphabet soup/cereal.

"Mmm"

This week is “Uit” (Out) week, which is basically an introduction week for new students. Pomona readers, it’s sort of parallel to OA. They actually have 3 separate introductions for new students. This week, Uit, is like an introduction to the city of Utrecht. There’s lots of parties and street fairs (one was blasting old-school Will Smith) and such. Next week, they can pledge to these student organizations that are sort of like frat/sororities, except co-ed, much larger, and several hundred years old. The week after that, there’s an academic orientation with people from their department (in Europe, you come into university with a major already chosen) to get them ready for classes. Apparently by doing the academic orientation last, kids are frequently so sick of introduction-things that they blow off half of those events.

Anyway, there were tons of goings-on related to Uit week, as you can see from the photos. What isn’t quite clear from the pictures is the degree to which Uit takes over the city. This stuff is spread out all over the city center, not just in one square or on one street. There was a ferris wheel–interesting historical note/plug for Chicago, the very first ferris wheel was invented for the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. It only cost one euro, so I rode it with a girl from Latvia who is visiting here. One of the student organizations had a camel they were letting people ride, so that was fun. The camel surprised me by not smelling awful at all. Also, it’s hard to tell from the photos but its front hump leaned to the left a lot. For some reason I assumed camel humps would be basically symmetric.

I got in touch via email with a woman who’s similarly studying technology activists, though in a much more formal way, as a Ph.D. candidate at the European University Institute. Her website was/is here, but it seems to be dead from a database glitch right now. I also made an appointment to meet with one of the main guys from PUSCII.

In de Neude square, I talked to some people from the international students group here, and they were very friendly and welcoming. They invited me to come by their office and see what kind of events they have planned, and to their weekly Tuesday night meet-and-greet, and also to a large party they were throwing that night.

I went to dinner at this pancake place with a Dutch mapmaking student from couchsurfing. Looking at the menu, they had both sweet and savory types of pancakes, so I sort of assumed that “pancake” actually meant “crepé”, and I ordered the ham and cheese one. They actually were real (but thin) pancakes, and the ham and and cheese was sort of baked into it. They did intend for you to eat it with powdered sugar and syrup, so it was kind of a mix of sweet and savory.

Later that night, I went to the International Party along with the Latvian girl, and it was pretty cool. It was free to get in, the place was really busy and beers were only €1.20, yet somehow there wasn’t a line. I attribute this to the fact that there were at least a half-dozen other enormous parties occuring simultaneously at other venues. I talked to a math major girl, and we may have set a new world record for ‘nerdiest conversation ever had in a night club’ by discussing linear algebra.

All in all, it was a pretty awesome day.