I’m back from roadtripping across Germany. Enormous fun! I love travel. I love Europe. But I love Cambridge too, and it’s good to be back amongst good friends and waiting projects.

There’s a blog of the adventures at http://www.depoint.net/roadtrip/. Highlights include hiking in the Alps of Slovenia; getting a personal tour of Ljubljana from someone we met at a 24-hour Burek eatery; discovering Ljubljana’s artsy, squattery alternative scene and staying at their prison-turned-hostel; wandering the grounds of Dachau Concentration Camp; having divine signals lead us to the best food of the trip in Worms; and seeing Cologne’s cathedral and gay town. Here are some images from the journey:

And I’m back with a change, if a small one. Recently I’d been back-of-my-mind depressed because of my job: I independent contract for two companies that give me an endless stream of interesting work… but work that I can’t believe in as anything but a fun way to make money. And I can’t live to make money or respect myself for it, no matter how fun. But as I sat in the prison-turned-hostel’s Oriental Cafe, I shifted my foreground and background and realized that I was already doing the job I wanted, just not the job I was hired for: I’m starting a business. My business is Departure Point, the traveler’s community site I’ve been working on on-and-off for months. I’ll continue contracting, to support my business until it gets off the ground, but now I have a end that I can believe in.

In addition, it looks like this semester I’m co-teaching a class on Technology and Culture, and teaching a section of MIT’s intro CS class. Exciting!