I did a hitchhiking race from Lille to Copenhagen in one week. We were 24 teams of 2 (m/m or m/f, for safety issues) with 15 organizers. Every morning, we were given an envelope with the destination of the day and we had to get there without spending a penny. We went to Utrecht (a mini-Amsterdam in the Netherlands), Niederlandenbeck (a small village of 40 peoples in Germany), Hambourg (a mini-Berlin), Kolding and Copenhagen (in Denmark). In one week, we did ~ 1400 kms (870 miles) and we got there with approximately 24 cars and one truck. The truck driver asked us to unshoe because he installed a little carpet. There was also a porn calendar and some kitchen paper at hand's reach, it was pretty funny. We went in a car with a CEO who just signed a 100 000 € contract and was pretty happy in a beautiful Mercedes, he created a product which aims to reproduce the yellow pages for compagnies. There was a guy who did MMA, a couple who went to a little cabin in Sweden to disconnect from the world and breathe, a sculptor, a fisher who fished in Antarctica and builds roads who was at 220 km/h (136,70 mph) on the highway in Germany. There was a guy who did a 500 kms detour for a team. Another who bought 6 burger kings menu to 3 teams. A lot of great people. Overall it was a really great experience.
Now I'm back to reality and I have to be ready for school/university interviews while searching for a summer job, but I spend way too much time playing Civilization V with friends. I'm also planning an Interrail trip in August and for now we planned to go to Milan, Rome, Athens, Istanbul and Prague. It should be another great adventure.
Wow, talk about a cool thing to do. I've never hitch-hiked but you make it sound like an interesting experience. Funny that you were in Utrecht, I have a friend who is studying there right now.
I hitchhiked with my boyfriends across the Balkans last summer. We made some awesome and interesting encounters as well! Here is what happened on only the first day we tried hitchhiking: http://foundonland.tumblr.com/post/96595634115/first-time-hitchhiking http://foundonland.tumblr.com/post/96701704525/hichkiking-adventures-from-romania It was no race so we had some nice leeway to just hang out and go with the flow of things. We did slept at the house of the person that picked us up twice during the whole trip. I guess saving money is one of the reason we did it, but we could have afforded buses too. If was just more of an adventure this way :)
That's some great encounters ! Yeah, I think it's important to just take a moment and enjoy where you are. We arrived at the periphery of Utrecht by truck (trucks can't go into the city), so we were some kilometers away from the finish line of our first destination. We were near a match of field hockey and we posed to just relax and enjoy. It was funny, because the crowd (18 years old) had big buckets of beer (3 liters) and we don't have that in France near playing fields. So we just posed, taked a beer, watch the match, and it finished 10-15 minutes after we arrived -- we were pretty lucky because then we found a player which was going home, directly to the heart of Utrecht, at the finish line of our race. There are some great tips here : http://hitchwiki.org/en/Top_Tips Basically, we found that having a sign isn't really necessary, because most people will not stop if they don't go to the city, even if they can help you by taking you for some period of time in the right direction. Most important : (1) Good spot : that means the car/truck can stop with safety and without interfering with traffic. The best spots are gas station on the highway, because people are going your way (generally) and if there is place in their car, it's extremely difficult to say no if you are a logical person. (2) Eye Contact/Speaking : I read on your blog you were shy of maintaining eye contact. I'm more an introvert than an extrovert person, but in the context of the race, we had to find a car, and the best way was really to just knock on cars to speak with them and to explain the situation. If you can speak to the person, I would say there is a 50/50 probability it's going to be good if they are going your way. It's harder to say no when you speak to them than when you just have your thumbs up.
Yeah, that was our first ever time hitchhiking so at first it's a bit uncomfortable. We got better pretty fast and were pros by the end of it ;) I found that our big Canadian flag really helped A LOT. Many people stopped to ask if we were really from Canada and then told us to hop in since they were already stopped. Huge facepalm when I forgot it in someone's car towards the end of our trip.
