This is a story of my trip to the CCC, told mostly in log format. Once I get organized, picture links will appear on this page. As always, questions/correction/comments are appreciated (yes, I realize there are grammar mistakes).
I am almost ready to go to the airport. Sameer and Bayporter were meeting me at 1:00, I was pretty much all packed, and I was simply fixing up my luggage. Some creative engineering for a bag to carry my tent and sleeping bag required poking a hole with scissors. Turns out the "sharp" point of the scissors wasn't so sharp, so they wouldn't go through. When they finally did, the blades were in "sharp" and sliced neatly through my left index finger. My officemates ask me "are you okay?". I say "yes" and run out to the washroom to wash it off. Momentarily, I'm back, unable to control the bleeding, and asking where the emergency room is. Steve was nice enough to come to the emergency room with me, and handle forwarding a message to Sameer to go ahead without me. He even offered to drive me to the airport, if need be.
I get out of the emergency room, three stitches and a tetanus shot later. Steve believes it's probably too late to make the flight, but we run to the office anyway. I call British Airways, asking them whether my 3:45pm flight might by any chance be late. They say that it's on time. They also confirm that I have no hope of making the flight, and book me for the next day, with a 7 hour layover in London. At this point, I am filled with caffeine, and my body is filled with caffeine, adrenaline, and endorphins. Things are looking up, so I go to lunch.
After lunch, I stick around campus, trying to do some work, but after being told by several people, including my advisor, that I look "out of it", I relax for the rest of the evening.
I land in London at around 12:45pm local time, after a long and uneventful flight. A visit to a local bank machine lands me with 100 pounds, which, given that I was only in the country for 7 hours, much to much money. Gotta love exchange rates. 10 of those pounds are readily spent on a "Heathrow Express", which within 15 minutes delivers me to the downtown of "City of the Millennium". By 2:15pm, I emerge from the London Underground onto the busy Oxford square, carrying with Ludwig and a backpack heavily laden with computer equipment.
London turns out to be an incredibly busy city, crowded with tourists and tourist shops. I spent several hours wandering through busy streets with cars driving on the wrong side, occasionally looking at sings and posted maps. One of my goals was to find cheap Fish & Chips - a food type I've always associated with Britain. I was unsuccessful, and settled for a hot dog, part of which was guilted out of me in Trafalgar Square by a gypsy woman who spoke no English, for her son. Later I fell victim to one of the countless soft-ice cream pushers with carts on every corner, and got myself a cone. So much for local food.
I wanted to document my visit with pictures, but I don't like simply taking pictures of landmarks, seeing as they have all been photographed by much more skillful people, and appear on many postcards and in travel guides. I finally decided to take a few pictures of Ludwig in London, resulting in interesting looks from the passers by (attempts to convince him to take a picture of me were unsuccessful). I also bought a couple postcards for posterity.
After a short flight, I landed in Berlin's Tegel airport. It was much smaller than I expected, and much more deserted at the relatively early hour of 11PM (and yet it took me over 20 minutes to locate a bank machine). To add to my negative impression, the pay phone I used to call Lucky's cell phone was apparently using pulse dialing, which made using a calling card more complicated. Then I got to travel on the wonderful (and I mean wonderful) Berlin urban transit system to the East end of town, where I was picked up by Lucky and Ian. Finally, after hanging on for dear life and trying not to look at the speedometer, I was delivered to the campsite.
I was taken on a tour, beginning with a stop at a shop that was set up, selling "spacewaffeln", with delicious cherries and whipped cream. Ian and I each had one, and proceeded to explore the main hack tent (lots of computers set up on tables), the microwave uplink tower (34Mbit uplink that was erected just for this camp), and the Alpha file server with a huge raid (ftp.camp.ccc.de). I received my peg for peg-dhcp, checked some mail, ate some tasty bread, and listened to a story of Julie that Ian tried to tell in his distracted state.
At around 3am, the chilly night weather and the mosquitos made me search for some pants in my luggage (I had been wearing shorts), and the searching made me realize that I had left my pants in Berkeley. Doh! At around 5 am we made another "space waffle" sortie, after which I promptly collapsed.
My first awake moment was at around 10am, when I discovered that it had gotten very hot (this phenomenon would only get worse as the trip progressed). I ripped off layers of clothes, the sleeping bag, and tried to catch some of the breeze going through the tent. The next time I woke up, I noticed Russell asleep beside me. Reassured that he made it to the camp, I went back to sleep. I didn't actually get up until 2PM, which put my jet lag as being somewhere over the Atlantic. The beauty of the situation was that I had no schedule to follow, so when I woke up was largely immaterial.
