// 16.5

In two days, I'm moving from Oslo to Kongsberg. After 16.5 years as an Oslo resident, I'm entering a new phase.

On January 29th, 2026, I get the keys. The new. The new.

I'll be commuting to work in Oslo. 1.25 hours on the train each way, Monday through Friday. That's 12.5 hours per week of protected time — and I'm planning to use every minute of it for decidedly non-work things. The office is for office work. The train is for everything else.

Finding new social networks, building new routines, doing new things. Making a house into my home. The kind of reset that only comes from changing your physical coordinates.

But this isn't really about Oslo. It's about a longer arc — one that started in December 1997, when I was 19 years old and moved from Bjæverskov, Denmark to Bergen, Norway. To study. To become something. To leave the small town behind.

Since then, I've only lived in cities:

Almost 28 years of urban life. Apartments. Noise. Anonymity. Convenience. The particular rhythm of cities where you can disappear into the crowd whenever you need to.

Kongsberg isn't a village — it's a town of about 30,000 people — but it's not Oslo either. It's something different. Something I haven't tried before. And maybe that's exactly the point.

There's another timeline running parallel to the cities.

In the spring of 2002, I was living and working in Brussels. One weekend, I decided to retire my old online handle — "Ehich" — and replace it with something that felt more like a compass. I chose "DLTQ": Don't Lose The Question. A reminder to myself. The questions matter more than the answers. Keep asking.

DLTQ was my digital identity for 23 years. From Brussels in 2002 to Oslo in 2025. Through blogs, vlogs, conferences, jobs, relationships — a thousand reinventions of myself, of what my core questions even were.

But in late 2025, I started shifting toward something new: str.is.

Partly it's about the domain. The Icelandic .is TLD is privacy-focused, independent, a quiet rebellion against the platform giants. I'm spiraling away from big tech — my Meta accounts were deleted in 2025, and sometime this year, my old Google account will follow. The less I depend on their infrastructure, the freer I feel.

But it's more than that. .is is also the verb to be. And str_is — in programming — is a family of functions that validate whether a string is something. str.isalpha(). str.isdigit(). str.isvalid(). They return true or false. They check identity. They ask: what are you, really?

Which, when you think about it, is just another way of not losing the question.

str.is becomes a side gig. A hobby project with ambition.

The goal for 2026: build 12 good solutions here. Some in Norwegian, some in English. Each one serving a different purpose, scratching a different itch. Not 12 half-baked ideas — 12 things that actually work, that someone might actually use.

swarm.str.is is a template. A multi-perspective AI swarm that iterates until it finds something useful. It's becoming the HQ — the central nervous system that other projects can tap into. The pattern that proves the concept.

I don't know what all 12 will be yet. That's part of the point. Some will emerge from work problems. Some from personal curiosity. Some from conversations I haven't had yet. Some from those 12.5 hours on the train, watching the landscape pass, letting thoughts arrive.

What I do know: the infrastructure is ready. The skills are there. The time is allocated. Now it's about showing up consistently and shipping things that matter — at least to me. Or things that add to what we in Norwegian call mengdetrening: volume training. Reps. Practice. Building the muscle of making things, with my AI collaborator — currently running on Anthropic's Opus 4.5.

Kongsberg awaits. Let's see what gets built. And what watching the landscape outside the train windows will allow me to reflect into new patterns.

raymond@str.is