December 2012
At some point when I was deciding to acquire my Bike Friday, Reed got a little envious and ordered a custom built one for himself. We decided the right thing to do was to travel somewhere and tour for a bit after getting our bikes, together, holding hands, the whole way. Well it took about a year but we finally went somewhere. There is, as it turns out, a sanctioned and well kept bike trail linking Copenhagen to Berlin. About 80% - 90% of it keeps you on bike only trails or very extremely once an hour low traffic roads. You'll see a ton of beautiful country side, and it's for the most part flat (except for a day in Germany).
I flew to Copenhagen (my first time) on July 30th, still cracked out from my sleepless leg leading up to Iceland. Some time around 07:00 in the morning I got out of the airport and next to a metro stop started resembling my nifty folding bike, which I've now named The One Trick Pony. I have to say that this particular photo makes me all giddy, instant bike!
With no cell service and some precached up Google bike maps (glad I thought about that before getting onto the plane) I started to trek across the city toward my friend Mona Jensen's place. After a very slow ride and drawing a lot of stares towards my odd small wheeled bicycle with trailer thing, I eventually made it. We ended up spending much of the day cruising around the city, bought my first two of nine total SIM cards for this trip (the two ended up not actually supporting data and I couldn't even get them activated).
Later we made our way to Christiania. I got to meet her friend who was their public relations person, and got a fairly interesting tour of their mini city. For being a neighborhood of squats with some sort of tourism thing going, they had their shit pretty together. Also aside from a falafel, I had my best Danish vegan meal there, which wasn't all that great. While hanging out my friend Jens Hillerup, who being the awesome hacker that he is, had a spare data ready Danish SIM card (3/9), I think I still owe him some money for. Hello maps!
The next morning Mona rode with me to the Illutron barge. After waiting for a while Reed finally showed up from the airport on his silly folding bike too. We hanged out for a bit, Mona did a walk through of the barge (hacker space on water!) then ran around the city for a while. Went and checked out Labitat, Jens gave us a proper tour, I have to say they have a pretty neat lab there.
Later in the eve we met back up with Mona at the barge, had some sort of dinner thing, beers, and passed out.
In the morning we showered (on the barge, but that's another story), saddled up, and head out of Copenhagen. We were really astonished by how friendly car drivers were to cyclists out there, even to the point of them simply getting out of our way. Additionally another constant theme was the fact that even though our bikes were weird, we tended to be the only ones riding the most functional for touring bikes, which I think I'll get into in another post. Reed eventually tried to make friends with some sheep.
By the end of the first day we reached a place named Køge, which is pronounced [ˈkøːə] but don't hold me to that as I apparently never got it right. We kind of didn't have the greatest of experience in this city, it felt too much like Marin, and was even more expensive.
After some deliberation, a review of how much our enjoyment level was of the ride was here in Denmark so far, and paying for our overpriced hostel room, we decided it might be a smart idea to skip out on the majority of Denmark and high tail it to Germany. With getting some help from our state side Danish friend Rikke, we hopped onto a train the next morning (yelled at for boarding on first class) and got dropped off about 30 km out of a town named Gedser. While biking to the port there I found some high priced Danish Lärabars, a bag of dehydrated mulberries (which lasted me through the whole trip, so good), and at a garage sale a very odd t-shirt with the word Confusion written on it in hand writing I couldn't immediately read.
The ferry which was to take us over the Baltic Sea ended up being huge. We were essentially pedaling our tiny bikes inside this giant ship on an 8 lane highway next to the largest semi trucks I've ever seen in my life. The ferry took about an hour, during of which we were encouraged to roam around the 4 story mall on the thing, dine in three different restaurants, play in their arcade, get a pedicure, or shop in whatever their version of a high end department clothing store is. While eating some fries and reviewing our next half day of riding, I pulled out the two (3/9 and 4/9) German SIM cards that Astera sent me to see if we could get it running (which we weren't able to till we found some internet access). Our last views of Denmark were a vast ocean field of wind turbines.
