note to self

Every year somebody asks which boat we’re on, and every year the answer is that we aren’t on a boat. We have never done a boat on Koningsdag. We have never done one for Pride either. From the outside the day looks like a floating car boot sale, and there’s a version of it that’s precisely that, but it’s not the version I have arrived at after a few years of living here.

What we actually do

Drinks first, either at ours or at a friend’s place. That’s the trick, and it sounds unambitious, and it’s the single best decision available to anybody on this particular day. The alternative is walking into the middle of it cold, sober and with no access to a bathroom, which isn’t a plan so much as a dare.

This year we were at a friend’s flat looking out over Rokin and Dam Square, which is about as good a seat as this city has to offer. You can watch the entire thing arrive. Trains empty out at Centraal and the crowd comes down towards the middle in a steady orange stream that simply doesn’t stop for hours. It’s impressive from three floors up and unbearable from inside it, and the difference between those two experiences comes down entirely to where you decided to be standing at eleven in the morning.

Then bars, late, with friends. That’s the shape of it now.

The visitor effect

We also had a friend in town for his first Koningsdag, which does something useful to a day you think you have taken the measure of. You find yourself explaining things you had stopped seeing. Why the whole city is selling its unwanted possessions off a blanket on the pavement. Why the children with the recorders are the real economy. Why nobody is in charge of any of it and it still works. It put some of the spectacle back.

The orange question

Fully committed, and escalating. This year I had matching hoodies made for the two of us, orange with royal blue text and team numbers printed on the back, which was cute in a way I don’t intend to defend to anybody.

The word that matters there’s hoodies. I have had shirts printed for this day before and the weather has made a fool of me every single time. Late April here isn’t a season, it’s a shortlist. You get the sunny version, the horizontal rain version, and the one that manages both before lunch. A printed shirt commits you to optimism at eight in the morning, and by two you’re wearing somebody’s borrowed coat over the joke nobody can now read. Hoodies. Learn from me.

The year it didn’t happen

In 2020 it was cancelled, and on the day itself I posted a photograph from the year before instead. What strikes me looking back at it’s the caption. I had written that in the picture I was worrying about my outfit, because I was going outside. That was the gag in April 2020, and it wasn’t entirely a gag.

It did tell me something about the real thing, though. A day that appears to be about a monarch, a colour and an enormous amount of drinking turns out, when you take it away, to have been about the fact that everybody is outdoors at the same time on purpose. That’s the load-bearing element. Everything else is decoration, and I say that as a man in a custom hoodie.

Still my favourite of the Dutch holidays, weather permitting, which it frequently doesn’t.

There’s a machine at home doing the work that four or five subscriptions would otherwise do. People ask what it costs, and I always answer with the electricity, which is the wrong answer.

What’s actually here

A box with the storage in it, another machine that serves the media, and a small pile of helper applications that fetch, rename, tag and file everything so that I don’t have to. Books, audiobooks, magazines. A dashboard so I can tell at a glance whether any of it’s awake.

None of it’s clever. Every single piece is something thousands of other people also run, and that’s the main reason it works at all. The moment you invent your own thing, you’re the only person who can fix it.

The thing I gave up on

Magazines. I tried three separate readers, all of them nicer looking than what I ended up with, and every one of them failed in the same specific way: each issue landed as its own series instead of one series containing three hundred issues. Beautiful software, useless shelf.

So I went back to Calibre, which is old, looks like 2009, and does the job exactly. I also built a conversion pipeline to turn the files into a tidier format, got it working properly, and then deleted the whole thing, because it doubled the storage for no benefit that any human being would notice.

That’s the pattern, and it’s not limited to my own hardware. I have tried to make Trello work for years. I keep going back. I keep failing. Somewhere there’s a list of the lists I have abandoned, and it’s also abandoned.

The evening I lost

Drive letters. On Windows a mapped drive letter belongs to the user who mapped it, so anything running as a different account, or inside a container, looks at that same letter and sees nothing at all. I spent an entire evening certain the storage had died, when in fact the path simply didn’t exist for the thing asking about it. The fix is to write the full network path everywhere and never use a letter again. There are still a couple of stragglers pointing at a letter only I can see, and I will find them at the worst possible moment.

