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Ik ben even een weekje naar Austin voor een woestijn-retraite met vakgenoten.

Net in de sneak de Nederlandse productie Bollywood Hero gezien. Dat er een hausse aan Bollywood films zou volgen op het succes van Slumdog Millionaire stond vast, maar dit is wel erg rap.

Twee dingen die Stewart wel vaker zegt over de humor van the Daily Show is dat je dit soort dingen niet kunt verzinnen en dat de gebeurtenissen vaak op het tragische af zijn en de enige manier om eromheen te komen is vaak om erom te lachen.

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.

Na heel veel gedoe en proberen 1 met verschillende video-codecs heb ik eindelijk de presentatie van Siert vorige week in een formaat waarmee ik hem ook online kon zetten. Ik ben nog niet heel erg te spreken over de kwaliteit maar dit is heel acceptabel voor een filmpje van drie kwartier.

Marrije zegt net “de conducteur zegt dat mijn ov-chipknip werkt. da’s fijn, maar ik wist niet eens dat ik ’m had, en waarvoor dan.” waarop ik antwoord “@marrije Het is geen chipknip (wat een groot gemis is), daarnaast is het handig voor R’dam. En je kunt hem hier claimen: http://is.gd/k7xG”.

It’s good to see not all newspapers are caught in a stupor the Japanese ones seem to actually be seeing their common interest and making something sort of useful to their readers.

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.”

I started the week out nicely with a lunch lecture from Kie Ellens about art in the public space. It took me some time to properly code it, but it is online finally (and mostly in English):

Taplin schreef van de week al dat de economische crisis onrust en onveiligheid op lokaal niveau tot gevolg zou hebben. Blijkt dat Dubai al het ravijn in glijdt en niemand weet hoe erg het daadwerkelijk is.

Veelgemaakte fout in het ervaringsontwerp en gevoelsmatig goed passend bij de faculteit bouwkunde.

I’d promised the guys over at the fixie hyve some decent quality pictures of my bike. Shooting pictures of a fixie is something of a thing. So yesterday I went out and shot some:

Ik heb de hele verkiezingen rond de dichter des vaderlands gemist 1 2 maar ik ben nog steeds blij en ik vind dat ik er iets over moet schrijven.

This weekend I visited the Barcamp UK Govweb (#ukgc09, barcamp) in London to talk with people about government websites, data and see what the state of the art is in the UK on this topic. It was a very interesting meeting and I learned a lot from people who’ve been doing this for far longer than I have been.

Het heruitvinden van de steden is in gevallen zoals Los Angeles iets urgenter dan hier, maar een huizenmarkt die niet op slot is en een leuke publieke ruimte zou ik hier ook op prijs stellen.

Vandaag op Twitter al gezien dat Rita Verdonk goed aangepakt is door Alexander Pechtold. Kijk het filmpje op dumpert, opleggen en erin schieten.

Biked to the Hague yesterday and spent part of the day coworking at my friends over at Nomadz. Just when I had to leave for our appointment at the notary Peter dropped by and demoed some very cool applications on the Android G1 phone he’d just gotten from T-Mobile.

Beirut announced European tour dates of which 5th of May they will be playing in Paradiso, Amsterdam. Yesterday, I got myself two tickets for that gig, which should be fantastic.

Today I got the idea and I think I’ve seen spectrum plots like these before but I couldn’t quite figure out where. So I dumped all my blogposts and got into Processing to plot it out. It should look something like this but less ugly:

I talked with Max Whitney at 25C3 for a bit to learn about how NYC Resistor came to be. The story seems to go something like this 1:

I am currently busy doing a project together with Tam Tam where we are tasked with developing a set of five widgets for Dutch government (assigned by the Dutch Ministry of Home Affairs and Kingdom Relations) as a proof of concept of how government data can be used. We’re developing widgets mostly because they are seen as modern, easy to develop and they can be deployed very near to users.

As per Kottke fished out of my iCal and my Dopplr, hat tip Mark:

Occasionally some very beautiful things here in Berlin between the grey and cold 1:

Picture by Zarko Drincic (CC by-nd license)

Ik had een gesprek gisteren over Qash.nl (het Nederlandse Wesabe) en de diensten die dit soort sites aanbieden. We waren erover uit dat het belachelijk is dat banken dit zelf niet aanbieden.

