15 hours left in Boston

Oh my God, these past 2 1/2 days have just gone by in absolutely no-time, I can barely believe that it's Monday evening already which means that I'll have to say my good-byes here in as little as 15 hours. It's weird, the last time when I was here at 1CC at the beginning of June the time also went by very quickly but at my departure I was very much aware of the fact that I'd be back soon. Tomorrow when I head to the airport it's going to be hard to convince myself that it's really au revoir, not good-bye as I'm sure to be back here at one point or another. However it's definitely going to be a few months and realistically the earliest I'll really be able to make it back to Boston is late spring 2009.

Anyway, no time to be nostalgic now, that's what I can do on the flight tomorrow. Now I'm going to make the best of the little time that I have left and thanks to a great and very enjoyable dinner with great company at the Cambridge Brewing Company I'm well prepared for the hours ahead of me.

Arrived in Boston. Only 3 hours delay after all.

Funnily enough about 10 minutes after I posted the last rant the boarding call for the 9:55 a.m. flight was announced and even though I certainly hadn't expected it I actually got a seat! So overall I only suffered a 3h delay instead of the 6h which I had been afraid of. The flight went by in no-time as I basically passed out the moment I got on the plane. When I woke up close to touching down in Boston 40 minutes later I was surprised to feel quite relaxed and well rested even though overall I had gotten less than 3 hours of plane-seat-sleep.

Anyway, now I'm off to get some OLPC work done. Is there a better way to spend a Saturday evening?

Thank you Delta Air Lines

Remember, there used to be a time when flying was an efficient and convenient way to get from point A to point B. Well, not anymore. These days flying is just a pain in the rear.

Example: At this moment I'm stuck here at SFO with more than an hour delay already. Plus when I arrived at the airport I learned that my flight from New York to Boston (nope, no direct flight for me tonight) was overbooked. Well, now that I'm very likely going to miss it that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.

The overall result is going to be that I won't be in Boston by 8:30 a.m. tomorrow, my layover at JFK isn't going to be a convenient 45 minutes and I will be very irritated and exhausted by the time I finally get to my destination. Ahhhh, the beauty of traveling. Thank you Delta Air Lines!

As least my friend Samuel (Adams) is here with me during these dark and difficult hours...

By the way, in case you're wondering: No there's no free WiFi here at SFO, I got a 24h T-Mobile pass for $9.99. I figure if I'll be stuck here for some time and also at JFK for an hour or two I might as well treat myself with some connectivity.

The last evening on the road...

I just realized that this is the last evening which I'm spending "on the road". By this time tomorrow I'll be on a plane en-route from San Francisco to Boston via New York. And a week from today I'll already be half way across the Atlantic in my flight from Washington, DC to Munich.

The reason why I'm calling this the last evening on the the road is that the next few days will pretty much follow my regular routine of working (Boston) and partying / socializing (DC). No more sleeping on couches or in sub-standard hostels. No more walking x km a day while exploring a previously unknown city. No more shallow conversations with random room-mates in backpacker-hostel dorms. The next 7 days will take place in well-known environments with people I know.

Not that I'm complaining, I'm really looking forward next week, I'm definitely going to have a blast and it will be great to be able to spend some quality time with people which I'll probably not see for many months or years afterwards.

However it's still always weird when these travel-episodes come to an end. Somehow it's quite easy to get used to this feeling of always being on the road, with a new city, new people and a different bed every day...

Decisions, decisions, decisions

Damn, sometimes life can be really tough. I'm currently staying at casa de H. about 100km from Toronto where we arrived on Wednesday evening. Tomorrow evening I'm flying to Vancouver to meet my friends Igor, John (both Handi Mobility) and Mike (from SilentPCReview) after not seeing them for what sometimes seems like eternity but really did go by in no-time. So that's the fun part, the difficult part is trying to decide what to do next.

My general itinerary calls for me to go to San Francisco, Boston, New York and back to DC from where I'll be flying home to Europe on August 1. However the question is how much time I want to spend in each of those places plus whether I should stop anywhere else on my way. Both Seattle and Portland are options, not necessarily because I originally wanted to visit those places but rather due to A.H. suggesting that they're actually quite nice cities (and going there by bus and taking a domestic flight to SFO would also be cheaper). Plus both of these cities have (or at least had back in Q1 / 2008) local OLPC user-groups which I would like to visit if they're still around. Anyway, everything is still up in the air so I still haven't booked any transportation out of Vancouver. I'm probably going to wait 48 hours until Tuesday noon to see what kind of feedback I get from the various people I've contacted and then decide what to do.

Ah, life really is full of hard decisions, right?

Random late-night thoughts and photos

I got a fair amount of BBQ'ing, beer drinking and work done since I got back from Boston so it really comes as no surprise that time is flying by again. As ever so often I meant to post some blog updates on the weekend but I really didn't manage to get it done. However I'm proud to report that I looked through the photos I took during my 4h walk through Boston last Tuesday. Plus I actually uploaded them to Flickr already. (Both things which I still haven't managed to get done for the photos from my NYC trip a couple of weeks ago.) Anyway, head over to my Boston set on Flickr for some impressions of the city.


Now let's see how much blogging I get done this week...

