Today (Wednesday), I arrived at the HIP camping place. Two days before the official start, the place is already filling with tents. While electricity and ethernet is being installed, people already unpack their computers and start hacking soon as they have electricity. Why bother to unpack your clothes and things, if you have lan connection?

I'm in the food tent now, where many tables and ever so many chairs and benches are set up for dinner and breakfast. They're empty now, apart from the occasional volunteer taking a reset. Apparently the music arrived, they now start playing music. Unfortunately, the wireless connection isn't ready yet, so by the time you'll read this it'll be Thursday.

I chose to put up our tent near the canal. I had to do it alone, my gf (MJ) has to work today, and probably tomorrow, she'll be here tomorrownight. I do suspect her she doesn't like putting up tents (just kidding). It's very hot, almost too hot to be in a tent and work. I respect the boys and girls who do the hard work of making everything ready.

There's three areas, roughly. Campers have a choice between two fields to put up their tent. One is near the entrance, the other one is right at the other end of the HIP area. This second field is forbidden for camera's, so probably that's where the most interesting hackers will be. It's where most tents are, right now. On Thursday evening you won't have that much choice, most of the fields being filled up with tents already. In between both camping fields there's the main HIP area where workshops will be held, food will be supplied, PTT set up their hardware (GSM is really fabulous, they set up a special antenna for HIP, though libertel is no good here). There's a circus, there's a tent where a daily journal will be made (I haven't found out where exactly that will be).

After setting up your tent (or even before that) you'll want to have an IP number. Field Head Quarters can provide one, so my first walk was to FHQ. The range of IP numbers here is 194.0. FHQ has written the numbers on clothespins, so giving out numbers means giving everyone a clothespin. My clothespin says 137.103. ouch! One thing that's definitly annoying is the insects. I got bitten for the third time, and I've been here for only a couple of hours. The name server is 194.0.128.10, the gateway is 194.0.128.1. I didn't have a piece of paper so typing it here is convenient.

HIP is different from the HEU, in many ways. Then, we had some 19k2 analog connections thru telephone lines, now we have some 8 MB digital. Still, bandwidth then was relatively wider, because telnet