Copenhagen was fun and I enjoyed hanging out with Mona and Jens, but wow the rest of Denmark was surprisingly boring, bare, and whenever a city did come into view, rather expensive for light travelers. I would like to go back some time and play in their amusement park though. [xmlgm {https://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photoset.gne?set=72157632183140893&nsid=98601772@N00&lang=en-us&format=kml_nl&georss=1} minlat=55.562219;minlon=12.400548;maxlat=55.562219;maxlon=12.400548;zoom=10]
Some extremely poorly shot photos from my Android during my 19 hour layover in Reykjavík before heading to Denmark over last (last) summer. My flight there was from Seattle, which I figured I could get some sleep on before hitting Iceland. As it turns out that time of the year if you're flying that high North, there's no sunset for you. No one really informed me of this little fact of nature before hand. I knew it was a thing but it just didn't dawn on me that I would be faced with this thing while attempting to sleep. Boy did my body freak. By the time I got there I was thoroughly cracked out. Might have gotten a 2 hour nap in there at some point.
Met up with Andi and (surprised to realize we were on the same city, let alone land mass) Ella for foods, drinks, and a quick dip in a hot tub before heading back to KEF. As it turns out their airport has no lockers and you can't check in your luggage 19 hours before your flight, bastards.
As you can see by 23:00 it was still light outside. Andi's friends were excited that they were just now able to start using candles again. Iceland is a lovely place but I sure have no intentions of living up that far North anytime soon.
I put this together using Kdenlive on Linux. The only snag that I hit was scaling titles from from 1080p to 720p, which seems to be a known bug and apparently fixed that I didn’t feel like compiling a bunch of fresh stuff. I hope to do a little more video later on down the line.
The only shot I took in Minneapolis, which is odd considering how much I enjoy photographing my friends there. And this marks the finish of my 2010/11 travels. Was gone for about 2 months, felt so long at first, but far to quick in the end. I would like to do another similar trip at some point again, except more like half a year to a year.
Home is where the heart is.
Years ago (late 2005), when I was in the middle of moving back to San Francisco, a good friend of mine gifted to me his ThinkPad T41. He was about to go traveling and had acquired one of those new amazing netbooks that hardly anyone uses these days, additionally his company didn't seem to want the T41 back. I was going through a transitional phase in my life, what with moving and all. The new (to me) laptop was quite an important gift in how I've shaped into a bit of a hacker over the years. It's safe to say I wouldn't be so into the open source movement if it wasn't for this machine.
Before moving back to SF, I had multiple machines I interfaced with. A much slower (yet so slim and light, they don't make them like they used to) and beaten up ThinkPad 570 (which now is somewhere at Noisebridge, along with its mate that I cannibalized for parts), a clogged up large desktop machine with two over 17" heavy CRT displays, an extremely disorganized server box. All three of these machines ran Windows in some form or another. I had 3 other desktop machines where I experimented with FreeBSD and various Linux distros, but they were so old and run down that I hardly ever touched them. Windows seemed to work and that was that, and back then having multiple computers was a normal thing for myself and friends I knew.
When it came to be time to start packing things away, preparing to transplant myself to a newer (smaller and up 2 flights of stairs) dwelling, I was loathing the notion of relocating all of my computers. That was around when the T41 fell into my lap, the friend simply asked me to wipe the drive before using it for anything. My mind was blown. The machine was much faster than my laptop or desktop, it had ports, it worked, it was pretty awesome. I named the machine Morocco, after the first destination my friend was about to travel to.
I don't know why I decided to install Linux onto it, but Ubuntu was turning into a thing back then, and it seemed like a fun experiment to do before I tossed my other machines. Well, it stuck, for a long time. I don't think I ever got around to install Windows natively on that machine, ever. Eventually I either got rid of the other boxes or converted them to some form of Linux. In the end I donated the desktop machines and CRTs to some nonprofit that a friend was a part of. All I had left was this ThinkPad and a really tiny home server (Shuttle when they were still producing cheap hardware). Some how that purge made me feel like an adult at that point.
