Syntaxis will save our future

quickie for the presentation tomorrow.

now off to watch ‘PI’ with fellow classmatians

Good, things are rolling again, loads of workshops and some hands on work.

Results for the few:

A few hrs of typography

A few hrs of layouting

Note: All the content as the images aren’t belong to me and far from absolute truth.

So many things, so little time. So I will try to keep it edible. Last week has been very stressfull the birth of reclaimmagenta and the death of a buisnessplan. Not really the death, we successfully managed to finish the plan with a lot of utopian woordpooping from my side. But the investers didn’t buy it. Or to be said better, they liked it but they suggested we should try to look for investments somewhere else.

ReclaimMagenta was a great succes, over 10.000 visters in one week from day one. We are almost up to a 1000 petitions by now. Meanwhile I really havent had the time to keep it evolving, and therefore freemagenta.nl smelled cash came in and stole our pride. No need to be having war on who has the best initiative, it’s all for the sake of magenta. Only the part of money making over this annoys me. This remembers me of a quote I stumbled upon a couple of days ago. “I am the modern day robin hood, stealing from the rich, giving to the poor and keeping a little for myself”. Im the brokest motherfucker in town, but still, I keep my values.

For the rest things are going pretty well, doing lots of freelance stuff and adding some value to Hyper here and there (which is another blogpost worthy writing about). But somedays I feel a bit displaced when I hear stuff going down in my old natural habitat from my friends. The best I heard this week as Bram msnd me: “I met Guus and Stephan the other day, they told me: ‘are you coming to the party at Coen and Kasper’s home next week in Breda’ and I(bram) said : but they dont live there anymore? they answerd:’No but were still invited’”. I am happy to hear my housemates keep the Weerijssingel 15 legend going :). Way too bad I can’t be there..

A new module started, and it started of with a bang. I really enjoyed Greg’s lecture today. He learned us how to start playing again. I have to get myself a new sandbox. But he lost me when it got tedious in the end. My focus wanderd off and I started to enter a half sleeping half awake state of mind. Therefore his words entered my mind but created other words than he actually was saying.

I here some echos down in the hall saying: “Goodnight, see you tomorrow, you are the only one left now!”.

So thats a good reminder that I really need to go home, grab a beer and get some sleep. It will be early tomorrow and it will be early the whole week. And loads of extra work has to be done, so maybe this is the first and the last update this week, you better enjoy it.

Me and Andreas Widman are going to work on the buisness management website based upon the hel-looks website. We both made some sketches.

These were mine:

Me and Tore went to Expo C today, a tech conference at Marin Museum. They offered Hyper Island a couple free tickets and me Tore took the chance. Basically most of the stuff was far beyond our hat. It was adressed to software developers in general, which we aren’t. For the first time since ages I felt n00b again. We are just media developers who know a little bit of Actionscript, Java, Processing, XML, Html, PHP. But nothing such as C++ and projects of 10k+ LOC (which means 10.000 lines of code (yes i’ve learned a new short today)).

Anyhow there was some intersting stuff on DuckTyping, for flexible XML webservices and some interesting views on Agile software development, which seems to be a new trend or a Buzzword. This Agile stuff felt really UGL and probably should improve the atmosphere and the effectiveness of work on the workfloor.

No time to go in depth right now, so to summarize it: some mad german professors, some debugging and most of all, free food, candy and some new contacts! And maybe some more freelance stuff as well. We will see.

New week, new module. Concept & Development. If I had to believe my feed reader, everybody seems quited filled with joy by having this module. Which in theory should be the most dull one. No hands on work now, but plain brainstorming, developing a buisness plan for a certain product and then pitching it upon investers. Still, a lot of people seem to be stressed by the amount of work. I feel less as there is no hands on work, no several nights in a row of scripting or keyframing. I think this module is going to be quite relaxing, at least for my standards.

The should be comedian Teo@interesting.org confronted us why the young & creative people on one of the most creative school in one of the most creative countries in the world weren’t that creative. To quote “Noo, that is not being creative! that’s just being stupid!” Meaning, we suck (we are crossing some UGL borders here). Luckily he showed us some martial mind arts how to be creative instead of being stupid. Some of the attacks I actually knew from previous education or inspiration, but its good to refresh if you want to become a black belt.

Our Mission was handed out today by Micke Ahlstrom, another black belt in developing Concepts & Buisness Plans. He also gave us some good tips. The “Masculine Tech Group”, as we like to refer our group to, adapted and developed one of his tips straight into Brainstormr . A web 2.5 random brainstorm generator. Which was actually one of the best of the over 20 ideas we generated today. We are actually thinking of developing this a bit further with some neat flickr plugins for some nice visualisations.

So things are going well. The current group is filled with manly ninjas; Tore, Erik, Zirath and Filip, we probably manage to get rich this module. In the meanwhile: the fireplace at Duckburg is burning like hell, and I fixed myself a freelance job for the next couple of months. Comfort & Money: the cornerstones for every succesfull life.

Finally, 4hrs after the deadline, I managed to get our 21st century confession booth to work. It was the outcome of the experience technology module, where every group received a technique and had the mission to do something inventive with it.

Our assigned technology was the Wii and our group quite quickly came upon the idea to map elementary messages into sound. We would only use the Wii for interface useage. So we started off with the idea of WiiCommunicate, which quikly developed into WiiConfess. (for more info on the progress it would to redirect you here).

The WiiConfess works basically like this: You have a 3d interface which represents a ‘word cloud’. Every node, or in our case, sphere represents a word, when selected 5 new associative words pop-up. And in this way the user would manage to create a message such as: “hate+school+friends”, which ofcourse means i hate my school friends. When a message is put togheter the user sends the confession to the confession wall.

The messages are posted on the confession wall as anonymous circles which bounce around in space. These circles contains the messages translated into a sound scenario. In this case, the listener, what normally would be a priest that works as the ear of God, would now be the exhibition visitor which works as the ear of the collective association.

I grabbed the oppertunity to use the “High Quality Video” function on my phone to make some footage of this project.

It ended up to be a bit more WiiConfuse than WiiConfess, as we had no room for usability testing as we already went 4hrs over the deadline. And I might sound strange on this videoclips, but thats because I have been awake for over 54 hrs. And so I’ve learned to not to be the Tech-guy and the Project Manager at the same time within a group, who always would say “yeah, we can do that”. Two and a half week are way to short to learn: ActionScript 3.0 / The just over a month old new 3D library for Flash Sandy 3.0 / and to build this project. But still we managed! and I would like to thank my hardworking supportive groupmates for this achievement. Although they couldn’t keep up with my ActionScript 3.0 ninja skills, they made sure that everything else was in tip top state.

I also would like to thank Tore & Rikard for helping me out at school and kirikou at flashsandy for superquick reaction debugging on the spot. See topic:
http://www.flashsandy.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=113

Finally this week we started off with the Experience Technology main assignment. This is to make an interactive experience out of, in our case, a Wiimote.Very interesting. I took the role as project manager as I got a lot of experience doing certain interactive projects. We will see where the ship will crash, as we got somewhat around two weeks to make this happen. All I can say for now is that we had an brilliant brainstorm today.