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!