Part of Amsterdam life, especially extremely modest income Amsterdam life, means moving from apartment to apartment. This offers a chance to experience the various neighborhoods and different quality apartments. It also acts as a great way to not be a pack-rat. Everything must be thrown out. I once had the finest archive of the French – Courrier International EVER. But I had to move, so it went to recycling. I’ve learned to cram everything into digital format and copy on CD’s that fit in either slim-cases or envelopes. You must be impressed by now. I digress, tuesday I move from Oude Schans to 1ste Helmerstraat… back to the Oud West, where I was once the quickest draw. Whatever happens, I shall miss my current apartment a great deal.. the garden.. the canal view.. the busy-busy kitchen and my roomates. Alas – this is Amsterdam life, for now.
Thinking about what I brought up in my last post, the importance and possibilities of RSS, Doc Searls points out a very nerdy but worth-reading theorizing about email and rss. He breaks email into three sections: spam/marketing, commercial, and private. He puts them into layers and shows how marketing is supposed to be the outside layer, and it invades the other two layers using awful spam. Anyway you’re better off reading it than listening to me. The bigger point was that RSS offers something that fixes the spam problem, you request the specific updates from a clearly-identified source. Such as this blog 🙂 So he wonders, as I now do, if RSS might not be an answer to the horror that is spam in email.
I also recently spoke about the East Timor oil situation. But as the Independent (UK) recently reported on, there are still huge amounts of refugees that have been unable or unwilling to return to their country. Talk about a UN/international community unfinished mission. Now they will start a mission in Sudan and the DR-Congo mission appears to need re-enforcement. OH and let’s not forget Haiti which is getting some fresh peacekeepers ASAP. All this with some of the most modest funding imaginable, GULP.
OH.. more news on this as it develops, I’m going Wi-Fi as of this week. Combination ADSL trouble and wanting to catch the Wi-Fi fever. I’ll be sitting in front of rich people’s houses and hip cool caf?s using their wireless network. Yeeehaw. I just hope I don’t spill hot choco on my laptop.
Today’s Music: Blink 182 – Miss you (stuck on it for some reason)