A weekend in the Netherlands
On saturday morning, around 7:30, a time I very rarely get up, I packed my things in the car and started my journey to Utrecht. It’s actually rather close, just taking me a bit over 2 hours and everything was easy to find. Having arrived at place we continued our way to Amsterdam to help Hans move to his new appartment, as if I didn’t have enough moving action already. This is also where I met Mark Hall for the first time in real life, just having talked via e-mail a few days ago. He is really a very nice guy and as he is probably reading this (soon, once he has his account ;)) … nice to have met in you in real life Mark! ;)
We were 6 people and that made the move go very painlessly. I actually watched out the entire time that I do not twist my ankle, which happens a lot, and it didn’t, until of course we were done and I was moving down the stairs. Amazing. Thankfully nothing major happened and the foot was feeling ok again soon after. Some of us then waited inside a bar until Hans and a friend brought back the small truck. Looking back, we shouldn’t have drunk beer at 1300 without having really eaten something. Not that we were drunk but the constant small quantities of beer might have had a bad effect on our fitness the next day.
Anyway. We ate a little bit in a cafe and started talking. The talks were flowing through a lot of subjects far to numerous to be written down here but for me it was an amazingly nice thing to once again talk with very technology interested people. I just didn’t have that a lot in recent times having move to Cologne. I need to change that a bit here. :)
We then decided to go to Amsterdam to the Milkway, a club, because they had some DJs from Ninjaclub (or a similar sounding label). We thought we’d also go eat out in Amsterdam but on our way we went past a very nice Indian Restaurant and then ate there. It was really wonderful. I had some spicy chicken and it was just right. I mean it was hot, but not so hot that you only feel hot after a little while. It seemed that it was perfect for me.
Then we went on to Amsterdam and entered Milkway. The first DJ was ok but then came the main act, if you can say so. Two guys working with 4 turntables and sequencer/sampler. In short, they rocked. The vibe was amazing and you could see them work and saw the musician in them. With the first guy you just had somebody putting on music and doing some strange stuff with it. But the others seemed to be composing. Really cool. I was the one driving that night and didn’t drink anything but listening to them was enough of a stimuli. I must look for a few more clubs in Cologne to find something similar.
Around 3 am we left and Thijs and me headed back to Utrecht and went right to bed. About 10 to 11 he came in and said we were leaving again for Haarlem (where Hans lives now) in 10 minutes… Thankfully I was already awake and he told me last night that this is how we were handling it. It was a rough getting up but then, after a short delay, we were already out of the door and in the car. Sadly meeting the others for the real Lucid Lunch meeting was proving to be a bit harder than we thought and it took until 14:00 until all were there. We all wanted something real to eat and found that in a cafe that was selling burgers and stuff. They were actually very good though I still think the idea of an egg on a burger is weird :)
We started to get our scheduled discussion going in there. “Metaphors in Technology”. Interesting subject really. As a simpler example, is it good that in our computer the Desktop is called or referred to as the Desktop? Would it have been better to call it Poopeldu because we would not have been restraint by what we expect from a Desktop? Or might it really help in terms of the learning curve? What should we look out for when choosing a metaphor? When choose something we know and when create something new? Where are the limits? Hans already mentioned and Mark then explained further the Places, People, Thing metaphor system which was about trying to get the metaphor idea as far as possible. For example for our meeting you would go into a room (on your computer, something referred to as a room). There you would find all people attending and applications that you need for that meeting. I think you get the point. It was a very interesting discussion and I have to say that it went really well in terms of getting 7 people to all contribute their views and manage to meet somewhere even if not totally agreeing. I am looking forward to the next meeting already.