I was, however, a little disappointed that Diana had already made off to explore Berlin, without even trying to wake me up. Turned out that she got up around when I went to sleep, awakened by an Ian coming into her tent, and then left not too longer after that. Not to be discouraged, I grabbed Russell, we took a shuttle to the train station, and then an S-Bahn into the city.
Our first stop was the Berlin Zoo, which was unfortunately closed by the time we got there. Our next goal is to find a map; and then we try to locate the Berlin wall. We could see where it was by the ribbon of construction cutting through the city (I've never seen so many cranes in one place), but everywhere we looked, the actual wall was gone. We were almost willing to give up, and settle for pictures of us next to "a Berlin wall" instead. But we did finally track down the only remaining segment. Satisfied, we headed back to camp, barely in time to catch the last shuttle.
At midnight, there was the "official camp opening", which was an informal gathering in the main tent, and proved to be uninteresting. We ditched the proceeding to come hang out in the cypherpunks tent, where we found cookies and Nutella. Life has never been so good!
As it gets later, the lack of pants problem manifests itself yet again. John Gilmore is nice enough to lend me some funky(tm) long underwear, though. I once again stay up until 4:30am or so, but I made certain that Diana try to wake me up in the morning to go to Berlin.
Get woken up by Diana at around 10:30, and I'm offered three options:
The seminars program begins, but the program would seem to leave much to be desired. I sit in on a couple, but most of the time I just hang around the camp. The conference, all in all, felt a little weak. As Russell described it, a bunch of people from around the world got together to surf the web together. At one point, I tried to go to the main hack tent offering a "cool projects" prize of my Perl shirt, autographed by Larry Wall. The call went out for people to tell my "panel of judges" (Russell, Ian, Sameer, and Ludwig :) about the cool stuff they're working on, and the people with the coolest project would win the shirt. Turned out, though, that most people were looking at pornography, downloading MP3s, or simply surfing the web. No one won the shirt prize.
So I spent most of my time just hanging out in the cypherpunks tent, occasionally checking mail or doing other random things on my computer. However, I can think of much worse ways to spend an August afternoon than hanging out with friends, cypherpunks, and hippies at a camp site in Germany, eating tasty snacks, enjoying the music playing around you, and all the while with an ethernet connection! Probably the best day was Sunday, when I slept for half the day (I had been up until 8am), and hung out with the hippies for the other half, all with a very relaxed and peaceful mood.
Russell and I went exploring, and found wondrous things. There was a giant disco ball, illuminated by a light mounted on the transmission tower, and projecting stars around the entire campground. Then we find the leisure lounge, with backlit trees, funky projections (made with surprisingly low tech equipment, as we discovered), and a tent playing nice ambient music connected to 6 foot tall low-range decibel meters! We spent quite a while there, enjoying the music and the scenery.
Our own party started at around 2am. We had a sound system set up, and people were dancing on the shaky tent floor. Later in the night, Sameer and Stephanie tried a 4 turntable / 2 DJ set up, which was interesting to listen to, especially when it worked well. They finally got shut down by some angry guy complaining about the "boom boom" at around 5am.
Complaints from previous night precipitated Alex to post a sign the next day saying basically "Loud party here tonight. If you want to sleep, move your tent!" Sameer apparently took the sign back home with him; he says he wanted to frame it. We got a couple noise complaints that night also, but mostly we kept the volume at a manageable level, and managed the people who disagreed.
I myself spent most of the night hanging out with Ian and Hinde, and learning Hinde's life story. There was also the failed "cool projects" contest, which left me a little disheartened. But I had ways of dealing with that. :) I stayed up until 8 am that morning, and fell asleep outside on rugs set up by some food vendors under a tarp which provided (some) shade and shelter from rain.
I spent most of Sunday relaxing (recovering?). Many people had left, many others were leaving during the day, and not much was happening. Perhaps the most eventful thing that day was Russell's and my experiment with the "orgasmatron". It was an Australian head massager tool, which, as promised, gave us "the most sensational head massage ever". However, five minutes later both of us developed a massive headache. We spent the next while warning people away from it.
I also met a few people that day, including Vesna, and Frank, who proved fun to hang out with during the rest of the trip. I finally fell asleep reasonably early, feeling happy and looking forward to Solipse.
Expect the follow-up story of the rest of my European vacation, including my trip to Solipse, to appear Real Soon Now!