Outdoors

Yesterday Alex (my colleague from the De Waag Society) arrived at the lab. Haakon promised me we would go to Tromsø (where the airport is) a bit earlier, so we can have a look at his motorbike. It appears he owns an old BMW R70 bike... This guy just keeps amazing me, but since it was sunday, everything was closed... so we just had a nice fish meal.

The day before, Haakon, Johan, Aslak and I went on a little trip to the most northern part of the peninsula we are on. Where the land meets the sea, a lot of boats crashed. When the tides change, millions of liters of water flow from or into the fjord thus creating massive currents. Walking along the shore we encountered lots of wreckage, and even found a whole ship (well, whole... check out the pictures).



We also stopped at a little lighthouse to have some tea and found a can of joika (traditional sami reindeer meat) we decided to eat. It was such a nice place that both Johan and I agreed that we would go back there to leave new food, so it was ok to eat some of the stuff there.
It was nice and cosy:

Loose ends again

So I'll be leaving for the Fablab in Norway again this monday. Just one more night shift (after the one I'm in now) and the plane takes off.
In Norway I'll continue on building a multitouch table using the FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) technique as described here, help as much as I can during the Kokompy camp that is currently being held (about adding functionality and usability to the cad.py program that Neal Gershenfield wrote to control all the machines in the labs from one interface) and I want to try to make a longbow like this one with the shopbot (for the handle) and some kind of lamination process for the limbs.

But today I also bought a new sleeping bag (which supposedly keeps me warm even at minus 20) and a new travel backpack to go on a long trip in the mountains. It's time for some reading about the

.

and some quiet and calm moments up in the mountains.
As Laozi said:

Gravity is the source of lightness,
calm the master of haste.

Ice climbing

Today was a day off, and Bas left early in the morning for a plane home, so now i am the only Dutch person here... But we also got up early and went ice climbing with a couple of people.
So we drove up to the small village that's near the lab, walked up the mountain a bit until we reached a frozen waterfall. We brought hooks, cables and clamp-on's (hooks you can strap to your shoes) and started climbing.
click one of the pictures for more...

Furthermore, Bas did a real good job setting up our website for the different projects. So i decided to keep this blog for writing more personal stuff (like i've been doing) and the site for technical issues.
Check it out: Stff
Neat, isn't it?