Awesome! I hitchhiked from London to Copenhagen and back one summer many years back. It was a great experience – stayed at some people's houses even. I was with a friend and we'd take turns, one of us holding a sign and the other juggling. We got picked up very quickly most times. Stopped in Utrecht on the way back and it became my favorite city in the Netherlands. Yes, like a mini-Amsterdam, smaller and quieter and not crowded. Thanks for sharing your story! Sounds awesome!
That sounds like a lot of fun. Did you get to pick the teams or were they chosen for you? I used to hitch hike in college from time to time. I stopped after being picked up by two weirdos in a van with beer cans all over the floor and hand guns visible. They never said a word to me. It was terrifying. All my other experiences were fine. Your next adventure sounds amazing too. Good luck!
We got to choose the teams, but I met my partner only 2 weeks before the race. We were discussing travelling destinations with friends and this race came up. We had a mutual friend which organized the race and we called him up and it turned out a team just signed out of the race so there was a new spot. We got pretty lucky there. There was 3 'accidents' : a team got in a truck and arrived in a hangar to reload the truck. Nothing happend, but you never know and it might have been dangerous. Another team got picked up by a huge weed-smocker. The guy had a carboy oxygen that he used after smocking to breathe while driving, pretty surreal, but they arrived safely. Another team got to an after party at 7-8 am in Hambourg and the host had a shoebox full of weed, was doing rails of coke and showed off his gun. At the end, everything went fine and it was fun, but it's risky.
I don't know if i'm going to hitchhike again. You can meet a lot of people and that's fun, but I find the argument 'it cost less money' lacking in the sense that, to get to Copenhagen (1400 kms), we did it in 40 hours while the best team did it in 30 hours. We can work for half of that time and take a car-sharing services to get there. It's less adventurous, but it's more secure. It's difficult to find a great balance.
Yesterday was my last day of high school. I am all done. Going to Syracuse in the fall. I am so excited.
That's a good feeling. I still remember the feeling of true liberation that overcame me when I was finally done with HS. Grade school is a prison, and it obscures the nature and size of the world. It was bad enough in the 90s; by all accounts it's a lot worse now, so I can't even imagine how bad it would suck at this point.
Hold for at least a month or two. Really the only reason to go to Windows 10 is directX 12 and there will be nothing using it until the holiday buying season. Let the other people beta test the new version of Windows and figure out what is and is not compatible. This goes for every OS release for all others reading these words. New OS deployments always suck, they always break something and are usually patched withing 6-8 weeks.
BUT YOU MUST HAVE A TOUCHSCREEN DON'T YOU KNOW? I have nothing against touch screens. but the notion of progress and "innovation" for their own sake REALLY bugs me. How about making the OS more efficient? How about REALLY focusing on stability, usability, and security? How about forgetting all of the gadgety crap? This goes for everything: cars, phones, computers, appliances. Just settle down and stop acting like every new feature is a must have in the modern world. whoa... rant over.
Had a full day at the ministry of Infrastructure today discussing the future of autonomous vehicles. Turns out they developed almost the same approach to the topic as I do in my own thesis! (mine's a bit more refined though, to be honest) LinkedIn is the bomb. I've gotten two invites for coffee with interesting people, one because of the Esri win and one because of today's discussion. elizabeth, have you seen the new Cortex podcast? It's basically CGPGrey fan service. Anyway, in it they discuss home screen layouts. I wonder who else here carefully consideres their home screen layout. What do you see when you open your phone? What can you tell about a person looking at it? Here's mine, judge away: 
This is an interesting question, and maybe worth a post of its own. Here's my home screen and the second page Some time ago I enabled the "grayscale" setting as a reminder to look at my phone less, so I would not look like that guy so often. It worked better than expected, and now if I switch back the colors look unpleasantly garish.What do you see when you open your phone?
I had a period like that, were I tried to optimize my home screen. I used to go to http://mycolorscreen.com/ ; there are some awesome home screen there that you can reproduce by tweaking a bit your phone. I used to have this one http://mycolorscreen.com/2013/08/09/ios-5-0-key-lime-pie-2/ -- kind of minimalist and simple, with icons from this one http://mycolorscreen.com/2013/08/26/ios-a8/ I really like this one as well : http://mycolorscreen.com/2011/12/09/multihome/ Since I rebooted my phone I didn't change the ui/ux. I might do that soon though.
