Just posted a short bio on my Edgeryders profile and thought it’s quite funny, so I also post it here. I made the experience that putting your life “as it is”, without elevating yourself, makes for the most cool and readable presentation style (think Cullman Liquidation – they inspired me). Self-appraisal just puts you on par with boring old commercials, but telling them how it is makes people think “Wow, he went through that all and is still an upright man. Respect!” You can also profit yourself from writing it down like that: when reading again and feeling your life reads strange enough to make for a movie, it will help you in all that suffering ;-.)
Hope you have as much fun reading as I have living this 😀
CS studies. In my computer science, I pretty much only appeared at exams (yea I know, quite solitary learning style – distance learning would be my thing, but it wasn’t widespread back then). After the finals two of my profs offered me a PhD option. Yet I declined, even without knowing what to do instead and at all. But some narrow research stuff of their choosing very probably wasn’t it.
On knowing not. So not knowing what to choose next, I simply jobbed part-time as a truck driver for a friend’s company, until after a year he lost the whole trucking contract. By then, living on just a minimal income with plenty of time to think about life, I had finally found what to do with it: “I am here to find out why I’m here”. There was no way for me to circumnavigate the meaning-of-life question. So instead it became my first passion. Here we go.
Umh, why do you call it work “life”? But even the tech monk that I was now needed to earn a living. Continuing extreme aversion to 9-5 nonsensical work left me with few options. I becamse self-employed, avoiding the 9-5, but the nonsense sticked: For a laundry shop, I built digital video surveillance that made the police happy (yikes!). For another customer, the task was to take free software captive by bundling it as a for-sale extension to their app. And I had my fair share of precarious freelance work when some fixed-price web dev projects turned out five times the original effort and got paid years late. I left freelancing in utmost frustration and now work as hopeful co-founder of a collaborative consumption startup (mintybox.com).
Heureka (thank you, economic crisis)! So this is how I stumbled into worklife, while around me, the global economic crisis was going rampant. Together, these ingredients made me think hard and I became obsessed with how to design a society that just works, and the tech to run it sustainably. That’s now my second passion and very much a work in progress, called “EarthOS”. It’s a system orchestrating all the existing free & open ideas so that all aspects of life are served by free, open, P2P tech and services only – see the EarthOS framework and equipment documents. Of course everybody here thinks I’m this crazy utopian 😀
The nomad. And I’m also getting practical with EarthOS stuff from equipment levels 1 and 2, making it the interior for my … well, home. It happened to be cheap, just what I needed at that time: 500 bucks for that freezer box body from a torn-down truck. And a year after, I found a 4×4 firefighter truck chassis from 1968 and bolted the box body to the truck. This combo is street legal now (yay!) and I’m eager to move in, to get going with my meaning-of-life expeditions and further EarthOS prototyping. (And hey, I will always be happy to stop at the door of amazing people. Welcome to drop me a line!)
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