It turns out there's no lunch. HIP provides breakfast and dinner. Breakfast is from 9am till 3pm. I'm a computer consultant, and an inventor, and a freelance writer (for a small part of my time). After getting my degree from university I was hired by a bank as a programmer, to be a project leader in the IT department soon after. For historical reasons mainly, the career of a succesful programmer in those days went from programming thru systems analysis to management. I've seen many good programmers end up as lousy managers. I've always recognized I'm not a good manager. I've never had the ambition to be one either. That limits ones career perspectives. I survived for some time as a consultant. I used to consult on the planning and building of information systems for big companies. When I stopped having fun in doing that (which was very very soon) I changed to artificial intelligence. Building expert systems, both by programming them in prolog and by using expert system shells, made me feel like I was doing real things. Although in the sixties AI researchers used to promise they'd create intelligeng software pretty soon, by the time I got into the field expectations were much more realistic. We claimed we could build systems that weren't as dumb as most computer programs at the time (which was pretty dumb, I mean those programs were). However, even in AI my career moved onwards, and I became a consultant rather than a programmer. In the end the only way to advance my career was to become a manager. Rather than advancing my career, I switched interest. In 1993 there were the first signs that the internet would be it. Real it I mean. In 1994 I started to spend considerable time on the net, and off the net arguing to colleagues and managers at Origin, that if the company wanted to survive, the Internet had to recieve main focus of the company. By then, no bid companies had any idea of the internet, at least in Holland they didn't. Acquiring and developing knowledge of the net would, in time, have given Origin a considerable advantage over their competitors. They disagreed. When finally they did start a project building an intranet (as we later called it) for the company, most competitors had preceded them. I started to look for another job. One night, while having a beer with a friend, we were talking about internet money, possible ways of paying on the net, digicash, chipcards and related developments. I remembered, from my time at the bank, that they had these little calculators calculating keys for the security system of SWIFT. SWIFT is (or used to be?) the international system for money transfers. The calculator was in no way connected to a computer. Why couldn't a system like that be used for internet payments? Chipcards need a chipcard reader in the PC (which nobody had, nor has). Digicash continued to be unsuccessful. Secure sessions on the web, whether they are really secure or not, didn't make it because nobody believed (at least no manager believed) they were secure. I knew the idea was good, but how could I prove that? Some weeks later I met a manager of an insurance company. I touched the subject of internet payments, which made him argue that internet payments would be big business in the very near future. Moreover, he expressed the whish of his company to participate in the development of payment systems. Are you still with me? Let's say, the bottomline is the insurance company gave me money to explore the use of calculators for an internet payments system. I quit my job. And I didn't succeed in proving my system was good. What I did succeed in, was to set up my one woman company. I had clients, and I was getting new clients for my consulting business. Finally I was in internet business, not as an employee but as a self-employed consultant. I now know my project could and should have been successful, if only I had knowv what I know now. Oh well, I've learned a lot. I was more or less back where I started my working career. I graduated as an astronomer. I never worked in astronomy because it was much easier (and more fun) to work in computer science. I never regretted leaving astronomy. Sometimes however, when I read about new discoveries in astronomy or about new kosmology models, the memories come into my mind. Red dwarf stars, the Hubble constant and its influence on the size of the universe, or telescopes on Swiss mountains where you could see bats fly in front of your lens... When I put up the tent at HIP, I found myself next to the Astro Lab. The Astro Lab is a bunch of astronomy entusiasts from Holland and Belgium. They brought three telescopes, two of which have a ccd camera. I asked one of the men what astronomy has to to with HIP. "Oh, I don't know really, we do have a lot of computers though". They will try to show the pictures of their cameras on the net. Also, they'll point one of their telescopes at the sun. As they said just a while ago, when I walked into their tent to ask if I could plug my UTP cable in their hub, their server has been damaged during transport. The harddisk of their main computer has crashed, and they're spending all their time on fixing it, or replacing it. They did let me plub in my mains cable into theirs, but my plug didn't fit in their Belgian outlet. I hope they'll have ethernet soon. My computer has a wireless connection, but that does work in the vicinity of the central hall only. I'd want to have internet in my tent, like most people. I'm not sure about what parts of the program I'll attend. Many lectures and workshops on spam seem very interesting. Also, lectures on IPv6 I want to attend. A workshop on yoyo's by padeluun looks very interesting, though I don't know if it's serious or just a joke. I'll attend it anyway. Security, one of the main issues on HIP (as on any hackers conference), gets a lot of attention. But, though professoinally I should attend at least some lectures, I don't think I will. I think it's too hot for security issues. I will go to lectures about virtual communities. HIP is a strange kind of community. It's not virtual, and at the same time it is. In a way, HIP is the hardcore internet community, at least in Holland it is. How else can I explain I meet so many people I know, here at HIP? People I've never met irl, just on the net. Yesterday, at dinner, all of a sudden the guy opposite to me says "oh, you must be Christine". He is koos, someone I had never seen before but I do know him for years, on irc, as kh. When I met him, I was talking to jit, another old times intenet friend I've only now met irl. Oh, I was talking about the aim of HIP. A disadvantage of writing this diary as HIP continues is that I get interrupted a lot. When new things happen, I forget to finish the stories I had started. My memory starts to deteriorate. Or has it always been that bad? My grandmother had Alzheimer, in the end she hardly knew she was alive. I felt sorry for my grandfather, who she didn't recognize at all. She'd wake him up in the middle of the night and ask him who he was. Then, in the morning, she'd tell him that at night she had found a stranger in her bed. Only to continue with "talking about strangers, who are you?". I have a black-and-white picture of my grandparents, when my gm's alzheimer wasn't so bad yet. I'm glad I took that picture, there's few pictures left of them. Is alzheimer a family illness? Do I have a more substantial chance of getting it? When that happens, I hope they can implant a memory chip in my brain, or at least a serial port so I can backup my memory to my computer. 100MB/s utp in my neck? The sun is getting lower (3:22pm now) and is shining into the tent. I can hardly read the display. I'll move to the central area, finish this story and upload it. And I'll fix the link from my homepage to the diary ;-) btw, I now seem to have an email addres: chk@hip97.nl. Dunno if it works. Next page