Scared of the ticking clock

I know, I talk about this a lot, but it is really really scary how time flies. I'm not even talking about those outstanding 5 days in Boston from where I just got home two hours ago. Rather it's the fact that I realized that I only have a bit more than 2 1/2 weeks left here in DC!

Anyway, off to get some badly needed sleep... Good night everyone!

Day 3 @ 1CC - 06/09/08 - Cambridge, MA (#2)

Ahh, it's already 4 p.m. and only now do I have some spare time to do a brief write-up about yesterday...

It was again a pretty good day and you can find all of the artifacts, transcripts and whatnot produced during yesterday's grassroots bootcamp session at w.l.o. We started the day with a brainstorm on the most pressing grassroots community facilitation problems that need to be addressed. It yielded some good and interesting results, community-assisted testing being the one I'll be focusing on over the coming days and weeks. After lunch consisting of very good pizza I briefly meet up with Walter Bender for an interesting discussion about both olpcnews and Sugar Labs. Afterwards I had the pleasure of joining in on an OLPC tech-meeting where some of the plans for the coming weeks and months were discussed. There should be some challenging tasks in there for external contributors, more information will be made available over the coming weeks.

In the evening I meet up with my friend Bob to grab some burgers and beers close to Harvard square. As always we had some great discussions about topics ranging from wifi networks to history.

By the time I got back to the office I was quite beat but we decided to call it a night. Unfortunately Maker House, where I'm staying, was locked and there was no key to be found so Seth and I ended up staying at SJ's place. Anyway, the 6 hours of sleep were certainly well deserved!

Well, I'm off to see the city, after all it's my 2nd time here in Boston and I've spent basically of it here in the OLPC offices in Boston. Last time we did spend 2 or 3 hours walking through the city center and the Harvard area but this time I want to see a bit more and maybe grab a bite to eat (seafood!) somewhere. :-)

Day 3 @ 1CC - 06/09/08 - Cambridge, MA

Another productive day.
Lack of sleep.
Good night.

More details to follow tomorrow.

From Dusk 'till Dawn

June, 9 - 5 a.m. - 1CC, Cambridge, MA

Day 2 @ 1CC - 06/08/08 - Cambridge, MA

Ah, what a great evening. I'm currently sitting in a courtyard, surrounded by fancy new buildings of the MIT and other R&D companies. It was a relatively hot and humid day but right now it's just perfect outside, with a light breeze and dusk slowly setting. It kind of reminds me of summer nights at Attersee, a lake in Upper Austria where my family used to go a lot when I was younger, with the only slight difference being that I'm several thousand kilometers away from Austria and not looking at the lake.

Anyway, we had another very productive day here at 1CC, with many more interesting discussions about community-related activities. Rabi from OLE Nepal also gave everyone an overview of their work there, I had heard most of it earlier in the week in DC but it was still an interesting session. Afterwards some plans for some important projects to be done in the June to August timeframe were discussed, more details about them will become available shortly.

Tomorrow marks the official start of the grassroots bootcamp and I'm very much looking forward to 2 1/2 days of intensive sessions, brain-storming, planning and hacking.

I can't even begin to really describe just how great it is to be here, I'm having an outstanding time and I'll definitely try to stop by again in late July before I fly back to Europe.

Day 1 @ 1CC - 06/07/08 - Cambridge, MA

I arrived in Boston 20 hours ago and I've spent 16 of those hours here at the OLPC HQ (aka 1CC). We ended up staying until ~ 6 a.m. last night, just discussing a lot of recent developments and plans for the future, obviously with a focus on community engagement and whatnot. Then we headed to Maker House where I'm staying while I'm in town, only to get up 2 1/2 hours later, take a quick shower and head back to the office. Today we've been quite busy discussing various bits and pieces, from a match-maker platform, community focused communication and events to feedback loops between deployments and (potential) contributors around the world. We also had a couple of good laughs and we might share some of our stories and jokes via a podcast (or something similar) in the near future.

Anyway, even though I've had my fair share of chai latté, coffee and coke I'm slowly starting to crash and it's about time I get outta here to grab some dinner and beers. Very much looking forward to tomorrow, especially the afternoon shall be interesting and it will be great to have a chance to match some faces to e-mails and nicknames in some of the meetings tomorrow. :-)

It's great to be back at OLPC HQ in Cambridge, MA

XO-laptops. They're everywhere. On desks, the ceiling, in shelfs, on the floor.
P.S. Yes, it is close to 4 a.m. on a Friday night and we're still in the office... ;-)

Another great day!

My readers must be thinking that I'm constantly stoned or something with all my shiny-happy-Christoph postings these past few days... :-D

However I'm simply having another great day around here. A productive day at work with interesting assignments which will keep me busy for the next couple of weeks. Plus I decided to take off two days in early June so I can head up to Boston for 4 days to attend some interesting meetups at OLPC HQ. On top of that I spontaneously decided to go to an Apocalyptica concert tonight as another embassy employee had some spare tickets. Having previously thought about going to the show (but totally forgotten about the fact that it's on tonight) and with the tickets coming in at $15 it really wasn't a hard decision.

Plus I'm writing these lines sitting in the sun at Dupont Circle before I meet up with some embassy colleagues for beer and dinner.

And the outlook for tomorrow isn't to shabby either as my schedule tells me that the Austrian Happy Hour is on again and the venue just looks outstanding!