It‘s party time again. Like every year, the Nation Of Gondwana is scheduled to take place at July 12th/13th. This time it is going to be at Schloss Dammsmühle, close to Berlin. You find an interactive route description starting at Berlin Alexanderplatz here.

Nation Of Gondwana has a track record of being the alternative party event at Love Parade weekend. It is an outstanding open-air event with an interesting line-up of DJs (most notably: Sven Dohse and Der Dritte Raum) and is renowned for its outstanding and very funny performances at the event.

There is photo archive of Nation Of Gondwana 2002. Project Blinkenlights was doing its experimental Bushfire installation there as well.

On my last trip I have photographed some objects that you might want to use as a desktop picture.

Rome Airport

Apart from the little details there are also some major differences to be found if you compare european countries. Well, actually I can‘t really compare them all but Italy has a slightly different approach when it comes to traffic. Or to be more precise: traffic lights.

While a red traffic light in Germany is considered a rule it is more seen as being a recommendation in Italy. A red light means something like: „you might probably want to stop as there is a good chance for competing traffic from other directions“ while in Germany it means simply „stop“.

This might sound scary first but the good thing about it is that it produces much „optimized“ traffic on the one hand and less superflous stops on the other hand. It also has the advantage that people will never expect a green light to be a undisputable sign of a clear way. I don‘t really know how pedestrians fit in this game but it might be the same with both systems.

Italian traffic somehow mimics Internet standards: there are recommendations and you usually do fine folllowing them. There is, however, room for optimizations that might make you ignore one of these recommendations without actually doing any particular harm to the whole concept.

Great ice cream is being served at Via San Quintino 31. This is a traditional, sicilian ice cream maker. That place is so crowded that the counter is organized like your local registration office. On entry you take a ticket with a number and then you wait until your number is on display. A friendly crowd of nice ladies is at your service on three counters at the same time. Never seen an ice-cream shop so busy.

My recommendation: Granite, which is basically flavoured crushed ice. You get it in all colors. I chose coffee and lemon (one after the other, of course) and I can understand why this place is as popular as it is. And it‘s open until 1 in the morning.

I am about to finish my trip to Italy. As usual, these vacancies give you some new impressions and hopefully new conclusions.

I closed my day with a visit to a restaurant deep in the suburbs of Torino. The restaurant is called „Manhattan Pub“ and if you will be in Torino once, I can only recommend going there (Via Giachino 46). I just participated in the biggest and one of the best-tasting Pizzas I ever had. The pizza for six people covered the table completely and delivered on my dreams without compromise.

My italian friends fetched me at the ground station of the mountain railway to Superga. What followed was a high-speed drive through the streets of Torino. Seems as if everybody feels like driving a Ferrari all the time. So Italy is also delivering: be prepared to discover the stereotypic behaviour that you probably have in your mind when you think about this very special place in Europe. Meanwhile, the back-seat passengers where busy exchanging Amore.

There are some things where Italy really excels. One is food, the second is the devotion to discussion (the use of mobile phones is beyond what I expected) and the third is the warmth that people use when communicating with each other. No comparison to what I am used to in Germany. Especially when you relate to the computer scene.

The hackers here seem to be much more integrated and „normal“. Of course, there is nerdy behaviour, but it is either taking less precedence or there is simply not the same amount of necessity in developing it as in Germany where the nerds seem to be much more distuinguished than the scene over here. But it is just a first impression and I may be also completely wrong. Take it as just one more reality to choose from in your daily life.

I left „El Barrio“ and took some time out to explore the center of Torino. It is deserted. It seems if everybody has left the city or was expelled for some other reason. Quiet Earth.

Most of the shops are closed. It comes to my mind that this is a deeply catholic society. So everything is closed on sunday. Well, not everything but downtown Torino is not the place I would recommend to my friends on christian holidays.

The city is pretty dense. Huge, monolithic buildings, one after the other. Small roads. No much free space although here and there some small parks have been thrown in. It‘s like a „buy two and get one free“ offer. You go for the bonus but in the end you just get the initial offer. So I leave the center and walk my way along the big road towards the river Po. It is getting nicer and nicer then. And greener. Public football places, kids playing. Every now and then a refreshing public water supply.

