Work

We hebben bij ons op de studio in @ouroffice binnenkort twee bureau’s vrij. Wil je op bureau met de leukste en creatiefste mensen van het Volkskrantgebouw — Eric, Maarten en ik— roep dan en we kunnen kijken of het past.

Last week was the first week that I was back from the Levant. I have notes for the three weeks in between, but I think I’ll skip those (though plenty of interesting stuff happened over there too).

Russell Davies apologizes, though he needn’t.

Stukjes schrijven zonder hyperlinks erin is gek, maar dat komt erbij kijken als het op krantenpapier gedrukt moet worden. In ieder geval is vandaag een stuk van mij gepubliceerd op de opinie-pagina van de nrc.next: “Dat moet toch beter kunnen? — Geef vervoersinformatie vrij.

Zoals mensen misschien al wel zagen aankomen, hier het nieuws op Webwereld met een redelijk verslag: “Fraude nekt online-fooienpot TipiT”

Last week I attended the Design Mind Salon with Bill Buxton (our hero) as one of its speakers. I managed to jot down some quotes by him. All of these are paraphrases but they’re good ones:

Ik was benieuwd naar wat gegevens van de OV-fiets, dus ik klom in de pen:

A short remaindered weeknote (a rather awesome event and dinner packed week indeed):

By the time you’re reading this I will have flown off to the Levant to spend three weeks mainly in Damascus, Syria.

A short week returning from Copenhagen on Monday evening.

De laatste dagen staan een beetje in het teken van gelekte e-mailtjes van, naar en door invloedrijke mensen in Nederland. Een van de recentere is die van de nieuwe hoofdredacteur van het NRC, Peter Vandermeersch, naar zijn redactie, hieronder (via):

Yesterday the next ARCAM lecture was held in the Brakke Grond by Jurriaan van Stigt of the firm LEVS.

Dit fijne dubbelinterview met Kevin Kelly en Steven Berlin Johnson is nog wel het aardigst omdat het uitlegt waarom we Engels moeten praten.

Gisteren een potje Stereoscoop gespeeld op de Neude in Utrecht en daar een gigantische buit binnengehaald. Deze badges staan nu op mijn profiel te prijken:

Last week was mostly busy with getting http://playpilots.nl to talk nicely to the Stereoscoop live game and make stuff work (mostly) properly back and forth. Synchronizing physical installations with websites is always fun.

There’s a lot of stuff happening in the Dutch Data Scene and more communication and consolidation of efforts is in order.

We moved in our new desks and got rid of the old ones. This clears up a lot of space in the studio and we now have a fifth desk open for lease. If you’re design minded and interested in a great place in a creative hub of Amsterdam, get in touch.

The belated weeknotes for the last week. My apologies. Another inbetween week, with a ton of events.

Last week was a short one and mostly spent in preparation of work writing proposals and quotes. I hope we can wrap all that stuff up this week and go back into grand scale production mode.

Last week was concerned with finalizing stuff for the first presentation of guadalajara. The current concept was more exploratory, we do not seem to have found the point of relevance yet to move forward.

Last week was a quiet one.

This week was dominated by a bunch of things. Preparations for Stekkerfest and touching up the website for that were very important. Also anticipation for the live demonstration of the first PLAY Pilots live game by Fourcelabs.

From slide 47 on is the core of this presentation by Jan Chipchase:

‘Design Directie’ is een periodiek stukje van Alper over het raakvlak van design en technologie met de maatschappij 1.

This week started pretty extreme 1 with 12+ hour days on Monday and Tuesday culminating in the launch of PLAY Pilots.

This week was completely spent with work each day on project Ebi, better known as PLAY Pilots. The site is due to launch this week (it in fact launched yesterday night).

Post-mortems and design overviews will be posted by the appropriate people in due time, but for now the site is live and we are quite happy about it.

A quick one.

Project Ebi is taking most of my capacity and brain these days, so everything else is necessarily pushed to the back burner a bit.

Some notes, this time not ordered by day, but by theme.

I was already in the habit of starting my mornings drinking the best coffee in Amsterdam at Stumptown and would regularly chat with the mayor. After planning some morning meetings there, getting an early start, drinking great coffee and having a good conversation with people you’d normally not talk to, proved to be a good idea.

I don’t know how I missed this job in my post this year on “New disciplines for a real-time data world” but this week the position for a Data Griot and Community Activator popped up at Last.fm and was brought to my attention by Chris Heathcote’s post who did some griotting into Grindr (an interesting app worth a post on its own).

Monday # Continuation of Ebi and first deployment to the server. One of my biggest beefs with Django is that any fresh deploy to a server will cost you at least one hour, despite it being the same old stuff you have been doing for ever (as opposed to App Engine).

Let’s see how this goes. Consider this a try out for now.

Some conversations with Jaap Stronks for the terminology and the rifts between UX designers I am witnessing more and more on events (dConstruct, The Web and Beyond) sparked this model below.

Dit is de zogenaamde innovatie bij de Rabobank:

I recently got glasses to make my vision even better than it already is. Nothing wrong with my eyes, but once you’ve seen the difference in sharpness, you do not want to go back. For me it’s an augment:

Haven’t got mine yet, but yes they’re Magic Tables.

Interesting to see that there were a ton of election result charting, display and visualization sites that popped up just before the elections. It seems that this is a hot topic.

Some posts that had been sitting in my browser tabs for a while combined together in a brand new job guide for 2010. You can also read this as a follow-up post to my previous post on Why developers are important, this is which developers are important. This post has been lying in my drafts folder for a while, but it has actually only become more relevant.

Today at an event called ‘What makes you horny?’ (#wmyh), I gave a presentation about my inspiration: Big Data.

One of the more important online projects Wikileaks got hit by a block this weekend but we at TipiT could quickly respond and get them up and running again. Read the write-up over at the TipiT blog.

The hearings for the various European Commissioners were held last week. Our Dutch representative Neelie Kroes (known from her ferocious busting of Microsoft’s balls) was given a hard time mainly due to political getting back from the Christian and Socialist European fractions for the grilling of their candidates.

Zoals al op het TipiT blog te lezen is TipiT nu ook beschikbaar in het Nederlands. Dat heeft wel aardig wat werk gekost, maar een site vertalen blijkt toch best wel leuk werk te zijn (al moet je wel je hoofd er goed bij houden).

Sjors Timmer writes a nice piece about the futility of innovation and the inevitability of failure.

Tim Bray speaks out on what those of us without a vested interest in the disfunctional business practices of enterprise software already knew and have been saying for years:

Of course I agree with this article: “Why front-end developers are so important to the future of businesses on the web” pleading for t-shaped webdevelopers being treated as such. Though that would seem like a fairly obvious point.

Yet another discussion about banks regarding the Huffington Post call to remove your money from the major American banks. There is in fact no reason why your money should be managed by a multinational public corporation (and many reasons why it shouldn’t). It is partly why my banking is handled by the Rabobank, a cooperative banking institution.

In een vergelijkbaar filmpje zoals je ze ook voor je film ziet wanneer je legaal DVDs koopt/huurt, komt er weer een stukje propaganda van de entertainment-industrie: