iphone logo design

I made this today, for Jorn's cheap gas app for the iPhone. Coming soon!

Mushrooms

Marcel got me addicted to Hugh Fearnley–Whittingstall's series, River Cottage. In this series, Hugh, a London cook, downsizes by buying a farm in Dorset. There he grows all his food and meat, supplemented with fish etc. from the ocean, wild picked edibles and game. In several episodes, he goes mushrooming with serious mushroom experts. One episode even involved hang gliding.

Inspired by Hugh, I took a trip to the Utrechtseheuvelrug with Effrosyni, Jasenko, Yulia and Jorn. Yulia turned out to be a mushroom expert, although she was very modest about her skills. The book we brought turned out to be totally useless, but we ended up picking out 3 types of mushrooms we thought were edible (thanks to Yulia). Mushroom hunting turned out to be a very exciting way to enjoy the outdoors.

Now they are molding in my fridge, before I got a chance to eat them...I will definitely go again.

Life, etc.

I've been looking for a new job...in the meantime I went on a weekend to Cochem, in Germany, our exhibition opened at the NAi, and we had our housewarming. Besides, the job finding stress everything is going pretty well. This week and next week, I have some meetings so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I also watched a lot of Hitchcock in chronological order and got addicted to the BBC series, River Cottage. In a few years I hope to be able to own and work my own farm. Gotta start reading those permaculture books!

nuclear test suburb we stayed in

exhibit at the NAi

pre-housewarming

Happenings

Two pieces of news:

1. Housewarming on Oct 2. featuring the Boxers and Alexander's band (see above)

2. We made it to the second round of the Change Your World competition! This weekend we will compete with ten teams for a 10,000E prize.

I <3 my bike

Job search

I'm looking for a new job, anyone have any offers?

Boxer's gig at Maaiky's birthday

TGIF.

I went to the Tango today with Daniel and bumped into Maaiky and Jer, the usual suspects. They mentioned that I would be receiving pics from our past Sunday gig. Here they are:


view from the audience


Gas


Me


Bart

Last weekend was Maaiky and Jer's birthday bash. We were invited to play there, and though we weren't ready to unveil our new band concept, we thought it would be awesome to play at Maaiky's (and it was). The party was an amazing Sunday evening barbecue at the anti-squat palace, casa Maaiky, Eliza, Shoert, and Eva. There was a tent, a barbecue in an old oil drum, a surplus of couches, and an audience of 30 some people. Everyone was surprisingly enthusiastic about our music, which gives me a good vibe for our coming band development.

All pictures from Vincent Basler

Inglorius Bastards, remembrance of things past

Yesterday I went to check out the new Tarentino movie. Afterwards in Tikis, several guys remarked that they would probably see this movie multiple times, also in the theater. Not surprisingly, the Matrix was brought up (I watched it 2x in the theater and probably 10+ times since). I had a flashback to high school times. It was summer in North Carolina and I was with Gemma, Lucy and some boys. We ate Goodberry's frozen yogurt cream before the movie in an enormous empty parking lot. Lucy was raving about how she loved the movie. I still remember the black skin chunks dotting the purple of the blueberry ice cream and the texture of the yogurt on my tongue. It was really a madeleine moment.




Vanilla with blackberries


Goodberries

Food

We've been busy making lots of food since day 1 at Rochussenstraat. This was one of our first dinners:


Paella dinner with crayfish, squid, crab and shrimp


About to start our dinner

I have to say that I am glad that I pressured Inga into moving in a week ahead of her schedule...

For my birthday, we made way too much food. Marissa recommended that I make Le Gâteau Piège. As you can see, the cake got a little bit crooked, since *someone put the grill in the oven upside down, and I was too lazy to fix it. But, it turned out delicious and I am definitely making it again. I also found out that wide window ledges are good for something besides sitting.


Le Gâteau Piège on the drying rack

Alexander offered to make me a delicious cous cous dish as a present. In the morning, I made friends with my local Turkish shop owners by buying about half of the store, including three whole chickens for the spit.


Ingredients for cous cous

The dinner turned out really well. Everyone really liked the food. We walked fat and chubby to the outdoor theater. The next day, I had about 8 kilos of food left; enough for one school lunch, before the rest had to be tossed out :(

Birthday Menu
- Hummus + turkish bread
- 2 whole grilled jerk chickens
- Cous Cous (have to get recipe from Alexander)
- Vivian's famous potato salad

- Le Gâteau Piège
- Apple crumble (Vivian)
- Fruit salad (Kim and Cyril)

- Melon cocktails for North by Northwest (Fedde)
- Bathub cooled beer

The next step is to buy a recipe book to record all our favorite house recipes!

This thing called zadelhoes

Amazing opportunity. Zadelhoezen or bike seat covers, are often placed on the seats of bikes parked in public places as advertisement for various companies/causes. These precious covers are alternatively coveted, saved, stolen, used and reused, but it seems like most of those advertising through this medium are design challenged. There is a great opportunity for graphic designers and design forward thinking companies alike to get their name out there...

Moscow times

In Moscow we spent a lot of time in Inara's kitchen. It was our gathering point and home base. Every morning I woke up to a banquet of cottage cheese, berries and other delicious food. Yulia's friend Genya took some great pictures, and here they are, thanks to Yulia for scanning.


Inara


Yulia and tea cups

Nerds

Yulia and Onno

Vijf bij Vijfeest

Another year rolls by. I hope I'm this suave by the time I'm 26...

Eve: I’m Eve Kendall. I’m twenty-six and unmarried. Now
you know everything.
Roger: Tell me. What do you do besides lure men to their
doom on the Twentieth Century Limited?
Eve: I’m an industrial designer.

--

Lieve vriendjes,

Ik ben bijna een kwart eeuw oud!! Daarom wil ik graag mijn verjaardag vieren op een fijne (hoop ik) zondag in mijn nieuwe buurt.

Programma, Zondag 23 Augustus
- 17:00 Eten (Rochussenstraat 297A, Rotterdam)
- 21.30 Klassieker North by Northwest (I <3>

Life etc, moving to Rotterdam!

After a few days of anxious waiting, we got the house in Coolhaven. I'm very excited to move, but it seems like we first have to complete an endless amount of paperwork. I'm guessing that it will take us another week before we get the keys to the kingdom. I already packed some bags and have been rearranging furniture in my head.



View Larger Map

I will miss my roommates, and I'm sad that I will have to say goodbye to this great blackberry patch I only recently discovered with Inga and Alexander. The result was 3 occasions for blackberry-pie-bars: cooking with Inga, for Peet's 60th, and for my roommates.


I recommend this recipe from Buns In My Oven

Other than that, the weather has been extremely nice for the past couple of days. On Tuesday, I finally fixed my bike and biked to Rotterdam with Inga and Yulia for a yoga class. It's good to be friends with architects :] Wednesday, I tagged along with Yulia, Onno and their friend, Kamala on an evening trip to Wijk bij Duurstede. We walked around the old city center and ate Chinese food on the floor of an empty 500 year old house. The house was amazing, with nicely proportioned rooms, a charmingly overgrown garden, a small gnome sized window overlooking the garden from upstairs, and thick clay walls keeping out the summer heat. We stayed there until it got dark, scaring ourselves with ghost stories. I will post some more pictures, if I get them from Yulia...



Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede: the only one in the world that you can drive under and located on a dijk, according to Onno

This weekend Marcel is coming back from Columbia, and we'll be going to Solar Festival in Roermond. I'm excited for my first camping-style festival. In exchange for tickets, we'll help with building up the Pleereef and we will be required to wear ridiculous/awesome outfits. We leave tomorrow morning by bus...

