Amsterdam

This episode from the lovely city podcast by Inge Wannet is a perfect account of what it feels like to cycle through Amsterdam rush hour.

Ik weet nog dat we na een bezoek aan Kopenhagen ook dit idee hadden om Amsterdam een watertaxi te geven die over het IJ zig-zagt en inderdaad ook de Amstel af gaat. De kans dat dit gebeurt is natuurlijk heel klein maar misschien ooit.

Het is lastig te beschrijven hoe belangrijk en consequent Karin Spaink en haar schrijven waren voor Nederland en voor de digitale wereld waarin ook ik opgegroeid ben.

Graven in de oude artikelen van dit blog doet me ook wat oude dingen nazoeken met een “Hè, wat is daarmee gebeurd?”

Asis Aynan over white flight in Amsterdam:

Hans de Zwart’s end of the year media overviews are one of the highlights of what still happens on personal blogs for me. He’s a voracious reader and one of the rare people who acts on his moral clarity. Also, Hans is a great guy and I had the chance to briefly catch-up with him last year.

Looking back on 2023 I can say that we made lemonade out of an overall pretty shit year.

Finding time for side projects and putting out new versions of Cuppings is difficult as always, but I’m glad we have a new version out this week again.

In this podcast episode a court case is treated (with the public prosecutor) where during a fluke accident a girl riding along on a bike is killed by a bus in Amsterdam.

Dit artikel bevestigt eigenlijk prima mijn beeld van het leven in Amsterdam waar veel mensen aan de pillen zitten.

Leuke aflevering met Menno en Wimer over de lange en rijke geschiedenis van hun bureau Booreiland en de volgende stap die ze nu zetten.

Goed werk van de Groene wat onthult hoe Kroes ervoor zorgde dat Uber zijn gang kon gaan in Nederland. Het zou me verbazen als Uber het enige bedrijf was waar StartupDelta zo’n rol voor gespeeld heeft.

Lovely bit about the broodje kroket and about Dutch colonial history.

Foursquare is responsible for an inordinate amount of good times I’ve had, it still powers @cuppings and I’m still pleased that we got it to launch in Amsterdam as its first international city.

The trimodal salary distribution for Amsterdam (and likely other cities as well) as displayed here is very useful information and will hopefully help push compensation (and innovation) in Europe closer to American levels.

Als ik het verhaal over witwassen in de Amsterdamse binnenstad hier lees, denk ik dat het hier in Berlijn zonder overdrijven tien keer zo erg is (decennia armoede, corruptie en geen enkele prioriteit bij de lokale overheid).

Een lang en grondig interview met Cody Hochstenbach over de wooncrisis in Nederland. Studio Tegengif is een favoriete podcast wat een soort Nederlandse versie van The Weeds lijkt te worden.

https://www.groene.nl/artikel/broer-ik-heb-mijn-9mm-helemaal-geleegd

Not enough popcorn in the world to read this exposé on Booking.com.

Reading about Amsterdam canceling 10'000 parking spaces, does make me feel as if I’m living in an idiot’s city.

Fuck you a million times.

For my personal archive, here is the talk I gave at Thingscon Amsterdam last year.

Last Tuesday I gave a talk at EMERCE Tech Live on the main stage of the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. It was a lovely event and it was fun being back in Amsterdam however briefly.

Next up, @alper talking about conversational interfaces. Join the livestream at https://t.co/mdVhV45tsg

Travel is making it hard to keep up writing these notes weekly (or write anything for that matter). So this blog is turning into an expensive affair.

Unbelievable how many weeks behind I am on these. That’s not wholly intended, but the last couple of weeks have been a bit busier than usual. This was the week of April 15th which I spent mostly in Amsterdam.

Two week notes in one because last week seems to have been too busy to write any.

I got things back running again. Did a bunch of work on TORREON. Most Hubbub stuff is in a weeknote over there now that I am writing now alternating with Kars Alfrink.

