Posts

Today I wandered over to the rent increase protest camp on Kottbusser Tor. Some initial unformed thoughts.

Quickly this last week. Work on our own iPhone transit application is progressing nicely. The iPhone has an exquisite palette of operations to work with.

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

The Hybrid Talk I gave the week before is up on Soundcloud. You can listen to it here and see if you agree with our ideas about how a client driven organization can operate without being rubbish.

This week was marked by a massive sprint on saba which made me miss this year’s Myfest in Kreuzberg, which is annoying but survivable. I did manage to see Ryoji Ikeda’s Data Anatomy on its last day in Tresor. A visually spectacular but thematically flat affair.

I lost my Fitbit today. This was bound to happen and I’m surprised I managed to hold on to it as long as I did. So one minute I was getting off the tram and the next I didn’t have it anymore.

I got a bunch of accessories for the office among which a bike stand:

A long week sprinting on saba. On Monday I got a nice desk chair:

The week before last (I’m running one week behind), was a good weak. Easter Monday was spent cleaning up the house which is now finally fully operational and fit to live in.

Jan Chipchase’s ‘Red Mat’ design experiment is brilliant by itself, but is goes much further than being just a design experiment.

De serie video’s Blind Sequence Trust van kunstenaar Joan Leandre speelt in DAM nog tot en met 5 mei.

Yesterday night I went to see Maß für Maß (Measure for Measure by Shakespeare) at die Schaubühne here in Berlin and it marked the first occasion where I saw a play directed by the intendant of that theater Thomas Ostermeier himself (see this Guardian piece for a bit of background).

A week or two ago I attended a discussion at the Deutsches Theater ‘Holland in Not’ that was organized because of a recently published book “Der Kulturinfarkt, vom Allem zu viel und überall das Gleiche” that proposed to close half of all theaters in Germany.

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 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.

We live in perhaps one of the nicest parts of Berlin I am finding out. It has every thinkable amenity: highly specialized stores, a diverse assortment of restaurants and cafés with some real gems. Our house is smack in the center of this in walking distance of three major U lines. If you talked to me recently you probably know where this is at, but for the purpose of this blogpost I’m going to play mum.

Culture flat rates are named both in the Netherlands and in Germany as a solution to the problem of copyright piracy.

The train just had its stop in Bad Bentheim entering Germany. At that stop we usually get a short break, a new locomotive and the German border police checking the train. Border police? Didn’t the Schengen Agreement abolish checks at the signing countries’ borders?

The week started with development on saba in phonegap. I got that to work with backbone.

Running behind two weeks and off to the Netherlands tomorrow (for a talk at a Crosslab event in the Unie). Oh how time flies! This was a fun week.

Work continues apace. New websites are forthcoming.

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.

Yesterday evening I saw The Day Before the Last Day in die Schaubühne as a part of the F.I.N.D. festival.

Briefly written notes for last week. It was one of the first proper weeks at the office for which I am grateful. German administration remains a challenging affair as my blog post and quoted Times article also testify.

Last week Peter Robinett sent me a link to this Times article that would seem a bit far fetched if it wasn’t mostly true. The headline (“a Limp Domestic Economy”) doesn’t really cover the article because it describes how massively things have improved in Germany. If I can believe stories, the situation here used to be far far worse. That however is no excuse.

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

We’re seeing this more and more among the edgiest of shops. The Netherlands has already had a massive shift towards freelancers (ZZP’ers). It is only natural that they would band together regularly to accomplish company level work but without the ties and inertia normally associated with employment.

Last Wednesday I was at a gathering by the Institue for Internet and Society here in Berlin in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk called “Berliner Gespräche” about how the internet influences society.

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.

Last week featured some taxes, and a write-up of our gamejam efforts in nrc.ne xt post-published on Bashers: The Making of Nakatomi Rider.

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

Last week we got the DSL at home to work (in two tries). It feels good to have that after something of a month of bureaucracy and false starts to deal with.

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

I’m reading up on German tax and trade rules because I’m going to incorporate here this month and most of the things I read do not make me very happy. They look like they are more suited to a 19th century gentry than to creative workers in the multipolar 21st.

Last week was a week in Amsterdam (and what a week it was!).

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?’

When I just got into Germany we managed to pin point something I had noticed before. It is striking how conservative people in Germany are when it comes to the internet and especially people who work in cultural positions. Compared to that, the Netherlands of the past five years has gone through a rather tumultuous revolution.

In 2011:

I dived into my log to make the yearly tally of what I did and saw. All in all 2011 has proven to be a good year.

Ik heb hier wel vaker geschreven over de beroerde webstreams beschikbaar voor Radio 1 bij de omroep. Daar is nu verandering in gekomen en het is nu af te spelen in Windows Media, Quicktime of Real.

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).

Some remaindered weeknotes that have been the casualty of an international move.

I think most of the thinking around The Filter Bubble comes from people who are not very procedurally literate to begin with. That is to say they are not very adept at understanding the rules that govern interactive systems nor are they well equipped at reconfiguring them to suit their ends. I touch on this because the same tired argument was parroted in this Zeit interview with Miriam Meckel, a leading German communication scientist 1. It starts off with some very sensible sentiments but then it quickly derails on the topic of algorithms and concludes on several sidelines.

I have been in Berlin for a couple of hectic days now and I’m trying to come to terms with my surroundings. I have got a new working theory to use for the foreseeable future. Let’s see how well this holds 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.