Shot a guerilla Christmas vid of the gang after last Thursday’s training:

In this podcast Adam Greenfield talks about everyware and contactless transit payment systems. At time index 15:33 the following question is asked: “But as a New Yorker would you want that to happen?”

Ik ben op dit moment wat aan het werk in het domein van de open overheid. Er zijn in dit veld een heleboel initiatieven en partijen betrokken in verschillende stadia van vordering. Één overheidsinstantie die belachelijk achterloopt is ons parlement. Het is op dit moment bijna ondoenlijk om te achterhalen wie er bij een stemming aanwezig waren en wie wat gestemd hebben.

These last couple of months we’ve been having regular music lessons. It’s a lot of fun and we are making crazy progress.

The Guardian shows a clip of the recent armed confrontations in Hebron due to the riots by Jewish settlers. I had read earlier about B’Tselem handing out small camera’s to Palestinians so they could record settler aggression and this is a clip that came out of that program.

I recently bought the full version of RJDJ and it is a very fun way to create a dynamic soundgarden based on your environment. I also started using last.fm again even though they don’t have an iPhone player available yet in the Netherlands 1.

Bij het uitzoeken van mijn video’s kwam ik deze tegen (in HD bij Vimeo).

So I get bored on a Friday night and I want a decent way to watch music videos. Rather than look for a service which provides this 1, I decided to revive our own toy of a couple years ago, so it’s alive (again!): LastTV.

Last Tuesday I attended the Service Design Network’s conference in the Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. I’ve been interested in Service Design for a while but I didn’t really know what it was all about. This conference was the ideal way to learn more about this field.

Ik heb vandaag niet gestemd. Hier mijn filmpje met waarom:

As can be read in this thread we are holding the next Open Beer Delft at our coworking office next to the Delft Central train station: Studio 4 Stagioni.

Hier even een korte noot voor de mensen die in het centrum van Delft wonen of er moeten zijn. Ik kan deze informatie online nergens vinden en ik vergeet het steeds en bel dan aan bij een poller om het te vragen. Googlevoer dus.

Staying up all night to watch the elections we finally saw Barack Obama’s victory speech somewhere after 5AM. Though at that moment I couldn’t fully appreciate it, it was one of his best speeches and one ending a period.

In some of Adam Greenfield’s backpages “Whatever happened to serendipity?” he recounts how he used to scrounge for punk rock records and how the difficulty and uncertainty of the experience was part of what made it worthwhile:

Één van de voordelen van mijn huis in het hartje van Delft was het wonen op drie minuten lopen van een C1000 en drie minuten fietsen van een Albert Heijn.

I called with the taxman yesterday to clarify some stuff. I had surmised that profesionally relevant books could be deducted as expenses. Now it seems there is a very fine distinction.

Last day in San Francisco we went up to Twin Peaks for this absolutely stunning view over the city:

Freshly one day back in from San Francisco some adjustments need to be made. The time difference has been reduced from 9 hours to 8 thanks to our splendidly European invention: DST. Along with the time difference there is also a slight difference in daylight and a large difference in temperature (15ź centigrade) and precipitation (nearly non-stop rain the past day).

My days in Berkeley/Oakland 1 used to be filled with:

Funny to hear from Cristiano that David Recordon just flashed Four Starters on stage (slide 37 of this presentation) on FOWA in London to demo the concept of hAvatar, a Wordpress plugin I developed about half a year ago. And a strange bit of anti-serendipity this stuff happening in London while I’m in SF.

I’ve always wanted to go there and tomorrow I’m finally going. Some vague plans, tads of serendipity and friends pushing me over the edge were enough to have me book the ticket, I think, only three weeks ago. Tomorrow Lufthansa will take me over an ocean for the first time of my life 1.

Tomorrow I’m going to attend Students for Free Culture. I may not be a student anymore, but I still regularly ride with that crowd and the conference has a great program and is for anybody with an interest in the topic. So, getting up early and taking the BART down into Berkeley. I’ll see if I can use my newly bought Kodak to record a couple of keynotes.

At our nice coworking spot Studio 4 Stagioni we have one or two desks available effective immediately. This poster has been hanging on some select locations around town:

Taplin writes about America having to buckle up and go to the simpler life, which I think might not be such a bad thing:

Last weekend the Camera Japan movie festival took place at the arthouse cinema Lantaren/Venster in Rotterdam and it was a lot of fun. The venue was packed and there was a great vibe (like always).