Last Monday was the last day in Berlin before the holidays so something of a push here and there to get things to go through. That night we had a vvvv workshop at the studio hosted by Joreg to teach somewhere around eight people the basics of node based graphical environments (the only other one I had used extensively before was Open DX and of course there’s Quartz Composer and Impure Quadrigram).

Gisteren met wat Flickr gebruikers afgesproken op de NDSM-werf en daar de hele boel vastgelegd.

Last week was a week for some work in the Netherlands and some much deserved catchup with friends and colleagues over there.

Last week was crazy hectic, notwithstanding the fact that I was ill at the same time. Sickness and deadlines are not fun, but thankfully both were survived.

Last weekend I saw Husbands by Toneelgroep Amsterdam director Ivo van Hove in the Schaubühne in Berlin. I was not unequivocally enthusiastic about the play, though it has a boisterous quality that has stayed with me these past days.

Writing these notes on a Sunday afternoon wit a mug of steaming coffee within reach as they are meant to be written.

I just read the double interview in Amsterdam Weekly with Johannes van Dam and Undercover Glutton. It is a lovely interview and their combined knowledge of food is certainly impressive. What I am a bit less impressed with is their knowledge of metropolitan cuisine. At one point in the interview van Dam extolls the culinary variety in Amsterdam and there I must take offense. I have traversed the city far and wide and I have come up empty more often than not for many a dish. Eventually I gave up and moved to warmer culinary climes.

The year has started nicely and the event line-up is already brimful.

Going over the list of services that the municipality of Amsterdam offers this week, I couldn’t help but notice this:

Talking to two young theater makers yesterday, I remarked that the majority of the Dutch plays I see don’t deliver the relevant and socially engaged experiences I would want them to. To which they asked why I still bothered going to the theater, a question I hear regularly from those in the more modern performing arts. They themselves hardly ever go and they make participatory theater, not the stage dramas that first come to mind. That is a response I get more often: that theater is boring, irrelevant and really ‘Why would anybody want to go?’

In the beginning of the week I spotted an interesting dataset on Sargasso, requested to play with it and got the following visual published the next day (our write-up).

Ik zou nog schrijven wat de conclusie was van het cameratoezicht op mijn gestolen fiets uit het vorige bericht. Daar stond al hoe je voor dit soort zaken van het kastje naar de muur gestuurd wordt. Ik had nagelaten dit op te schrijven door drukte en frustratie met hoe het gaat in de stad, maar gelukkig herinnerde Rejo Zenger van Bits of Freedom me eraan.

Another week and another change at the office. One thing that does define the Open Coop is that everything is in a constant state of flux adding jitter so none of us remain stuck in a local optimum. The global optimum we are shooting for in and around our location in North is rather ridiculous but best not shared in public.

I’m incredibly proud of the team and events coming together in our organization of the biggest Hack de Overheid feature yet. Looking back on the past year, it has been an incredible ride with the various Apps for… competitions and no small amount of personal and professional changes.

This summer I shot a roll of color film I had lying around using my trusty Yashica D medium-format camera. The subjects were passers-by in our Amsterdam office. The results were better than expected.

I was at an event organized by ARCAM tonight concerning co-operative housing projects which are already very popular in Berlin but are rapidly expanding to other cities. Amsterdam is busy launching its own initiative and Michael LaFond from Berlin presented their experiences with this way of building.

Onlangs zijn de wielen van mijn racefiets gestript toen deze over het weekend geparkeerd stond op de Korte ’s-Gravezandestraat in Amsterdam.

I was at a meeting this weekend by the Pop-up City and the documentary displayed about urban development fits into a wider recent trend where people kick the creative class and blame them for society’s ills. Usually the dreaded specter of gentrification is pulled out to show how apathetic and different and outright bad the Creative Class 1 are.

Je gaat een verlaten loods in waar je verwelkomd wordt. Je mag de ontmoeting met de ander aangaan voor een persoonlijke ervaring en voor een hoger doel. De bedoeling wordt gaandeweg duidelijk en het uiteindelijke aanbod is lidmaatschap van een club, van dé Club.

The sidewalks of the newly renovated Marnixstraat: