English

This was a tremendously enjoyable read. I wonder why my English teacher never pointed us in this literary direction for things to read.

Funny to come across three pieces today wherein a bunch of fashionable faux-intellectuals are taken apart.

Reading this book took me quite some time since it arrived in my mailbox some four years ago. I only picked it up after acquiring an epub version of it that I could read in Readmill wherever I happened to find myself (so also really after Readmill launched their iPhone app). It takes some getting into but this book is hugely rewarding and a pleasure.

Another long overdue post with notes from the biography of Colonel John Boyd. This is partially so long overdue because extracting quotes from Readmill is somewhat annoying and the excellent API integration Box of Quotes no longer works 1.

I finished Aramis (PDF) a couple of weeks ago and this is absolutely essential reading for anybody involved with technology in a wider sense than just technology. It is also quite funny. I look forward to reading more by Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into the Modes of Existence is high on my list 1 and I’ve registered to join his MOOC on the Scientific Humanities.

I tried to register to vote for the buyback of the Berlin energy grid and then I got this letter back informing me that I cannot vote.

Here are my notes from a couple of weeks of drinking coffee in Tokyo on a fact finding mission for Cuppings. With Cuppings we try to give you a guide of the best coffee places around the world based on our personal tastings. Some notable locales are still not as well represented as they should be. London and New York have their own excellent guides for coffee with Oliver Strand’s Coffee App and the London Coffee Map. Tokyo is one place that I thought we should fill in.

A funny week and with these weeknotes falling ever further behind it is also becoming increasingly vague what ever did happen back then.

Tonight I saw the magical Symphonie Cinétique works at MADE in Berlin.

I will be gone during the peak of the horrible German election campaigns (in fact I’m just back and voting is this Sunday). The only thing that is keeping things somewhat bearable are the low-budget fake news broadcasts by Tagesschaum. I pay taxes in this damned country but I am not eligible to vote. That’s why I penned this election advice before I left for those that are. I didn’t have time to polish it then but here it is, better late than never.

I’m writing this from Japan after seeing I have fallen seriously off the blogging horse. I think this particular week I was a bit under the weather but I did manage to get out a minimal prototype for AJI.

This week was a bit more stationary than the last thankfully. I tried out a competitor to Cuppings called Bean Seeker which is a rather terrible app.

Oh, this week. This week was how to put it rather intense.

Odd that I hadn’t gotten around to blogging these notes from Dan Hill’s brilliant book, but here they are then finally:

I’ve been on something of an applied philosophy 1 binge recently and after almost finishing “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War” 2 I am now starting to read Aramis which Latour opens with:

Right now in Berlin we are being bombarded with the election campaign but I do not know anybody who looks forward to voting come September. I cannot vote but if I were allowed I would also face a tough choice. None of the options are appealing and what we will get seems so certain and terrible that potential alternatives pale. Germany being as it is the election focuses on the heartland and there isn’t that much being discussed that people living in a city can relate to.

With KANT we were still figuring out mostly what it is we are doing and seeing as we are neither a collective or a coworking space it was up in the air a bit. I wrote up our offering in a more straight-forward and streamlined way where you can very easily find what it is you may be looking for. In other news we are discussing next steps for KANT in the future but anything on that order is off for at least 6-12 months.

A new coffee place had reportedly opened up in the area and I went out searching for it. Concierge is tucked into a gate on Paul-Lincke-Ufer and they are really nice guys pulling quality shots. It is amazing both that this part of Berlin which was quite barren when it comes to coffee is shaping up so nicely and also that

Most of the time this week was spent doing heads down work (notes on which elsewhere). Meeting with Igor and Tijmen and hanging out in parks. Summer.

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.

This was the week that Kars returned from his honeymoon on Bali. And all for the better as well, because I had worked through most of our stack —we didn’t have any running projects at the time— and I was getting so annoyed by Dopplr’s performance that I was about to write a clean implementation of its trip model to store my upcoming travels in.