The other confession: I have no backups. Not one. The array has parity, which people mistake for a backup, including me when I’m feeling relaxed about it. Parity protects you from a disk dying. It doesn’t protect you from you, because a deletion propagates immediately and cheerfully to the redundancy as well.

Where the line is

Email. Absolutely not, not ever. If my email goes down I can’t reset the password on the thing that would tell me my email is down, and I’m not interested in explaining to anyone why their message bounced for three days.

The other side of the line is anything the household depends on while I’m not in the country. A media server that falls over on a Tuesday is a mild irritation. A media server that falls over on a Tuesday while I’m in a hotel in another timezone is a phone call, and the phone call is the real cost.

So self-hosting isn’t cheaper, it just costs you evenings instead of money. And the evenings turn up at random, usually the ones you had plans for. I’m still not going back.

The British problem is not politeness. It is that we have built an entire second language on top of English, in which the actual meaning sits somewhere underneath the words, and we expect everybody to be fluent in it.

Then you move somewhere that has no reason to be fluent in it, and you discover how much work you were making other people do.

My old team kept a translation guide

Not a written one, but it may as well have been. The version I eventually heard back was roughly this: when Iain says “interesting”, he means bin it, or burn it with fire, why on earth would you do it this way.

Which is completely accurate, and it is the most useful piece of feedback I have had about how I communicate. Because look at what was actually happening. I thought I was being kind. I was in fact making a group of people do unpaid interpretation work every time I opened my mouth, and the ones who got it wrong were then surprised later when the thing they had built got binned.

The hedge was not softening the blow. It was postponing it and adding a puzzle.

My current team need a much smaller guide. I would like to claim that as growth. It is mostly just eight years of being in rooms where the hedge does not land.

No is a complete sentence

This is the single biggest change and it took me an embarrassingly long time.

Not “no, because”, not “I’m not sure that”, not “could we maybe look at”. Just no, and then stopping. The first few times it felt aggressive to the point of rudeness. It is not. Nobody at the other end of it experiences it as rude, which was the information I was missing for about a year.

What I have not become is blunt. I am still an introvert underneath all this, and there is a level of Dutch directness I can admire without ever getting near. I have moved perhaps a third of the way and then stopped, which feels about right.

The grammar made me a better listener, by accident

Here is the thing nobody warns you about. In Dutch a good deal of the negation turns up at the end of the sentence. You cannot tell from the first half whether you are being agreed with or refused. You have to wait for the whole thing.

So you wait. And having spent years waiting for the end of Dutch sentences, I now wait for the end of English ones too, which has quietly made me better at listening than any amount of deliberate effort ever did. I did not set out to acquire the habit. The word order imposed it.

Shops are the easy version

People in shops here are very direct, and it took me a while to stop reading it as rudeness. It is not rudeness. It is somebody telling you the thing you need to know, in the fewest words, and then getting on with their day.

Once you stop expecting the padding, the absence of padding stops registering as hostility. The British version is friendlier in tone and worse at conveying information, and I could not now tell you which I would rather be served by.

The Light Festival is the one thing in the Amsterdam calendar I have never got bored of, which is notable because I have now seen a lot of editions of it. This is the short version. The detailed write ups, edition by edition, live over on cramberts.com, which is where I put the proper travel stuff.

What follows is what has actually stayed with me across the years, which turns out not to be the ambitious pieces.

Darth Vader fishing in the Amstel

By a distance the cutest thing the festival has ever put on the water. Not the most impressive, not the most technically clever, not the one that photographs best. The cutest. A Sith Lord, sat on the Amstel, having a quiet go at the fishing.

That was edition 10, over the winter of 2021 into 2022. I have looked at a great many illuminated installations since and it is still the first one I mention when anybody asks.

Walk it, do not just do the boat

We usually do both. The boat is the version everybody books and it is genuinely good, but if you only do one, walk it.

Two reasons. You go at your own pace, so you can stand in front of the one you like until you are finished with it rather than gliding past on somebody else’s schedule. And you can break it up, doing a few installations an evening across a couple of weeks instead of consuming the whole route in one go.

That second point is the one I would press. Treating it as a single event you tick off is the fastest way to stop enjoying it. Treating it as something that is simply on for a few weeks, that you wander into after dinner, is much better, and is also roughly how people who live here actually experience it.

