I’m off to Budapest and I’m quite excited. Budapest is one of those cities that sounds famous and exotic. Everyone’s heard of it, but nobody knows anything about it. It’s like Tripoli or Casablanca.
Uitfeest was awesome. I’ll post more photos later, but here’s the Float-In Movie. I found it very charming.
Dutch people watching movie on the canal
Don’t get me wrong, the Netherlands is awesome, but it’s cold, grey, rainy and depressing here. I’m really looking forward to going someplace with sun. Furthermore, I feel like I’ve been here too long. I’ve gotten to know Utrecht well enough that I can find my way around without a map (at least in the center), and I’ve met quite a few cool people, but I’m starting to feel too comfortable. Everyone here speaks English, I know where the grocery store is, it’s too easy. I’m not challenging myself and I’m not getting outside my comfort zone. It’s time to leave.
I have a flight to Budapest on Monday to attend a conference about the EU Data Retention Act. I’m excited and I’ve heard really good things about Budapest. It is kind of weird though, because once I know when I’m leaving, I get into this “get out of Dodge” mentality where I’ve been running around trying to do and see as many things as possible. Tomorrow is the Utrecht Uitfeest, and all of the museums, art galleries and theaters in Utrecht will be open for free with special events. Utrecht has kind of a ridiculous number of museums for a city of its size (it’s about 300,000 people, and there’s probably a dozen museums). I especially want to see the Spoorwegmuseum (train museum) tomorrow, because it’s supposed to be cool, but it’s normally quite expensive. Tomorrow night, there’s also a “float-in movie theater,” where they show movies on the canal and people watch from boats. It sounds like a lot of fun, but I heard you have to get there quite early if you want to get a spot on a boat.
So the Amsterdam hackers have proven to be both wily and elusive. In email correspondence, they said that they’d be at their squatted hacklab anytime from 6 pm to midnight tonight. I went on the later end because I figured things would be more active (and because it takes a fairly complicated series of busses, trains and trams to get from where I’m staying in Utrecht to their place in A-dam), so I arrived around 10:15. After much fruitless ringing of bells and knocking of doors, another guy who lives at the squat arrived home and informed me that those I sought had all gone to this digital art gallery/exhibition, and gave me a flyer for the place.
I took another tram ride and tracked down the art gallery…just as they were closing up! A helpful art patron informed me that I’d missed the SLUG hackers by “just maybe 10 minutes,” and that he thought they were going back to their place. So I went back there, again. Right now, I’m sitting on the stoop in front of their building (I already tried the bell again), borrowing an open wireless connection to post this (thank you, essid J.C.). I’m going to give this 10 more minutes and then get out of here.
But after chasing these people all over Amsterdam for an hour and a half, I do have to ask, are they hackers…or ninjas?
UPDATE: I took the train back to Utrecht, but managed to miss the last bus out to my couchsurfing host’s place by 5 minutes (my timing is effing terrible), so I wound up staying in a crappy hostel and paying 21 euro for the privilege. I guess it beats sleeping at the train station. Oh, and all my clothes are at my host’s place. Hooray sleeping in your clothes. Anyway, yesterday sucked.
CERN’s new high-energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), went live yesterday. The $10 billion, 17-mile long particle accelerator has been 15 years in the making. Obviously, this is a major achievement for particle physics, and represents a serious commitment to “Big Science” and pure research. However, looking at the media coverage of the Large Hadron Collider, you would think that the only important question to be answered is whether the LHC will cause the end of the world.
There are at least two or three ways that the particle accelerator could maybe bring about the end of all life on earth. It might create a black hole that swallows up the earth, it could create strangelets, that would transform any regular matter into strange matter. It could create vacuum bubbles, or magnetic monopoles, with similar universe-destroying potential.
My last couchsurfing host was a high school physics teacher (his name is Otto Kool, so he’s literally Mr. Kool to his students), and he joked rather darkly that if the LHC wiped out humanity, it would seem “a fitting end to the human endeavor,” to destroy everything in an attempt to understand everything. Others were less sanguine about the prospect of ending all everything everywhere, at least two separate lawsuits were filed in attempt to stop scientists from switching the thing on. Fifty-four percent of respondents to an online AOL survey said that operating the LHC was “not worth the risk,” and of course AOL users are well-known for their expertise in the risks and rewards of high-energy particle physics.
Spore, the highly anticipated new game from Will Wright (the creator of SimCity, SimAnt and The Sims) launched on Friday here in Europe and tomorrow in North America. I was/am incredibly tempted to buy it. I saw it at the store here on Friday, but it’s €49.95 and the menus are all in Dutch. I was still tempted, but I think it would be a better idea to order it online, pay $49.99 USD and get an English-language version. EA actually has a direct-download option, where you could download the game online, but it comes with a lot of irritations I really don’t want to deal with.
You can only download it using their special download manager, which you then have to keep installed in order to have it check for authorization in order to keep playing the game. If you download it, there’s no provision for a refund in case the game doesn’t run well on your machine, or you just don’t like it for some reason (unlike the DVD hard copy version which can be returned for up to 15 days after purchase). Furthermore, if something happens to your harddrive (or you just need to delete the game for some reason), you can only re-download it for up to 6 months after the initial purchase. If you’re willing to pay an additional $5, you can extend that to two years.
In any case, it’s probably good that I don’t buy Spore right now. It would be pretty lame to waste my amazing time traveling playing a computer game. Still, I am sorely tempted, and this will probably be one of my first purchases on returning to the US.