Month: June 2007

Goodbye NL, hello DK

Welcome indeed!

Less than a week from now I’ll exchange the lovely Netherlands for the equally lovely Denmark. I’m taking what you could call a working sabbatical. I’ll be freelancing from Copenhagen and have (pretty exciting) work lined up for the first three months. If you have a gig in social software, mobile or gaming and want to work with me from October onwards, get in touch.

Besides Copenhagen, you might be able to grab a hold of me in Brighton, where I’ll be attending dConstruct 2007 or Barcelona, where I’ll be speaking for the 3rd Euro IA Summit. Perhaps I’ll see you on the road?

Better travelling with Jet Lag Passport

Neon sign that reads 'jet lag'

With the attention given to travel lately (Dopplr springs to mind, as well as my own increased flight frequency this year) I thought I’d finally write up my experiences with a jet lag prevention technique called Jet Lag Passport.

I was planning my trip to Las Vegas earlier this year when I was approached by Daimon Sweeney. He invited me to check out this small booklet he’d written (sold on his website for 10.25 GBP) that described a pressure points and meditation routine aimed at syncing your biological clock to local time. Being a Fortean and martial artist, I saw no reason not to try it. I printed out the PDF he’d sent me for free (in exchange for a blog post if I liked it) and stashed in my carry-on bag. While taking off I took a look at it for the first time. The routine was easy to remember and takes up very little time. You repeat it for every two hours of flight.

Although it’s always hard to objectively say whether this stuff actually works (and to be honest I feel that’s beside the point) it worked for me. I had a short stay in Vegas (I arrived on Friday evening and left on Monday evening) and a long flight in comparison. I got into the rhythm of things on arrival effortlessly and had none of the weird sudden attacks of fatigue so typical of jet lag. This stuff may not be for everyone, perhaps an open mind and some experience with meditation (however small) is a prerequisite, but I’ll be sure to give it a try the next time I take one of these long flights.

Check out the booklet at Daimon’s website and who knows, if you promise to blog it, he’ll let you try it for free…

Slides and video of my Reboot 9.0 talk

So I’ve been busy uploading stuff. The slides to my Reboot 9.0 talk are up at SlideShare. I uploaded a video recorded by Iskander with his N70 to Vimeo. Finally, since SlideShare still doesn’t import the notes that go with the slides in PowerPoint, I’ve also put up a big PDF (almost 50 MB). Please refer to the notes in the PDF for all the Flickr photo credits too.

Slides

Video

Mobile Social Play @ Reboot 9.0 from Kaeru on Vimeo

Notes

  • There’s a bit too much um-ing and ah-ing for my tastes. I need to do more practice, practice, practice before these things!
  • This will be the last time I use Darth Vader as the opening slide, I promise.
  • It’s too bad I didn’t have more time to go into the examples that go with the last part. Next time: less stage setting, more meat.
  • Still, I had fun. :-) Thanks again to Thomas for having me, and all the cool people at Reboot for going easy on me.

Reboot 9.0 day 2

(Waiting for my train home to arrive, I finally have the opportunity to post this.)

So with Reboot 9.0 and the after-party done, I think I’ll briefly write up my impressions of the second day.

Stowe Boyd – Good talk as always, offering a new definition of ‘flow’. I guess his attempt to have people open themselves up to the beneficial sides of being intermittently connected was a success.

Marko Ahtisaari – Interesting character with a good story to tell. His free mobile operator for teenagers scheme made a lot of people curious. (Free stuff always does that, it seems.)

Lee Bryant – Very fitting to the theme of human?, a touching story of how former inhabitants of a Bosnian town used social software to reconnect and rebuild the town.

Julian Bleecker – Cool stuff on new ways to interact with computing technology beyond the utilitarian and efficient, into the realm of play.

Dave Winer – An interesting character having a nice conversation with Thomas. I enjoyed his offbeat remarks and dry wit.

Guy Dickinson – Another round of micropresentations, this time with me participating. I stumbled several times. Next time I’ll prepare a custom talk for this. The other presenters were awesome.

Rasmus Fleischer and Magnus Eriksson – Two cool young anarchists with interesting ideas about file sharing and the future of music. Too bad large parts of their presentation were read from a sheet.

Leisa Reichelt – A carefully put together overview of ambient intimacy, what it is and what it’s for. Next step: coming up with design guidelines for these types of ‘tools’.

Matt Webb – Delivered on the expectations raised by his performances previous years. Interesting to see him move into experience design territory and hear his take on it. Very much applicable to my daily work in designing web services.

Dinner and the after-party were great (although it seemed that the reservations scheme had gone awry, they had no place for us at our chosen restaurant). I guess drinking and talking into the night at Vega with a lot of confused locals around was a fitting way to end another great Reboot.

Reboot 9.0 day 1

So here’s a short wrap up of the first day. I must say I’m not disappointed so far. The overall level of the talks is quite high again. Here’s what I attended:

Opening keynote – Nice and conceptual/theoretical. Not sure I agree with all the claims made but it was a good way to kick off the day on a gee whizz way.

Jeremy Keith – Good talk, nice slides, didn’t really deliver on the promise of his proposal though. I would’ve really liked to see him go into the whole idea of life streams further. The hack day challenge sounded cool though.

Stephanie Booth – Very topical for me, being a bilingual blogger and designer often confronted with localisation/multilingual issues.

My own talk – Went reasonably well. I guess half of the room enjoyed and the other half wondered what the f*** I was talking about. Oh well, I had fun.

Ross Mayfield – Could have been much better if it hadn’t been for technical screw-ups and perhaps some tighter pacing by Ross. Still the work he’s doing with social software is great.

Matt Jones – Very pretty presentation, nice topic and Dopplr looks cool. I’m not a frequent flyer but I can see the value in it. Still not quite sure it will improve the consequences of air-travel though.

Nicolas Nova – Came across as the high concept, theoretical twin to my talk. Lots of cool pervasive game examples. Nicolas always boggles my mind.

Jyri Engeström – Cool to see how he’s developed his talks throughout the past Reboots. I guess he delivered on his promise and stayed on the right side of the ‘I’m pushing my product’ line.

The evening program – No micro-presentations (which to be honest was fine by me, being quite exhausted). Good food, nice conversations and plenty of weird generative art, live cinema etc. All good.

On to day 2!