404 – common sense not found

Number-sign from the street Gl. Køge Landevej number 404, part of a project proposed by Søren Johannessen of microformats.dk, to take a picture of all number-signs of a road for the official Internet error-codes 200-599 (Wikipedia: List of HTTP status codes).

I got all fired up by Søren’s geekish proposal, so when he suggested streets for me to hit, I went for it, and had not expected to run into any problems…I was wrong!

The first problem I ran into, is that there are huge gaps in the street numbers, meaning for instance, that Gl. Køge Landevej has a gap from number 198 to 220.

The second, and much more severe, problem I ran into was that, people on the street thought that it looked suspicious, and I guess I could have been more discrete, I already felt in my stomach that it was a wrong thing to do, before I was approached by two men that asked me what I was up to, and that their neighbourg had actually called the police.

I had a friendly talk with the people, and explained them exactly what I was doing. They felt that it was illegal, and that I should have asked every single household for a permission.

I think this highlights the problem geeks like me have, understanding that the world is not perfect, that people mistrust each other and the naivety I showed in undertaking this, I was just being a kid playing with “LEGO”, meaning no harm, but totally lacking common sense.

I will abandon this project, but as you can see, I snapped the number 404, the Internet error code for “not found” (Wikipedia: HTTP 404) I might pursue finding as many as possible of the 404 numbers, I think I can do that discretely.

According to Søren there’s a total of 133 streets with the number 404 in Denmark, 1 down, 132 to go 🙂