House Hunt, Updates

We got a message from Marcel from Columbia that gives us the go ahead. I feel like we are on the brink of moving! Now we wait to meet with the owner...

--

WAUW!!! Count me in, chicos y chicas!!
I can afford it, looks really pretty... I think I like it...
And I have to say, I really love the idea of living with the four of us. We´re going to have the most awesome place evah! DelfsVeiligeHaven.. :-)
I check my email once in a while but not that often... so sorry that I didn´t respond earlier...

ciao!!

House hunt

I have been thinking about moving to Rotterdam for the last few months. After a slowdown in momentum, and some large disappointments, we finally got our groove back with Alexander's precipitous return to the Netherlands. We visited three potential houses in Rotterdam this week, and found one especially promising one on Rochussenstraat next to the Coolhaven metro station. 

The house is available for four people, and has a nice big living room, high ceilings, a balcony and lots of light. We are still waiting to hear from Marcel, who is in Columbia, as to whether he is interested in this house as well. Next Monday, we will meet with the realtors for more information. On the administrative end of things, to live with more than 3 people in Rotterdam, one has to start a living group. This involves a trip to an accountant and a registration at the Chamber of Commerce. 

In comparison to two other houses we looked at on the Burgemeestermeinezlaan (better location), this house is in great condition, cheaper and will house one more person!

Floor plan (Alexander has claimed rooms #1 upstairs and downstairs, Inga #3)

living room

balcony 

kitchen

I have already staked a claim on room #2, or should I take the room with the balcony?

Slacklining, Man on Wire

Yesterday I tried slacklining for the first time. Loucas became obsessed with it on a trip to Dortmund, and ended up buying one for himself. We made plans to make fish for dinner, but once the line was up between the two trees, our dinner plans quickly devolved to take-out anchovy pizza.

We strung the slackline between two trees in the park behind his apartment. Though it was initially hard to get on the line, I got the hang of it pretty quickly. We spent the next 2.5 hours practicing, with some happy interruption from some little girls who also wanted to try it out. My furthest record was to the midpoint of the trees. Heart banging in my chest, one would have thought that I was 500 m up in the air rather than a mere foot off the ground.

I'm definitely hooked. We ended our day by watching Man on Wire, a great documentary about Frenchman, Phillipe Petit, who fufilled his dream to walk between the Two Towers in NYC.

By the end of summer, my goal is to walk across my canal without falling into the water, or more importantly without impaling myself on a bike. More to come...

?/365: An idea

An idea for an interactive exhibit.

After two stormy days, it is finally becoming nice outside again. I am looking forward to going to Void/Sunyata, a piece for 5 singers and electronics in Rotterdam tonight. Jorn's teacher, Jorrit Taminga worked on the sound for the opera.

This weekend I am tagging along with 1uptoys for a trip to Berlin for the beatbox world championship. The last time I visited Berlin was with my mom and sisters. I'm looking forward to seeing another side of the city this time. It seems like other friends will also be there, so maybe I will meet up with some people while I am there.

?/365: From Gas

I have been slacking with posts, but I have been drawing. This one is from Gaspard. I will upload my backlog of pictures soon!

Great news today. I heard that we girls from constructingreen will possibly be able to expand the garden we started during Motel Mozaique for the Parade festival in Rotterdam. More information to come on that.

8/365: Rehearsal Weekend

Tomorrow I am leaving to Someren for rehearsal weekend with Krashna, but I will try to keep drawing while I'm there and post them later. This is a drawing I made at my friend Danny's graduation talk on creative facilitation for novice facilitators...right is a bee drawn at lunch by Gas.

7/365: Flying Car

Ooeps, the day is actually over before I got a chance to post. Today was a long day for me at work, but I vented my frustration boxing in the evening and got recruited for fencing. I guess I will give it a try even though I am not too enthusiastic...it has been two years.

Biomimicry arrived in the mail today. I'm excited to start reading it even though I am still committed to finishing all the other books I half started...I watched Janine Benyus on TED in anticipation!

