I'm spending the week in Zandfoort an Zee, a beachside town along the North Sea. Greenpeace International sponsors a "skillshare" for the IT department here every year. The idea is to invite the IT personnel from our national offices for a series of discussions on future products, department strategy, and of course, play buzzword bingo. It still surprises me how much Greenpeace is like any other company. Of course, bankers don't usually chain themselves to forklifts on their days off.

During the day, this means a lot of meetings. Far too many of them involve the use of Powerpoint and other sleep aids. The interesting ones provoke really good (by this I mean "entertaining") discussion. Players of Illuminati may recall that the enemy of a fanatic is another fanatic. Wear your asbestos underwear at all times, folks.

By far, the real fun happens in the evenings. Greenpeacers are notoriously social drinkers, and this time they've given us a week in a hotel with free food and a cheap bar. Yesterday I upped the ante by going to Haarlem for coffee-shop supplies.

When we're not doing that, we're geeking. We've got at least 20 laptops between us, a network connection, an 802.11b wireless hub, a digital projector, and a metric assload of music, video games, porn, and downloaded movies and TV shows. They really shouldn't have given us that projector.

Once a year, the museums of Amsterdam host an event called "Museumnacht". All the major museums stay open until 2am, featuring live music, DJ's, and special events. A large group of us - Greenpeacers and assorted friends - went out last Saturday for it.

Imagine a beautiful multi-story exhibit space with soaring ceilings and the requite white walls and museum sterility. Now, replace that with rave-style lighting and two DJ's doing live scratch and breakbeats on three turntables, a stylishly dressed European crowd, and a proper level of nightime public intoxication. I had no idea how much I liked art.

I would love to see that at SF MOMA.