Oh God, I've been writing thank you notes all day. My hand hurts. They all feel so copy/pasted, since I can't write everyone something nice and personalized...whatever, I'm almost done. First, to all of you who were listening to me in IRC the other night (lil, am_Unition, galen, and others) I got the housing contract figured out with my university! (Due to a typographical error, all of the emails were being sent to the wrong address, and I missed the deadline by 2 days.) I had to go in in person to hash out the details, but all of the faculty were very kind and understanding, and it only took maybe an hour. All in all, it ended very well, just like you all told me it would! I leave for a week long canoe trip on Friday (I'm certain I've talked about it on pubski before), so I'm consolidating all of my camping gear and getting organized. It's going to be a hell of a trip--just my family, and two good friends. Three of us are eagle scouts, and everyone has been camping for their entire lives, so it seems like a perfect combination. I'll tell you all more about it afterwards, I'll try to take pictures and draw a hub-wheel somewhere!
Toldja. Glad it worked out. :) The best thing you can do when you're in a real pickle is to show up in person. Especially if you're at least somewhat presentable and well-mannered. I have found that treating employees in any service industry as people is something that occurs far too sparingly for anyone interfacing with the public. Maybe you treated them fairly decently. I made life scout, was just shy of eagle two merit badges and my service project. Everyone warned me; "Cars... and Girls," they said. Get it all done now, because of cars and girls. "Cars" turned out to be other things, in my case, but they were right about girls.
Personally, I'm not a fan of the BSA on a national level, but my troop is full of great, tolerant, and generous people. Two of our adult leaders are lesbians, and as far as I'm aware, it's never once been an issue within the troop. I'm proud of getting my eagle, and I'm glad I listened to my parents when they told me to finish it! What exactly were your "Cars," if I might ask?
I have the same thoughts on BSA. It was a set of experiences that are foreign to many. Really applicable stuff. But the whole LGBT thing... seems pretty regressive, which does make some sense given the traditional/conservative nature of BSA. Anyway, you should be proud, of both the eagle and graduating high school (I think you just did that, right?). Already got one thing to set you apart from your peers, and that's usually a positive feedback loop that perpetuates throughout the rest of your life. My "cars" were academics, music, and work. Am I about to use this phrase? Oh boy, I am. Here we go. Gettin' old. Look, I'm rambling and everything. When I was your age, senior year, I was working as a grocer bag boy thirty hours a week, taking something like five AP courses and three regular ones, one of which was band. Piano lessons. Oh, oh, and I drummed for a Church youth band, lolz. I did about half of my sleeping in class. Actually I think the following all happened when I was a sophomore, but whatever, I never slept enough throughout all of high school. So one night, I had simply been not ninja enough and my mom wakes up, and bursts into my room (another mom story, sorry guys, it's like a once-a-week Pubski spectacle now): "Is that AOL Instant Messenger?" "Pshh, no, you know we only have internet downstairs." "YOU ARE TALKING TO YOUR FRIENDS, am_Unition, I KNOW WHAT THOSE SCREENS ARE FOR! WHERE IS THE CORD? HAVE YOU DRILLED HOLES IN OUR WALL TO RUN THE CORD UP HERE?" Damn, I was in tears. This lady was pulling my desk away from my wall to look for shit at 3 AM. I definitely got grounded for that one. Too bad the company I used made their antenna so obviously an antenna. I'd gotten Wi-Fi three months before I got caught, but you'd have never known it because the tech had come out pretty quietly, and my parents weren't looking for that sort of thing (but yeah, I was). I hid the router downstairs, and had to buy the NIC chip to install into my motherboard. Damn that chip's chubby little rotating antenna. OK, back to work, good watercooler break, amigos.
insomniasexx Anyone else in LA for a hubski meetup? Best weekend dates are Friday July 31 or Saturday August 1. I will be in Altadina, but can figure out the commuter train if necessary. I'll be downtown Sunday August 2 - August 4 and those evenings would also be good. First let's pick a date/time/place - and take it from there. Minimally it will be me at the hubski LA meetup, but maybe someone else will show up. I want to get this tentatively booked, so that I can plan around it. Over to you insom!
