To celebrate our upcoming vacation, Tessa and I went to see the movie 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest'. Having had great laughs watching Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow in the first movie, both of us found the sequel disappointing.
The evening was not a total loss though; after the movie I had a spare few minutes waiting for Tessa, and was attracted to one of those Playstation stands we have in our cinemas. It turned out not to have a PS2, but a PSP instead. The PSP was running a game with cute yellow blobs rolling around, and I was sold in an instant. Everything from the intuitive controls, to the convincing physics based animation and the ever so cute music made perfect sense.
One of my last activities before I switched jobs was to attend the 3AD conference, the 3rd conference for Appliance Design. At 3AD I presented some of the aesthetic interaction features of SPi-V. The conference also included a design competition, and the entry by dear friend and ex-collegue Ianus Keller, cowritten by myself and Aadjan van der Helm, won first place.
Tessa is not the only one at Hoeben.net who's enjoying a fresh new job. Around november last year, my "company" studioPKO (note the quotes) contracted a big job at the Digital Home group at Conexant in Bilthoven. When the group started to spin off, I was asked to join the technology startup 'Avinity'.
Today I received a package containing no less than 4 cameras with fisheye lenses. "Business must be going well" you might think... Not that it isn't, but if I tell you the cameras are from Lomo, you might start to realise it's not actually all that impressive price-wise ;-)
The art of Lomography is to 'shoot from the hip'. From wikipedia:
Like I said, I really want one. They look great, and I have been looking to buy a recent mac to test SPi-V development on. Plus, they look great!
But Apple made one crucial error. Contrary to a long-standing tradition, Steve's keynote presentation was not broadcasted live. By the time the presentation was available on the Apple.com website, I had already seen all new stuff that had been presented, including the mini mac. No need to watch the presentation...
As part of the Hoeben family, and Internet savvy person, it is an honour - no, a duty - to be active with a blog on hoeben.net. Favorite subjects of my blog will probably include gadgets, cars (a special kind of gadgets really; Volvo's, Healey's and other classic english vehicles I'll be adding to my collection), music (Bach) and my favorite pet, Hobbes. So let's get going...
Yesterday I bought a Roomba. Remi (friend and colleague at the Digital Home team of Conexant) was raving about the Roomba, and I overheared Ronald (dito relation) ask Remi where to buy one. I chimed in that I would like to have one too, so off Ronald went to buy 2 Roomba's at the MediaMarkt. After a long night charging, I finally got the Roomba to do some vacuuming. First impression is that it is really good at it; it collected lots of Hobbes' hair and seemed to be pretty intelligent about obstacles. At the moment I write this post it is doing the most complicated room in my house; the kitchen. I just saw it rotate around one of the table legs, quite neat! The only downside would be that it sometimes gets stuck on doorsteps; I probably need to improve the 'Roomba friendlyness' of my house. A more fundamental issue could be that the Roomba I have is really designed for spaces up to 5 by 6 meters; observation learned that the algorithm uses the size of the room (small, medium, large) to determine how long it should travel along the walls with its patented side-brush, or how long it should traverse a room before doing circles again (I'll explain more about the algorithm in a later post).
