Utrecht

A couple of weeks ago by now I finally got to visit our new office in the Vechtclub XL building in Utrecht. This turned out to be a great experience.

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.

Nothing much happened during the Christmas week before, so I decided to skip that note. Most of Berlin shut down into a deep hibernation normally only witnessed in student towns.

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).

After some weeks traveling to Beijing and Australia, last week I was back in Europe, touching down in Amsterdam Tuesday morning early. I had a very nice flight in from Sydney with the only annoyance being that my laptop had broken upon arrival there. This made me spend half a day of the two I had there in the Bondi Apple Store trying to figure out what the problem was.

A massively eventful week that for me took place mostly in Amsterdam where I had tons of catching up to do after a holiday absence of I believe over two months. In between moving offices and traveling, work on kohi moved on apace. We may have something usable by a slightly wider audience somewhere in the next week.

I’ll include here Hubbub’s two reasons for celebration which were also reasons for me to celebrate and I’ll add a third in a bit. These really are the weeks when a lot of stuff is happening, being built and delivered. Not that much time for idle talk and reflection, though that too will return.

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

Last week commenced with preparing my presentation for the CrossLab event in Rotterdam. On Tuesday I took the train from Berlin and got there nicely in time.

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

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.

Ik doe recentelijk een stukje over games voor Fast Moving Targets en wat beter te vertellen dan mijn ervaringen uit de Dutch Game Garden. Het is een leuke plek in Utrecht, waar veel gebeurt, maar wat in Amsterdam bijna niet aankomt. Een poging om een brug te slaan:

Monday

On Monday I let go a bunch of stalling side projects which were not going anywhere.

Another long form weeknote, history recapping brought by the fantastic Memolane service which aggregates my various media chronologically so I can quickly write this overview.

A bunch of work on finalizing Code 4, work on culiacan continues steadily nearing a launch sometime soon, and kicking off ideation and sketches for tlalnepantla.

Last Monday I paid an information architecture house call at a friend at one of the beleaguered (a somewhat redundant word when discussing print publications here) Dutch weeklies. Looking forward to advice taken to heart and maybe some online Dutch media that I can consume with pleasure.

Monday I spent all day planning the Statlas release and encountered some showstoppers still. That night I went to Utrecht for This Happened.

Monday I did some support and then went off to the UvA to present on data journalism together with Stef.

I witnessed a discussion yesterday that stated that for creative industries to catch root in a certain area there is the need for trendy coffee shops. While that is a necessary condition indeed, it is not sufficient. The coffee produced in said shops also needs to be of excellent quality or at least miles better than whatever most stores in the Netherlands are pouring. The lovely folks over at BERG also have a post about it.

It looks like the past period of turbulent ascent is over and the plane is going to be level for a bit. That does not mean that there isn’t an awful lot of awesome stuff on deck waiting to be published nor that there aren’t a bunch of new prospects on the horizon. More on those in due time.

Last week Monday we saw the final work presentations at the Willem de Kooning Academy. It was a great experience and I was really blown away by the breadth of some of the work presented. Nevertheless it remains a challenge to fit a full data visualization curriculum within the course of 4 weeks. Given the time we had I am very proud of the progress made.

Drive by-ing these notes twothree four days late. Yeah, these are those kind of weeks.

Solid progress on Maguro in Utrecht. Spent a large amount of time over there also to evaluate the PLAY Pilots project’s succes. Started building a prototype that runs more in real-time and on timed events (and all that in a traditional web framework).

Got some reinforcements at the office:

A somewhat more downpaced week with a bit of a cold in the middle, but:

I’m writing this sitting in a foggy Village Bagels in Amsterdam looking out onto the snowy streets. It’s been a while, and things are different than they were a year ago.

The quotable This Happened Utrecht #8.

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).

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.

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).

Last Monday we saw the sixth edition of This Happened taking place and —I haven’t seen all, but I’ve seen more than most— I think this was one of the best ones yet.

Yesterday I attended the fifth edition of This Happened in Utrecht city. It was a great new iteration with more polish even though it was also a big step up moving the entire event to a new venue.

Ik schreef een paar dagen geleden in een roundup over de wedstrijd van 9292 voor een nieuwe reisplanner. Marie-José Klaver heeft er ook een stukje over waarin ze nog wat minder mals is dan ik.

Afgelopen maandag niet naar de meubelboulevard geweest maar wel een andere traditionele Paasbezigheid volbracht. Net zoals Jesus stierf aan het kruis en weer opstond, ben ik tijdens de halve marathon van Utrecht figuurlijk gestorven waarna ik door een wonderbaarlijke opleving toch de finish wist te behalen op 2:22:36.

Zoals ik al zei zou ik aanwezig zijn bij de tweede editie van This Happened Utrecht. Het was weer een erg geslaagde avond met interessante presentaties.

Monday I’ll be attending This Happened Utrecht #2 1. This Happened is organized by Ianus, Alex and Kars as part of the This Happened franchise and the best description I’ve heard is that “it’s like Pecha Kucha with actual content.”

A while back we went to the World Press Photo 2008 exhibition in Utrecht with some capoeiras and looked at the pictures many of us had already seen after the first announcement.

Voor wie het nog niet weet, ik ben bezig met een initiatief rondom mobiliteit, internet en sociale netwerken. Met het oog daarop volg ik het nieuws en de verschillende overheidsprogramma’s hierover in Nederland.

Vandaag even naar Utrecht geweest voor het Marketing3 congres.

Donderdagochtendvroeg naar Den Haag om mijn Macbook in te leveren en vrijdag eind van de middag er weer heen om hem op te halen.