Welcome to the forums Pat (: We hope you enjoy it here!

welcome…

BTW the streets name is Vlaardingenlaan – I try not to be as pernickety about minor details as in Northern European cultures where it matters I do try and keep some accuracy – spelling the street name correctly (and I appreciate its difficult, only been learning Dutch since 2008) makes it easier for our software and google to auto index the threads and articles about this wonderful place. I did not know Dr B was that involved and I don’t think its his article quoted (there is a certain way Dutch write English and it stands out because of different word order and grammar (I struggle with the same but the other way round) but his heavier involvement would not surprise me. it also explains why Dr B he so kind to provide a platform for me and my rants throughout the 2000s when I was trying similar in Blighty.

De Vlaardingenlaan nr. 11 te Amsterdam was ook sinds 1998 dé plek voor goede psytrancefeesten. Daar was de Elf, een van de meest aantrekkelijke kraakpanden van Nederland te vinden, met keuken, meditatieruimte, een chaishop en een dansvloer op de bovenste etage. De feesten duurden soms dagenlang en veel artiesten kregen er een kans. De gemoedelijke sfeer binnen de psytrance-scene kwam er volledig tot haar recht. Bezoekers verbleven er soms langere tijd. In 2001 kwam dit ten einde. Het terrein is tot op de dag van vandaag braakliggend.

The IT industry of the late 90s was amazingly tolerant and non judgemental (albeit only due to the dot com boom false euphoria and perhaps in hindsight only for a few fleeting years) so involvement in that and activism wasn’t mutually exclusive. Also they were so rich it was easy to divert what was actually quite high cost resources, and the salaries paid meant you had money for toys and fun (particularly if you resisted the temptation to spunk it all on cars, or just didn’t have a driving license or lived in a country with less car culture or even a UK city where a car isn’t necessary).

I remember things like beige boxing for spare phone lines of big businesses or councils in squatted places (I’d never rob off a small business or folk what couldn’t afford it), and using a very clunky IRDA Nokia phone to post stuff to partyvibe in the early days (usually sent via email). One post even came from up a tree house outside Reading, which in 1999 was quite an achievement. The laptop itself weighed a half ton compared with todays netbooks, and I didn’t even have my bicycle then.

Also I wouldn’t “misunderestimate” the activist value of a friendly, pro-and pan Europe (but very internationalist/multicultural) internet forum that is friendly and thus on the outset looks “mostly harmless” (even in comparison with Farcebook, and other sites which have much more anger/negative energy in them), especially if it just looks more like its a mixture of teenagers, youths, and old hedonists/hippies approaching middle age. in Blighty today (as you probably know) you don’t get these groups mingling and co-operating outside things like the eco-activist scene, Transition movement etc. Even nightlife is balkanised to age groups, music genres, culture nowadays in some towns.

you don’t need to be Dutch to end up writing in Dunglish, just regularly exposed to both languages – I’ve managed to do it on a email I sent to my office colleagues in England (I often work from home) because I was writing in Dutch on the other screen.

To make things worse it was to try and explain (to non technical readers) the workings of caller ID on a VOIP phone system where the endpoints are analogue cordless phones designed to ETSI standard (so they should work anywhere in EU) and why it would introduce delays into call processing from time of arrival at the phone system. Not sure if anyone even understood half of it and when I looked at what I sent wasn’t sure if I did.

At least I didn’t give a full “Dutch” response which (given these folks fondness for direct plain speaking) may have just been “well answer the fucking phones quicker then…”

There is a whole generation on here who might not realise why a PCMCIA network and phone card was a such a bonus in those years (if anyone is really curious I will explain in the computer section).

@Pat McDonald 476785 wrote:

Well, having a mobile network is always useful. I paid quite a bit for it but the guy was in a position to use it to best effect… don’t know if they did, wasn’t quick (dial up speed) but very handy if you have a truck and a habit of setting up party sites.

True but by the mid 2000s most laptops by then had the analogue modem built in (albeit often a Winmodem which wasn’t much good with Linux) as well as wired and wireless LAN. multimedia really didn’t take off until the late 90s and that was using a machine for stand alone production (one reason I liked my Tosh laptop was that it had at least sound hardware built in)

I expect many younger folk assume a laptop always could go online “out of the box”. but initially you needed more kit. Not sure if new laptops even have PCMCIA slots these days! I was still using two of these PCMCIA cards in the 2000s and an old laptop to make a router so I could get onto PV, it was only after ’05 or so the ISPs started giving whole routers away rather than just ASDL or DOCSIS modems. PV as a forum really only took off after broadband was available, as otherwise you’d be running up huge phone bills even if you could type fast, and tying up a entire phone circuit that others might want to use for voice calls (even mobiles were not as common as now).

hello too much text to read for my poor 6am brain x