Internet and hitchhiking in New Zealand

Internet connections are not very widespread or advanced. I haven’t found a cafe with a free wireless internet connection in either Auckland or Wellington. Broadband  is pretty expensive, so many people just have dial-up access at home.

Fortunately, hitchhiking is good. My hosts dropped me at a gas station on route 1 down to Wellington. It was raining all day yesterday, but I didn’t have to wait too long at the gas stations. Kiwis are friendly. My first ride was with Nick and his parents. Really interesting people. I will probably go visit them this summer. And I might even have some job opportunity, working with gifted and talented children!

Check the Hitchhiking Wiki for useful tips, especially if it’s your first time hitchhiking. Many people hitchhike for the first time, in New Zealand. In fact, in the plane from LA I met Scott, whom I introduced to CouchSurfing and hitchhiking. And, hitching from the airport to Auckland’s city center is really easy.

CouchSurfing in Syria!

Right now I’m in LA, it’s 1:25 AM, and I decided to stay up later. My flight is only leaving at 6:20 PM tomorrow. 18 hours later I will be arriving in Auckland. I’m not too eager to leave the US. I had a great time here. My life has changed. Again. CouchSurfing is so much cooler than I had thought, and now I’m totally addicted to making it better.

When I went to the Collective in Montreal I didn’t really know what to expect. I just wanted to set up a CouchSurfing Wiki. Which I did! Do-ocracy is the rule. The Wiki is turning out to be a big success, with over 100 registered users and more edits than I can read. I didn’t have any clear goals. I just wanted a platform where people can cooperatively work on documents related to CS, and somehow related, a Guide for CS all over the world. No Tourist Guide, a CouchSurfing Guide. Where people who want more guests, but live outside the city, advertise themselves. Where you can write about good places to hold CS meetings. Where you can explain people coming to your country how to be a good guest. Today I was reading the article about Syria and it made me happy!

I only spent two weeks in Montreal, the final weeks of the Montreal Collective. But I met many amazing people, whom I will meet again and again for the rest of my life. And I started programming on the CS code, just a little bit. With amylin I hitchhiked down to NYC, drove to San Francisco with a CouchSurfer I met in Lima, hitchhiked to Quincy, and did some more programming. And more hitchhiking to Portland OR, more programming, more hitchhiking!

Last week http://bugs.couchsurfing.com was set up. More than 70 bugs have been reported. Which is great! The more bugs reported, the healthier the project! It makes it easy for developers to go and fix them.

There are so many people who want to help out with technical issues, programming, security, design. It’s just hard to get them started. There are still only 3 people who regularly submit patches (incremental improvements to the code), Casey, Anu and me. That needs to be improved. But, the current code base is not the most readable ever. So things need to be redesigned.

One good way to get new programmers started is putting out small (harmless) parts of the code out there, and ask for improvement. People who send in useful patches can be given access to the entire code.

Check the NZC Technical Goals on the Wiki for more information. And feel free to edit or to leave comments on the discussion page.

peace,

Kasper

Categories

If you have suggestions for the categories we should have on this blog, please post a comment on this post.

Right now the categories are:
+ Fluffy – Posts that have nowhere else to go, a slightly more fun name for Uncategorized!
+ Audio – Audio blogs from the the land of Kiwis and All Blacks.
+ Video – Video blogs live from NZ 2006!

Should we have categories for the different projects? What about categories based on what people are doing? Cooking, programming, dancing, djing, etc? Should we wait and see how the blog develops and add categories as we need them? We want YOUR opinion, don’t be shy, speak your mind!

The collective is about living in the now.

I would never imagine that family lunch was going to be preparation for the collective.

So there I was, sitting at the table, with my earplugs on, muffled sounds. Eating the slowest I have ever eaten. I was in a 1/2 zen state. Observing every move around me, I was eating raw tuna, arugula and country pasta with chopsticks. Present at the table were some of the Bassani´s and the Silveira´s.

Gabriel, my cousin Giovanni´s son, was being fed and had just waken up from this 12 o´clock nap. His father feeds him his first bite.

I was observing him eating, as if it was slow motion. It was like he was experiencing every chew, every taste was being sensed by his tongue. He had a look in his face that was saying to everyone that it would take him 5 minutes to fully experience that moment. In the middle of his 4th chew, his father shoves another 3 pounds of food in his mount…a fork full of pasta. Turning his face out of the way, obviously rejecting that gesture by his father, Gabriel ended up eating it, obviously forced by and to please his father. He suddenly started to eat faster, being conditioned by the system, to eat more.

What does this mean?

By pushing his own subliminal bad habits, which are reflections of his inability to live in the now, his father was giving his son 6 negative examples of life style on one bite! Gionvanni´s behavior was giving his son subconscious permission to be intrusive in other´s lives, to have impolite manners, to be impatient, to use of abusiveness, overeating, and to to be subdued (to give in to people´s pressure).
He was losing respect for his father, because his father did not respect his personal timing, his personal experience. This is a classic example of not living a simple experience and consequential bad communication. His father could have resolved all of that by asking his beloved son “would you like another bite?”

Leo

Welcome

Welcome to the CouchSurfing.com New Zealand Collective Blog. What a mouthful!

The idea behind this blog is to get as many people as possible who attend the Collective to post their stories, their perspectives, and share with everyone their experience of the Collective. You can blog, video blog, audio blog, all sorts. With YouTube it’s dead easy to post videos, video diaries, anything you like.

If you’re going to the collective please join this blog.