Last night I dreamed I was sitting on the porch of a flying car powered by a balloon. It couldn't fly too long on one balloon, so we were soon on the ground again.

6/365: Singer/songwriter

Today was the singer/songwriter contest at the Cultural Center. After rushing to increase our set list from two to five songs in the last two days, I was pretty happy with our result. A lot of friends showed up to check out our performance, and though we did not win, there was a lot of enthusiasm. I viewed this band contest as a sort of experiment/debut, since it was the most serious thing we have played so far. I'm pretty excited about continuing to grow and improve as a band after yesterday!

Here are two drawings from Gas and me. We drew them while others were sound checking. Mine is of Robert Zwamborn performing.

5/365: Pinned Fly

Drawings from Gas and I. We made them today while waiting for Bart to show up for practice. Tomorrow we will be performing at a singer/songwriter contest in the Cultural Center, starting 9pm.

Last night I dreamed that I threw a throwing knife at a tree. When I went to
recover my knife, I found that I had split a fly in half.

I finally finished Blink. I thought the book was quite nice, especially as a complement/counterpoint to Fooled by Randomness which I read earlier this year. The first was about how mental heuristics are a powerful engine for understanding the world in a flash, but also how these processes are unconscious and therefore unpredictable to the uninitiated. The second is about how the same mental heuristics can lead people to interpret the world as more causal than it actually is. I recommend both, but especially Fooled. Blink was fast and easy to read, but didn't really present that much new information.

4/365: Deflt details

Today was yet another day in my endless May holiday; the second to last. My feat for the day was that I played tennis with my housemates, Tim and Illhame. The weather was brisk but sunny, and we ended up at the Locus Publicus with Sierd and Inga after we finished a series of mini-tournaments. While sitting on the terrace, a for rent sign caught my eye, and eventually my gaze wandered onto a window detail (left).

When you live in a city for a long time, you become blissfully ensconed in everyday life while becoming more and more unaware of the details around the city. I was surprised to see so many stony faces around me where I had never looked before.

Tonight, Gas, Bart and I will practice for the first time in awhile. There is a band contest on Wednesday, and we have to fill 20 minutes...I'm going to try out my new pedals.

3/365: Sunday Morning Room

I didn't have any crazy dreams last night, so I made a sketch of one corner of my room (please excuse my poor perspective :). My plan was to go to Amsterdam today and visit Charity at her new house, eat dim sum and go to a photo gallery, but the weather wasn't cooperating earlier, putting me in a suspended state. Now the sun is out again, mocking my laziness. I hope I can finish Blink today. I bought it for 1E on Koninginnedag (Queen's Day = a giant excuse for unofficial flea markets everywhere), along with several other books, the old BBC version of Chronicles of Narnia (3E!) and Boonanza! (.50E).

Drawing from Gas, made at Oma's birthday party.

2/365 Days: A Match

May 02, 2009

Following the theme of dreams, I drew a scene from one I had this morning...

I was in a large hall with a sparring ring. A multitude of scissors were suspended from the ceiling at different heights; they were very sharp to the touch and I already cut myself several times on them before the match had even started. My friends and I were evenly matched, but I was chosen to go represent us against our mysterious rivals.

It was customary to eat a bowl of rice with tea before starting. As I gulped down my rice, I saw my opponent watching me avidly. That was when I sensed something was wrong. There was poison in my food...but that wouldn't affect me. I communicated with my eyes to let my opponent know that I knew about his tricks, and that he was still going down. I ended up winning, but the thugs weren't satisfied. As they pressed in on our small group, we dashed out of the hall and and drove off into the horizon in a stolen car...