The T41 saw its fare share of action, thankfully being built like a tank it didn't give a damn what happened to it. During a Fire Arts Festival, we had some epic computer failure. In an emergency I plugged Dance Dance Immolation into Morocco, and after about 30 minutes the USB ports got fried (and as it turns out the machine suffered the same fate a year or two ago under its previous owner, and had gotten serviced). I replaced the power board due to the power port becoming faulty. Plastics cracked, the exterior got more scuffed, covered in stickers. Thing kept on ticking.
I learned many life lessons about administrating a Linux desktop machine, and how there's a very thin and sharp line with burning time between fixing a computer constantly and using a computer as a tool for creativity. I eventually got really frustrated with the state of Linux on desktops and how more of my time was going towards fixing Linux every 10 minutes than doing fun things on it, like playing with photography.
During a party while playing music the machine marinated in a puddle of Gatorade over night while trying to frantically put itself to sleep, over and over again. Found it with almost no battery life left, some how still running but full of liquid electrolytes. I quickly pulled battery and started taking it apart, draining the machine, noticing that metal bits here and there had shifted in color from the exposure to the liquid and electricity. Dried it as best as I could, put it together, wouldn't turn on, started freaking out. I panicked, quickly went window shopping for a new machine that would have good Linux compatibility, realized how much of a fool I was at thinking such I thing would exist at the time. A friend recommend I try switching over to a Mac. It took a good solid 2 hours of research and a tiny bit of peer pressure, but sure enough the next day I was the owner of a new 15" MacBook Pro.
I regret making that switch now, but I still continued to touch Linux boxes here and there. That and I can't ignore how I wouldn't be into photography as much as I am now if I hadn't found Lightroom then. It also made me appreciate GNU based tools so much more. Anyhow, that phased lived on for about 3 years and 2 different piece of Apple hardware, I became increasingly more paranoid about damaging my precious pieces of Cupertino hand crafted aluminum egg shells, and fearful over running anything that might break OSX to the point where I need to either reinstall or go to an Apple Store since I can't simply debug that stuff by hand. The first one just flat out died and wouldn't power on one day (also at the Fire Arts Festival), the second one grew some very obnoxious issues that Apple wasn't willing to address nor would they give me the means to debug myself. And so 1.5 years ago I switched back to Linux by picking up a ThinkPad X220 and running Debian on it, I've been rather happy since then. Linux on the desktop is very much a working thing now, with minimal upkeep.
The ThinkPad T41 continued to live on. After about a month or two of drying and a surface mount resistor replacement, the machine booted back up like nothing was wrong. I've used it as a dummy kiosk for events, hardware to run projects, a networking router on playa. The BIOS battery eventually gave out, it'll continue to boot up but I can't get into the BIOS to alter boot up drives as it's now asking me for a password. I got Debian up and running on a 2nd machine and swap the drive back into the T41, to be used as a guest or loaner machine. Friends have used it as a simple web browser here at my house, and I loaned it off to another friend who was in need of a Linuxy machine to do work on Zoa, a Flux Foundation for Burning Man project, while her new ThinkPad X230 was in transit from China (to replace her own ancient ThinkPad which had also just recently died).
I got the machine back this past weekend and wanted to do a distribution upgrade before charging the battery and setting it aside for use by visiting friends later. Sadly the machine no longer wants to boot off of the internal hard drive. I've tried other drives, but alas I think there's something now terribly wrong with the IDE controller. After working on it all this morning, I've decided the time has come for Morocco, time to move on.
The pace at which technology moves now, we've stopped growing attached to the devices we interface with. Now we more focus onto our data and the services that hold them, using desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smart phones, simply as a window to reach out and hold that data close. Running off of the T41 really pushed me into doing more fun and interesting stuff with Linux, and made me learn how important the free open source software movement is (well also in part by switching over to Mac). To some extent that machine symbolizes freedom to me, from closed software and from a past life I no longer live attached to multiple objects and ways of thinking.
Thanks to the friend who gifted the laptop to me, and thanks to the machine itself, that was a good solid 7 years.
First photo by Edrabbit, shared under the CC BY-NC license.
Towards the end of my trip, Chicago felt a bit like home. I wasn't bothered much by the cold, and they were done with their record snow fall. Hanging out with friends there was rather excellent. It almost felt like a vacation from my travels.
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