I'm starting a spring European hacking tour with my favourite Lisp conference in Amsterdam this weekend. My master plan is to bounce around the continent for a month or two visiting the kind friends who offer me their couch or spare room for a week or so at a time.

So! If you're a kind old friend and you'd care to catch up on old times then do drop me an email :-) I'll be hacking away on my circuit board all the while.

I'd particularly appreciate a couch within striking distance of Slussen next week!

In the few days since I landed I've done productive work at the newly-forming OLE Nepal, explored Thamel, been introduced to the nightlife (good), Hashed around the edge of Kathmandu valley, and now I'm having a relaxing sunday breakfast with good coffee and wifi at the Himalayan Java Cafe.

Kathmandu is great value. You can find a clean room in Thamel for $2/night and a good all-you-can-eat meal of Dahl Baht for about $0.50. Best of all is that you can eat with your hands. :-)

There was one day of productive work so far: I was introduced to Christine the teacher-trainer and found out how she'd like to computerise a couple of simple maths/english textbooks that she wrote. I tried prototyping the first bit (a grade #1 adding exercise) with Etoys and this was really pleasant. Just by dragging and dropping some stock objects and pictures from the internet I easily made a simple authoring environment for creating a book of adding exercises. There're only three lines of drag'n'drop code to indicate whether the answer is correct, see screenshot!

A little polish is needed and then it'll be fun to see how it's received. I'm glad there's productive work to be done from day one.

The focal point has been visiting my friend and history tutor :-) Denis Mashkevich, the philosopher and Lisp programmer of Jerusalem. I also caught up with the west-coast Lisp scene (Michael Livshin) and even the illustrious Ehud Lamm! I hadn't met Ehud before and it was great to find we have so much in common.

I also made some new Hollywood friends along the way who I'm looking forward to meeting up with once my eastward trajectory lands me in California. :-)

Now I'm exploring around Petra (again) and rediscovering the wonderful truth that the whole world smiles back at the guy on the unicycle. :-) Yesterday I rode from Wadi Musa down through the Beduin village to Little Petra and spent some hours hiking in the mountains. It was all smiles and jokes for the whole day and lots of people waved me down to offer tea while they tried their luck at riding. So, so, so much fun :-)

The unicycle is an excellent instrument for measuring the overall societal whimsy level. The Jordanians score very well: right up there with the Russians!

Photos: around Israel, brilliant scuba diving holiday to Dahab, around Petra.

Tonight I'll fly from Amman towards Kathmandu to start on some real work!