Part 2 of this post:
I spent my whole day in R'dam today biking around with Inga searching for a new house. Afterwards we had tea with Tessa (where I bumped into Gas and told him about the 360day project), checked out the state of our garden (we saw bunnies!) and went to a dinner with MoMo guides. The dinner was delicious and in the studio of 2012Architecten. We then biked back through the fog to Delft in time to see Alex play at Ciccionina. When I got home just now, I found this in my mailbox...Gaspard submitted a drawing for this project!

1/365 Days: On the Run

May 01, 2009
Inspired by a chat with Loucas over coffee, and by an old photo taken by Marcos I stumbled across from way back when, I decided that I want to draw and post a picture everyday (no matter how crappy) for a year. It has been a long time since I sketched or drew for fun, especially now that I have no more lectures to sit through. This will be an extreme exercise in self discipline for me...and I'm starting now!

Yesterday I continued my marathon of barbeques with one on Hoi-kee and Loucas's roof. Drawing the awesome scene there was way too complicated (I have some wads of paper to show for that), so I ended up drawing something I dreamed about the night before. I was driving a bus or truck of some sort, on the run from some unknown danger with a bus full of people I didn't know.

Funny that I dreamed a variation of that same dream this last night as well, but this time it involved orcas, karate, poisoned rice and scissors...

Smart Surroundings

A few days ago, I attended the final event for the EU project, Smart Surroundings. Some people from Studiolab were also there with their prototypes. The event was in this typical ministerial building that one finds in the Hague (glass and triple story indoor atrium), there was a jazz band, free food and drinks. I am not sure what I expected, but I did see some nice and interesting projects. I was really interested in one in particular which was this flexible interface developed by engineering students from Lancaster University. The prototype consisted of elements (buttons, sliders, etc) that could be inserted into this foam board material that was overlaid with a sheet of graph-like paper. You could insert these elements anywhere and name them with a felt pen on the graph-paper. The pen was special because it had a camera that could read the written text and interpret it for use in, i.e. Photoshop. Instead of using these physical elements, you could also draw a slider on the paper and use the pen drawing movements as changing the state of the slider. It was really cool, but it looked like it still had a long way to go as a technology.

Work Blog

For my work, I just started a blog to organize my research. If anyone is interested in reading about what I am working on (sustainability in interaction design), or about the topic itself, check it out!

I am organizing a symposium about sustainable interaction design in the living and work contexts. This involves writing a benchmark analysis report (sort of literature study) on the current field. Additionally, it could include some side projects on wirelessly networking energy monitoring devices. We'll see how far I get. For that I am learning Max/Msp although that is going pretty slowly :/.

Wintersport

image: view of Morgins from the lift

Two weeks ago I went to Morgins, Switzerland to go snowboarding with my house mates. I had never snowboarded before, but now I'm hooked. I took morning classes while the boys boarded to France and met up with me for lunch afterwards. It snowed almost constantly and I only saw sun on the last day; on Wednesday it snowed so much that the lifts in Morgins were closed and I spent a day at home reading and drinking tea. We had an idyllic cabin to stay in, thanks to Tim's parents, equipped with an open fireplace, radiator for drying damp things and of course fondue and raclette sets (yum).Thankfully all the powder meant that I didn't fall very hard or get bruised (except when Andre mowed me over by stopping in my back :). By the third day I could go down the mountain by myself, and by the end of the week, I could do most things adequately. Mostly now I have to work on not being scared of going fast on straightaways...can't wait for next year!

Pictures here and here.

Books:
I am reading about a million books simultaneously, which isn't getting me anywhere fast. But, I did just finish reading Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase. A Wild Sheep Chase was very entertaining, and I especially liked his description of ears and the part of the book where the main character is sitting in a desolate mountaintop cabin. It reminded me of wintersport of course. I am now reading In the Bubble, a book I would recommend to anyone, but especially designers.

Videos:
1. Twin Peaks - I want to watch all episodes of Twin Peaks with Alexander before he leaves for Vietnam. Love it so far, especially the subtle yet creepy, pervasive music + imagery.
2. Classic Albums - Nirvana, Nevermind