As my work based weeknotes are being catered for rather nicely both at Hubbub and KANT, I’m going to keep writing weeknotes here, but instead of making an overview of the week’s work, I’ll do some more long form reflecting on stuff that happened. A bit more casual and personal than we are used to.

I’m running frightfully behind with these and debating whether to continue writing weeknotes if it means this work is being featured in a total of three places. That seems a bit too much.

So today I went to the meeting of Autofreies Kreuzberg about the traffic calming of the Manteuffelstraße between Skalitzer and Naunynstraße.

There’s an absurd amount of construction being done in my neighborhood and I presumed that as a resident somewhere you would be entitled to see the changes that are being planned in the area. Not to mention to be able to know the traffic blockades that result from this construction (which almost exclusively seem to black the foot/bike paths.

This week started with Pentecost. Trying to get stuff done in Germany during the bank holiday flurry that is May is always a challenge. I spent more time working on Cuppings. In all likelihood this app will never make any serious money, but there are other advantages to building apps which may become apparent in the future.

The Quantum Thief was a very stimulating read. Make no mistake. However far off the events in this book may seem, Rajaniemi manages to evoke concepts and create language for issues that we are already dealing with.

So it turns out I’ve fallen immensely behind with the weeknotes over here, but we did start writing them at the new office now, which should make up for something. Those live at http://kantberlin.tumblr.com/ currently.

I have a current shtick that says that game designers harbour no illusions about human reality. Designing and testing a game on people reveal the murky depths of human nature in a way few other pursuits do. Take even the simplest game with the possibility of deception and it will often devolve into the horrible treatment of one player for the advantage of another.

There is no thing as an anonymized dataset. Anybody propagating this idea even tacitly is doing a disservice to the informed debate on privacy. Here’s a round up with some recent cases.

The week before last was filled with theater, a full 9 hours of it which should last me for the rest of the year. I wrote the one negative review you will find of ‘Krieg und Frieden’ as a result of it.

So that cat is out of the bag: I’ve taken up residency at KANT, the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering. Peter who you may have read before on The Waving Cat just wrote the inaugural post on our freshly pressed Tumblr (tweets are still forthcoming).

The week before last started out with me still in Paris sampling the local coffee scene which has been improving massively over the past year or so.

This week was the week where we were in full sprint for the pilot launch of KAIGARA. Besides that we had a dinner off NEXT with some people involved and some speakers. What I managed to catch from NEXT’s program while working was nothing short of splendid. Bruce Sterling’s talk has been shared widely and I’m eagerly awaiting Anab Jain’s to be published as a video (the slides are already there).

I’ve learned my lessons: I will not go to traditional German theater anymore and I will never again book a play without first checking its duration.

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.

Something that we noticed during my recent study of the German language is the tremendous promiscuity of Dutch with English which goes even further than I had previously noticed. We all know the usage of many English words in Dutch as if they were our own, but I wanted to pay attention here to a special case: the fully imported verb.

The week before this on Monday (almost two weeks ago), I went to a lecture by Graham Harman. Notes on that were blogged in a timely fashion.

I played a bunch of Ultratron over the past couple of weeks. It’s beautiful pulsing dance of bullets that lost its charm somewhere past level 100 where I thought I had the game beat, but everything keeps on repeating ever faster. That was eleven hours of obsessive pleasure (according to Steam) followed by emptiness.

The week before this is getting a bit boring, but as soon as the current project is over I promise that adventures will resume again.

Last Monday I heard Graham Harman give the International Flusser Lecture in Berlin. The lecture was in German and for me as a non-native speaker somewhat hard to follow, but the present Germans loved it. ‘The English dominated academia’ seems to be problematic for them 1.

I had penned some notes about bitcoin before the entire thing exploded last week. So it seems that everybody is blogging pretty much everything about bitcoin there is to blog. So trying to see if I have some points that are still worth publishing.

We’re in the middle of a big project, so pretty much everything is that right now. In between some small things happen, but we’re rather busy shipping right now.

This was an interesting read and only strengthens my resolve to read most of the things Houellebecq has written.

Dear Niels and Kars,