I finally I found my way to the Superga mountain railway station. I spend EUR 4,13 on a return ticket (8000 Italian Lira). I enjoy the trip with the ancient cable car and on the top I am being served with a beautiful view on Torino. Well, it could be better as the weather is a bit dizzy today.

On the top of the mountain there is basically a church and a couple of shops. A classic tourist trap. The church is under reconstruction so you can‘t get in anyway. I dont‘t care as I am fed up with churches anyway. I rarely visit even museums when I enter foreign cities. It is so boring. The shops offer a a mix of fan articles for the two big J‘s: Juventus and Jesus. I guess most people go for Jesus, with Juve securing a strong second place. While I was shaking my head, hacking on my log a bit and listening to the disgusting pop music that poured out of the bar‘s shrieking loudspeakers some people were folding out flags and were generally spending too much money on useless stuff.

I am spending some of my money on some useless paraphernalia as well. I am not too unhappy with it as I am able to bring it down to a reasonable price. Then I have to leave. My tourist job has ended. I am going to rejoin with some of the Hackmeeting guys in hope for a delicious meal.

My flight leaves at 7 in the morning. Hope I will find some sleep before.

The Hackmeeting has come to end. Traditionally this is done by assembling everybody in a huge discussion circle to talk about how everything has been, what should have been better and what is next.

The next Hackmeeting is going to be in Genua. And there are plans for an additional, trans-national event that much more addresses crowds from other countries calling for participants from Croatia to Spain, from Italy to Germany. And probably everybody else.

As I said before, this is important. Don‘t know if my presence has stimulated anything but focusing on international events is a good thing. We are trying to do this at the Camp as the dutch hackers have been doing it for more than a decade now.

Got spare time? Experienced with scissors? Then you might want to check out „『ロボットタイリク』ロボットカタガミ★２６„.

Hopefully, the title of this link actually actually displays in japanese characters in your browser. I have actually no clue what it means as I just copied and pasted it from the web site and do not understand a single concept of the japanese language. I hope it doesn‘t mean „Welcome To Adobe GoLive“ or something similar offensive :-)

But most probably, the title of the page won‘t reveal the same graphical impression to you as the creator of the page forgot to correctly encode the used character set (Shift-JIS) in his web page.

The creator probably assumed that nobody except japanese people would be interested in cutting out paper robots. He (or she) was wrong. And now the page looks a bit awkward when you first open it and your defauöt encoding is not Shift-JIS. So what can we do?

First, you can try to manually select the Shift-JIS encoding (also called „Character Set“ oder „Character Coding“) from the appropriate menu in your browser. This should fix the display of the page and of the page title as well (of course the title is still broken in Internet Explorer on the Mac even if you select the correct encoding).

Taking care of proper encodings and declaring the DOCTYPE of your web documents is important. It helps other people read what you are talking about. It helps browsers to properly render what you graphically intended.

Web standards are the glue of the information age. Let‘s apply it.

The Hackmeeting community is renowned for its discussion-based decision making. The whole event is organized via a single mailing list where everybody contributes and where everything is being discussed over and over until a decision can be made that is backed by most or everybody on the list.

One of these decisions is to have a restricted access to the Internet. One of the reasons for it seems to be the good experience that was made with this in Catania two years ago where there was no Internet at all.

When I look around the rooms where people sit and work with their machines I see them doing basically the same things I am used to see at the Congress: trading files, watching some movies, playing Quake a bit, working with the command line and so on. The servers are filled with the usual mix of ripped media: audio, video and books. Quite a lot of Linux installed, almost no Windows in sight. I have seen around five Macs so far but some people confuse me when they look on my screen asking: „Ah! This is Mac OS X? Quite beautiful…“.

So the only real change is the absence of external web pages. But this also means: no researching, no updates, no search engines, no news, no web services. I don‘t get it but nobody seems to complain. They are busy discussing and learning which is not a bad thing.

I no longer make a distinction between Internet and Intranet. I can‘t work without Internet being „on“. I use it like a bookshelf and I feel handicapped if my favourite encyclopedias are gone.