The strange one was 2021

That edition ran under coronaregels, and it closed at 17:00. Sunset was before that, so there was a window of perhaps an hour where the thing was both lit and open.

I expected that to be bleak and it was not. The city was emptier than I have ever seen it in December, which suited the festival enormously. But it was also busy in a way that took me a moment to understand, because everybody in Amsterdam was desperate for something, anything, to do that was outdoors and legal. So you had a quiet city and a crowded route at the same time, which should not work and somehow did.

It is getting more commercial

This is true and I cannot decide whether to mind.

Better, because more money means bigger and more reliable installations, a route that is properly organised, and a festival that will still be here in ten years. Worse, because the more sponsored and packaged it gets, the less it feels like a thing the city is doing and the more it feels like a thing being sold to the city.

Both of those are the same sentence about most successful festivals, so I am not claiming any insight. I am still going every year and still enjoying it, which is the only review that really counts.

Every year around now I go through the tech, work out what earned its keep and what quietly let me down, and write it up. This year the exercise produced an unexpected result, which is that nothing broke.

Nothing died. Nothing got replaced. Nothing needed a repair, a battery or an argument with a support chat. I sat down expecting to write about a failure and could not find one, which after twenty five years of buying gadgets is genuinely novel.

The inventory, such as it is

• Work MacBook, an M1 from 2020. Four years old and still faster than anything I ask of it.
• A MacBook Air at home, doing the not-work half of my life.
• Nothing Phone (1), bought 22 July 2023. Seventeen months in.
• Nothing Ear (1), bought 29 September 2023. Still work perfectly.
• A NAS in the flat running Plex and a handful of other services.

That is the lot. The newest item on that list is fifteen months old. It is the most boring audit I have written and I have come round to thinking that is the point: at some stage this stuff stopped being a hobby that needed feeding and turned into infrastructure that works.

Still very happy with the Nothing Phone

Seventeen months in and I still like the interface, which is the bit I expected to tire of. It is simple in a way that phones mostly are not any more, and the simplicity has not curdled into limitation.

It is also doing two jobs. Work and personal live on separate profiles on the same handset, and it runs two SIMs, because I have been in Amsterdam for years and still have not given up my UK number. I suspect I never will. That number has been mine longer than some of my friendships.

Carrying one phone instead of two is the single best change I have made to how I work, and it was not a change I planned. I just bought a phone that could do it.

The annual Trello failure

Here is the one thing that did break this year, and it was me.

I tried to use Trello again. Set it up properly, boards for the right things, good intentions all round. It worked for a while and then it fizzled, exactly as it did the last time and the time before that. At some point I stopped opening it and did not notice I had stopped.

I am writing this on 29 December, which means I am three days away from deciding that next year I will really use Trello. I am aware of what that sentence is. It is a new year resolution with a login page.

The honest conclusion is that Trello is not the problem. Nine years of evidence says I am not a person who maintains a board, and the correct move is probably to stop buying the idea that one more attempt will take.

The accounts audit

The hardware held still this year and the accounts did all the moving. I went to Bluesky properly, which I have written about separately. And I think I got rid of Threads, though the fact that I am not certain rather makes the point about how much it mattered.

So: nothing to buy, nothing to fix, one habit to give up on honestly rather than fail at again in February. Not a bad place to end a year.

Timeline of Social Networks: From Orkut to Bluesky

Orkut (2004-2014): Launched by Google, Orkut was one of the first platforms to connect friends and communities online. It gained immense popularity in countries like Brazil and India before being discontinued in 2014. I think this was also the first network I used 8lettersuk as a username?

MySpace (2003-2011): MySpace was a pioneer of the customisable profile and of course the infamous music integration. It reigned as the most visited social network until Facebook surpassed it. Yes I had a profile no I have no idea what was on it now.

Facebook (2004-Present): Initially launched only for students, Facebook expanded to become the largest social network globally, integrating features like News Feeds, photo sharing, and groups. It all started though with farmville and pokes. Yes I still have an account. No I don’t want to talk about it.

Twitter (2006-2022): Known for its 140-character micro-blogging format and it’s fail whale, Twitter became a platform for real-time news, discussions, and global trends. It’s time is over though now it’s X and basically a propaganda machine.

LinkedIn (2003-Present): I guess this counts as another micro blogging platform just with a specific niche for companies and networking. LOL of course I have an account.

