My chosen specialist subject:
confusing re-routes of trains from the Poland/Germany border into Berlin
Another day, another Venice... By which I mean Berlin has its own weird Venice-named canal system, just like Los Angeles. When I moved to Berlin I used to ride out here a bunch, but it's a bit further from where I live now and there are more city distractions. There's a convenient bar/cafe at the halfway/turnaround point where I am right now, "rehydrating" *cough* for a meandering 25km back home
Today's example of Conway's Law - the shiny new Ukrainian passport office in Berlin has you pay with credit card online: one part in UAH for the passport, and then a second time in EUR for the agency service free.
Other than that, it looks great and the staff were friendly and helpful (maybe Ukrainians think that's just normal but this is Germany)
refugees
walkie talkies: the #Berlin government gave us a bunch of walkie talkies to use, and we used them plenty. but they also caused comedy trouble with people not used to radio protocols (hi Dadley) and needed a whole bunch of sign in/sign out/exclusion because not enough radios that has more recently been replaced by people using telegram
refugees
I've been working with refugees at #Berlin #Hauptbahnhof for just over a year. Because of that recent anniversary, I've been involved in a bunch of retrospective stuff, and I've been trying to write something up on the role of tech in our #volunteer group. For now, I'm going to try to make a thread here of some of the notes I made for myself...
I'm at BER #Berlin airport, the chaotic airport that everyone loves to hate, waiting for some friends.
I'm sitting outside a door that says "please wait here. All arriving passengers will use this exit" but on the other side it tells arriving passengers "STOP! this is an emergency exit only".
Waiting with bated breath to see what happens.
Hi.
I'm Ben.
For fun I ride my bike around Berlin and build pretty things with LEDs and microcontrollers.
I'm also interested in programming language design/theory stuff.
I help with a refugee reception volunteer group in Berlin for people arriving from Ukraine.
I like dogs.
http://www.hawaga.org.uk/ben/
https://github.com/benclifford
https://twitter.com/benclifford