I'll be at a downtown hotel from August 2-4, driving north on the 5th. My HCI-I workshop is on the morning of Tuesday August 4, so that afternoon-evening would be a great time for a meetup for me.
this is the first week of my summer schedule that runs from 8 to 8. 3 hours of arabic in the morning, 8 hours of work, ~1 hour for transit all around. i feel ok now but let's check back in a few weeks and see how bedraggled i am
Welp, I bought a ticket to my first music festival and couldn't be more excited. Actually, it's my second, but the one I went to in Europe was much different than this one. RATATAT and others wowowowowow. Not only that, but Yo La Tengo is releasing a new covers album and going on tour and I will be buying a ticket for that on Friday. Over the past year and a half they've become probably the most important band to me and having the opportunity to see them is something I'm not going to pass up. Such a good week for music. Been playing a lot too.
Whoa. That's incredible. I've seen every one of those bands of the front page play before. That's a first for me. Secondly, Yo La Tengo puts on a hell of a show. I saw them a few years ago in Santa Cruz when they were doing the freewheeling tour. It was really cool to just chat with them for a long time while they were playing. I got to ask about the Sounds of Science soundtrack they did for the Criterion Collection of Jean Painlevé films they released. Super cool. I plan to see them here in DC again in September.
That's impressive. I'm only going one day and a big part of that is because The Julie Ruin is playing and Kathleen Hanna is one of the most important people in music of the last 25 years. I'm so jealous that you were able to talk to them, Ira Kaplan is one of my musical idols. Their entire story is incredible and they are the definition of doing it themselves and embody what the word "Indie" should be mean. Have you read Big Day Coming?
I used to ride my bike to work at least 2-3 days a week as long as it wasn't snowing - and I could do that most of the year even in Colorado. That was about 3 years ago. I started driving my kids to school in the mornings, and that cut the practice down to once a week, then once a month and then now... yah... I haven't ridden in so long that today, I rode in and everyone is looking at me funny. It was a great ride though... high clouds blocking the sun, a cool breeze... it was a little slice of heaven on earth.
My iPhone screen cracked last night. It was remarkably unsettling, I didn't realize how much I'm used to an intact screen and my fingers free of glass shards. I stressed over a few options; replace the screen myself (way too difficult, I'd need a dust free environment which I don't have); send it in for replacement ($300 and I'd be phoneless for two weeks since I'm hours away from the nearest Apple Store); or get a flip phone. Wouldn't you know it, my boss has a few old dumb phones laying around and he offered me one so I'm going to switch over tonight. I've read a few articles of the Internet-enslaved extolling the benefits of trading out constant connectivity for a bare bones phone, and while I can imagine what they say to be true, I can't sift for truth through all their enthusiasm. What do you guys think?
My iPhone has been cracked to the point it is nearly unusuable for the past weekish or two. Meh. I could feel better about it by saying I am detaching from my phone, but the truth is I was kind of in the process of that already. Otherwise I wouldn't have been able to not care enough to get it fixed for what is probably really about two weeks. I think it depends a lot on who your friends are and how they phone.
It's hard to say. I've found myself to be a bit of a phone addict recently (the problem isn't recent; me noticing it is), and I've therefore taken to leaving my phone in the car when I'm out and about, especially, say, when I'm out to dinner with friends and family. I can't say that I don't really like the utility of an iPhone (because I definitely do), but I think I like having it half time instead of all the time. That said, I don't think my life would be vastly altered with a flip phone (except I really like looking at the traffic on Google Maps). For $300, I would definitely not get another iPhone.
I'm sick. Sore throat and body aches. Starting to cough. My kids have been sick for almost two weeks. I'm going to Vancouver next week and I really don't want to be sick for it. Today I have to drive almost four hours to get to a conference room so I can ask virtual questions of our EVP. I have no questions and this is a giant waste of resources. On a positive note, I have been invited back for a second interview with an opportunity that sounds too good to be true. We shall see... Have a great day all!