Comfort Zone Amsterdam

It’s that time of the year again, when I’m left pondering my choices and the way forward – this seems to have become a bit of a tradition in the past 3 years. Things always change, the ones taken for granted not always ending up being so after all.

Amsterdam has a few things going for me – the green startup I’ve been helping out here and there (random advice on issues that come up while building a website), ping pong tables at Den Haag office gig (pipelining educational data and Yet Another CMS) , Casa with friends and travels up in Bos en Lommer, beginnings of friendships and connections I haven’t had the initiative to build up yet. But are those enough to keep me here, considering the very likely possiblity of yet another flat-hunt in a terribly overcrowded city and forced commitment of X months to high-unless-ure-lucky-rent.

But then, where else? Helsinki has the flat I should make a decision on, but as socio-professional landscape is most likely more of the same old, I’d rather not. London has a friend and possibilities towards what I might want to be / do, but 11 (?) million is just a bit too big and the costs staggering. Berlin is cheap and beautiful, but who do I know there to get started with things I really want to do – and I’d rather practice languages other than German.

Or.. just take whatever I have and get going, anywhere and nowhere in particular – lifestyle of a location-independent professional. But it’s getting to a point where I’d really rather stay enough to be able to say I’ve lived there, and work on things I care about, rather than just hop around endlessly from couch to couch, community to community.

Past choices having been dictated more by wanting to travel, and meeting like-minded people outside the bounds of a small country,  I’m now more on a lookout to align my past experiences and skills in a professionally meaningful way, wherever that may be. So for the odd chance of receiving a response to this shout-out into the void:
I’m all ears for pointers towards socially conscious projects where experience with online/offline communities and software skills (& degree to show for those) are needed.

The very first steps are clear however: it’s up north, cottages, camping, family and friends soon enough – with enough time to think things through being forced to be OFFLINE (oh the horror ) somewhere there in the wilderness.

Welcome to the sequel of my so-called life. As a post-nomadic expat it’s often easy to forget there are still people somewhere out there who would like to know how you’re doing, what you’re thinking about and what new adventures life unfolds for you.

Title “Hello World” came with the software, but might as well use the metaphor. Like it is tradition when stumbling across new programming languages to explore the syntax, get all-systems-go by writing a simple program spitting out Hello World on an output device – this post is me looking at life curious to give it that initial test run… and then start building further.

Building what, telling which stories? Anything, really – random circumstances usually make life too unpredictable to be able to pre-define how to approach recounting the experience. It could be any or all of the below or perhaps something else altogether.

• Amsterdam – as that’s where I spend most of my days for the time being
• Being Finnish – as that’s where I spent most of my life so far
• Travels – as the roads might still seduce me, and I miss telling those stories
• Hospitality exchange – as that’s what got me uprooted in the first place and there’s some unfinished business left  as an itch to be scratched
• Hello Worlds in software, on platforms – as that’s what I do for a living (and for fun at times)
• Concepts of free software and p2p applied to life in general in a post-scarcity techno-utopian anarcho-geek tree-hugger world – as that’s what my chosen surroundings mostly seem to facilitate
• Just days in a life – as sometimes it’s good to just write it all out, anyway.

…expect nothing, be prepared for anything!
(and feel free to say hi in the comments whenever )