Instagram (2010-Present): Initially focused on photo sharing, Instagram introduced stories, reels, and shopping features, basically anything Meta thought it could use to kill off competition like snapchat. Yes I have an account. Yes I have issues with their overtly anti-LGBTQ moderation. No I will not elaborate.

Snapchat (2011-Present): Known initally for ephemeral content and AR filters, Snapchat changed how users interacted with disappearing stories and messages. Your Instagram stories exist because of Snap. Yes I had an account. No I was not the target audience.

Vine (2013-2017): Vine introduced looping 6-second videos and became a cultural phenomenon before shutting down. Its legacy influenced short-form video content on platforms like TikTok. Yes I also had an account.

TikTok (2016-Present): Originally launched as Douyin in China, TikTok gained worldwide popularity for its short-form videos powered by a highly engaging algorithm. It’s also attracted lots of hate in the US because (in my view) it is the only major network on the list that is not US owned and operated. This one kind of passed me by because I don’t really like video content without subtitles and most of the content is not really that.

Threads (2023-Present): Created by Meta and tied heavily to Instagram Threads emerged as a direct competitor to Twitter, aiming to merge visual content and text in a micro-blogging format. It suffers the same issues as Instagram and indeed all Meta properties in it’s moderation issues and LGBTQ suppression.

Bluesky (2021-Present): So this brings us to Bluesky which focuses on decentralisation. So here we go again? What is old is new again. Re-inventing the micro-blogging format but is it worth the effort?

I skipped over Mastadon (yes I started with it but it is still I think way too techy barrier to entry for most people) and I skipped over FourSquare which I loved and think I may still be the Mayor of some London places but meh they messed that whole thing up when they split it into two apps and lost focus on why people where using it. Anyway this is a shorter version of a list of of profiles i have online (https://8letters.co.uk/profiles/). I say this because well here I am extolling the virtues of yet another platform. BlueSky.

Why Bluesky Stands Out Among Micro-Blogging Platforms right now

If you’re looking for a fresh take on micro-blogging platforms, Bluesky might just be what you’re after. As someone who’s explored multiple platforms – including Twitter (or X if you insist) and Threads – I’ve found Bluesky to offer a better experience that deserves attention. You can find me sharing my insights and stories over at my profile 8letters.co.uk on Bluesky. Oh yeah it nicely allows you to use a domain as a username very easily (more details here https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial).

Decentralised Structure

One of Bluesky’s better features is its decentralised architecture. Unlike say Twitter, which is controlled by a single company person, Bluesky leverages the AT Protocol to create an ecosystem where users have more control over their data and experience. This approach promotes openness, innovation, and user autonomy, setting it apart from the closed ecosystems of its competitors.

A Cleaner, More Natural Timeline

The clutter-free timeline is another major advantage over some of it’s competitors. Bluesky’s design focuses on user-generated content, without the noise of excessive ads (although I am sure they will come) and losing the major algorithmic pushes seen on Twitter and Threads. This means your timeline will likely stay relevant and free from distractions, letting you engage with content that matters to you. At least that’s been my experience so far.

Community and Culture

Bluesky has managed to cultivate a unique and tight-knit community. Early adopters and creative individuals make up a significant portion of its user base (and we I guess can skip over the furries), which fosters an environment of genuine interaction and creativity. Unlike the polarised or heavily commercialised culture of Twitter, Bluesky feels more like a community where individual voices are valued.

Data Portability and Control

One major pain point with platforms like Threads and Twitter is the ‘locked-in’ nature of user data. Even in the EU with our data portability laws it’s kind of pointless to have my Twitter archive if there is nothing I can do with it. With Bluesky’s AT Protocol, data portability is not just a promise but a feature. Users can move their profiles and content between different services that use the protocol, giving them true ownership over their digital presence.

A Refreshing Alternative

For those tired of the ego-driven changes on Twitter or the brand-heavy feel of Threads, Bluesky offers a refreshing alternative. It’s a space that values quality interactions over quantity, allowing users to feel connected and heard.

15 Million and counting

With the exodus from other platforms and the natural network effects as a platform grows more an more people are using BlueSky (https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/13/tech/x-musk-bluesky-users-post-election/index.html). More than a million joined this week alone (https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3larljiybf22v).

Check out my profile here to see more about my journey on yet another new platform.