Author Archives: olivier

We are back!

By olivier | Published: October 25, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, a hard disk failure on the server which hosted hippiesque.com took us off the web. It was the worst possible time to notice that the hosting company had somehow… forgotten to backup our databases, our sites, our files. Everything. We did our best to salvage the contents of the site from [...]
Posted in miscellaneous | Leave a comment

In praise of walking

By olivier | Published: July 28, 2009
Walking is man’s own, unique in the animal kingdom. Michel Serres, the charming thinker, rambles on in a gorgeous short podcast episode (in French) about how the walking pace, like the rhythm of the beating heart, is one of the most effective stimulants for thought. This reminded me of my recent reading of Beyond Culture [...]
Posted in thoughts | Leave a comment

Ruskin and Slow Travel

By olivier | Published: May 20, 2009
As a quick followup to my previous entry on The Myth of Travel, a quote from John Ruskin which I picked from the last chapter of Alain de Botton’s excellent The Art of Travel: No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was [...]
Posted in thoughts | Comments closed

Hypatia and the Renaissance Women

By olivier | Published: March 24, 2009
On the occasion of the first “Ada Lovelace Day”, which aims to highlight remarkable women in technology as potential role models for present and future generations of women, I started looking for the epitome of the “Renaissance Woman”. The “Renaissance Man” is an archetype personified by the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci: artists, craftsmen, engineers; [...]
Posted in thoughts | Leave a comment

The Myth of Travel

By olivier | Published: March 15, 2009
Before the 20th century, travel was slow: months on a boat or on roads. Travel was the hardships of migration for most, formative fun for the well off, and adventure for novel heroes. Then came a century of wars and population displacement. But between those wars, a few strange things happened. The 1930s saw the [...]
Posted in thoughts | Leave a comment

The travelers’ dream of the Big House

By olivier | Published: March 1, 2009
I learned a second language at age 9. A third and fourth at 13. I was not particularly fortunate, or living in a very international family or region. This was pretty much what every little European went through at the time. Back then, we had pen-pals from England. They had a different language, a different upbringing, [...]
Posted in thoughts | Leave a comment