Syntaxis will save our future

Yes, confusion shall rain down upon your fragile souls. A new blog, for new purposes.

The reasons are simple: We start our tech module tomorrow and we are supposed to set up a tech blog. I will utilize this blog to focus upon my tech specialisation and tech experiments within actionscript, processing, vvvv, max/msp the web and so fort. The second reason is that this blog will become a part of my portfolio as well.

As with everything new, this one has it’s parts which should be reorganised, redeveloped, redesigned. But I hope no-one will notice those minor changes. I imported the most of my old blog today, which could make it a bit chaotic, I shall try to cristallize.

Some older projects will be reposted sometime tomorrow.

For the rest.

Puss och kram!

PS. bigup wordpress, never thought it would be that easy.

After many requests I revived the /audio folder upon stijlfigurant.nl. This folder has been gone for a couple of months due to clumsy server moving. Luckily after a few days of downtime they managed to put most of my stuff back online, but not my beloved audio folder, which I used for uploading new soundbites, finished tracks, mixes and so-on. Reason: they did not backup folders bigger than 2 gigabytes.

Oh really, that is just what a good service should be about!? Very well then, make up your own rules, but then please presuade consitency.. For instance, my /motion folder was bigger than 2g’s as well, but that one got backed up? Oh hell they have learnt me a good lesson. Don’t go for small(er) and cheap hosting again. I will never use the webhosting: yourname after this again due this brilliant fact.

Anyhow back to the point. Some nice recent stuff to be found here, to bad no time in Karlskrona to finish a single bit, anyway, enjoy:

/Audio

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.

Many things to running around my head to write about this week. Too sad there is such a minimal amout of time. But there is one thing that pisses me off right now: T-Mobile (a mobile phone company) claimed the rights of the color maganeta. So they sue every other company that uses that color… Makes my blood boil. Up untill now I only found reports in dutch. But I will try to keep you updated.

I will put up a petition site, to reclaim the pink! (some hrs later today).

To keep it pink, there is a lot going on around the topic of free online music distrubution as Oink got busted sometime last week. There is something revolutionairy music distribution wise going on this moment. But more on that later (today I hope).

Autumn hasn’t finished yet, but you could notice the shadow of the winter extending every day. Days getting shorter, docks getting empty and common mures preparing their bellies for on hell of an overnighter. More and more people changing their shoes for cars, while everything is a 10 minutes walk around this by god forgotten near to comatose town. It almost seems that there are more people leaving South than birds. Even my parents, born and raised in even smaller towns in Holland, which came to visit last weekend, described this place as excitngly dull

So this is what Sweden is all about and I slowly come to understanding their alcohol problem. It’s either get drunk or get lost.

The last channel on our TV is slowly fading, we experience recurring power outages and so Duckburg is slowly taken down with the whole town. I spend more and more time in my prisoncell. The only daylight I see is in the morning when I walk to school. The prison is one of the most cosiest place to be in these times. More and more hours I spend behind my one and only lightsource, my computer. And I feel like I’m going to the monastry of digital media development, when I come out after this winter I will be able to create code with my mind.

Still there are some small threads of light going out of this place thanks to the internet and I’m happy I could participate with WordWide. The photo I’ve taken symbolizes the comatose situation of this town and that the winter is yet to come.

I’m also eager to get back to Holland in the end of Novemberto visit STRP FSTVL and I believe that more classmates want to get the hell out of here as there are 11 Hypernauts coming along.

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.

“Polyphasic sleep is a term used to describe several alternative sleep patterns intended to reduce sleep time to 2–6 hours daily in order to achieve a better quality of sleep.”

Very useful information for our hyperislanders! Especially within this project

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.

Who said Digital Media would get you rich? It would at least not be me. For those who are interested in my finacial status, here is an update:

My second payment for Hyper Island is almost due, and I haven’t paid the first one as well. So there goes another 45000 swedish crowns, or 5000 euros. So from this point I got 25000 crowns, or 3000 euros left. This is every single penny I posess. I can live with this untill somewhere around Febuary if I spend a maximum 500 crowns, 56 euros a week (I calculated the monthly rent seperatly within this model). This is not much for Swedish standards, but managable if I cut down on booze, meat and other luxuries.

Still Hyper Island needs me to pay another 85000 Swedish crowns in the near future. So I am already 60000 short and so to speak, officially rendered broke.

Before I came here I figured that the Dutch ‘IB Groep’ would be able to lend me money for this cause. The time between admission and the offcial start of Digital Media course was shorter than the time the ‘IB groep’ could process my request. So with some uncertainty I took the risk. Spokepersons from the ‘IB groep’ were saying, “don’t worry about it, Sweden is a sober country, they know what they are doing” and the website of Nuffic was saying that Sweden has the highest valuated schools within Europe.

From all the professionals around the world who came to give us a lecture, said the Hyper Island is seen as the most or one of the most highly respected and valuated school from within the Digital Media market. But for some uncertain reason, Hyper Island did not get acknowledged at the Dutch govermental instances and I ended up without a loan. I am still not really sure why.

I tried to look for other money shooters such as CSN. They can’t lend me money because I need to live in Sweden for two years. Guest scholarships in Sweden need me not to be within a KY system. And for almost every scholarship, they need me to apply many months before I knew I got admitted. The swedish goverment can’t pay for me because I’m following an english spoken international course. It starts to feel like I am two steps ahead of globalisation.

Now my parents are willing to help me out, but I don’t want to strip them from all their money. Second they also need it to be repaid within 2 or 3 years because I am not the only child they have.

I figured that I should be old and experienced enough to stand on my own two legs. And so I am trying. I’ve looked desperately for some freelance work the last couple of weeks, but somehow nothing has really worked out untill now.

Maybe I should start working in a restaurant as a dishwasher, or picking mushrooms somewhere (I got at least five years working experience picking mushrooms). But that’s not how I expected to end up with a Bachelor degree Communication & Multmedia Design.

But then again, David Lynch took a job as a newspaper delivery boy to get his funding for Ereaserhead around.