LOVE SWINE? Get the T-Shirt.
Feeling under the weather? There’s no better remedy than a LOVE SWINE t-shirt. Check out more colors and cuts in the porky department of our European storefront.
Thanks to Bochito for the creative inspiration!
Coworking and Travorking
Coworking is a brilliant idea. You’re a nomadic professional, tired of schlepping your laptop and shelling out $2.50/hr in coffee at your local cafe. You’d like to be around interesting folks, learn about their work, and share contacts and experience. College was a luxury of the past; now you miss your 24-hour campus library and comfy dorm couch. So what to do when you’re young, employed, and on the search for the perfect modern office?
Enter coworking, an office-turned-community solution for the modern spirit. As I learned from last week’s Open Everything, coworking spaces are as diverse as the people the frequent them, but the main idea is the same: create a space where you can plug in, wire up, and get some work done — all with the camaraderie of fellow pixel pushers.
The newly opened Betahaus in Berlin is an example of a well-planned space. On the main floor, you have a cafe, lounge, and exhibition hall for events and art installations. One floor up you’ll find plenty of desks which can be rented on by the hour. Wifi is as ubiquitous as oxygen, plus printers, fax machines, and other office kramm abound. One level higher is home to the regular members, who pay by the month for a fixed desk and secure place to leave their stuff. They’re also given a key to come in during closed hours.
The Betahaus is already becoming a studio-of-choice in Germany’s creative captial. Anyone who waited an hour to get into the office’s opening party can attest to that. And as Christoph, one of the Betahaus’s founders, explained at Open Everything, desk contracts are going fast.
Travorking
But other than a hip home-office hybrid and new friends, what else comes with a coworking space? Well, here’s one idea that really caught my imagination. Patrick, co-founder of Station C in Montreal, introduced me to the concept of travorking — traveling and working.
If you need a change of scenery, pack your bags and head to another city to work remotely. Patrick and his girlfriend Marie are doing just that in Berlin. They found an apartment, a friendly coworking space in Kreuzberg, and set up shop. They explore the city in the evening after work, and during the day they’re at the office, working on projects and getting to know their office mates.
Also struck by wanderlust, Peter and Matze decided to do the travorking trip in reverse. My Berliner buddies have taken off to NYC, where they’re now camped out at The Change You Want To See coworking space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They seem pretty happy there, and from what I hear, there’s never a dull moment.
With travorking on the rise, it makes me think there’s a good future in developing a coworking visa. If you’re a paying member at a coworking space in your city, you could go and work at partner offices around the globe on your same contract. I think a visa system would encourage even more travel and strengthen coworking’s network and vibe. It’s definitely a cool mode of work, and I’m happy to see it picking up!
Monkeys on a Banana by furryscaly / CC BY ND
Computer Monkeys by ChrisL_AK / CC BY
Wanna Learn Arabic? Some Cool Tools and Sites
One thing I appreciate about the net is that people are always compiling lists to share their experiences and help others find (or avoid!) certain tools and sites. With that spirit in mind, I thought I’d jot down some services I’ve come across so far on my journey to learning Arabic (and wow, it is such a long road).
With no further ado, here’s my must-have list:
- Arabic Pod: This excellent and gratis podcast, run by Mohamed Moshaya and Ehab Saleh out of London, offers regular audio lessons for beginner, lower-, and upper-intermediate speakers. It has been my favorite language companion so far because Mohamed and Ehab have a wonderful delivery and knack for explaining tricky grammar and phrases. They alternate lessons between classical Arabic and colloquial, and their website features transcripts of their lessons, videos, and more at a reasonable price. I really appreciate these guys — shukran!
- Alkitaab Podcasts: Jeremy’s an American grad student who’s put together a series of podcasts to accompany the ubiquitous Al-Kitaab textbooks (which btw is also a great site, for those advanced enough to decipher the syllabi). In Jeremy’s Alkitaab podcasts, he walks through each page and exercise in the famous textbook and explains the questions and provides example answers. It’s a really helpful homework complement.
- Alkitaab Audio: Speaking of the glorious textbook Al-Kitaab, San Francisco State University offers the audio, re-recorded by their own native speakers, so you don’t have to buy/burn the Al-Kitaab DVD. The sound quality isn’t as good, and having the original DVD is actually really beneficial, but in a crunch, or for data exportability, use SFSU’s audio as a solid fix.
- Al Jazeera’s Children Channel: You can watch and read plenty of things in Arabic on this channel’s website. The content is geared towards kids, so it’s colorful and interactive, and therefore good for people wanting to learn the language.
- Arabic Internet Radio: Plenty of the links are broken, but you can still find some streams from radio stations in Lebanon, Tunisia, the UAE, and elsewhere.
- Yamli.com: Arabic transliteration can be hard, especially when you’re new to the language. This search engine suggests Arabic spellings as you type and brings you results usings several orthographic variations.
- Nice Translator: This service builds upon Google Translate, but gives it a much better interface and immediate as-you-type translations. You can also set it up to translate into several different languages at once.
Update: An absolute gem for free Arabic tutorials can be found at Learn Arabic Online. It contains a real wealth of material, including audio lectures, conjugation charts, grammar study sheets, writing guides, history, and heaps more. I’m also very impressed by their vocab lists and poetry tutorials. I’ll definitely have to spend more study time here! (Thank you to the Shariah Program for sharing this link with me!)
we love arabic .. نحب لغتنا العربية by place light – flying not physically / CC BY
Open Workspace @ Openeverything Berlin
This month we’ll be talking about new forms of co-working, collaboration, and office sharing.
Joining us:
- Hallenprojekt (Berlin) – Sebastian Sooth (Twitter: sebaso)
- Station C (Montreal) – Patrick Tanguay (Identica: patrick, Twitter: inevernu)
- Betahaus (Berlin) – Jan Tanner (Twitter: betahaus)
Where: newthinking store, Tucholskystr. 48, 10117 Berlin Mitte
When: Thurs, 23.04.09, 19:30
Read more about our other Openeverything events & ideas:
leave a comment