It’s been pretty quiet here this week. Jan and me had a paper deadline, so I didn’t find the time to blog. I still have a few drafts lying around that I might finish somewhere next week if I find a quiet moment. Time to relax a bit now 
Happy holidays everyone!
This is a quick update on my previous post about the STRP festival. Apparently, the technology expo continued at night, so I was able to see some of the demonstrations anyway. I wanted to share a few of them just to give an impression.
There were a set of large screens mounted in the expo that displayed a video of a woman’s face together with a power meter. When the lady smiles (no pun intended) , the power bar is green and filled to the top. When she stops smiling, it drops to the bottom and turns red. It took me a while to get the meaning of this power meter since the women only stop smiling once in a while There is a video available that gives some more details.
I also had the chance to experiment with the i_AM table which was not very impressive in my opinion. Although it was definitely more simple than the reactables table, as a consequence it did not offer much functionality. Each object that was placed on the table was linked to a sample (e.g. a guitar loop) with a certain volume depending on its position on the table. When an object was pushed up or down on the table, its volume changed from loud to quiet. When it was moved to the left or to the right, it would become linked to another sample. When you turned an object, the portion of the sample that was repeated could be altered. I did not find the mappings logical, but then again the problem with these kinds of systems is that there has to be a way for the user to find out about the object’s affordances. This can be done by using objects that represent their affordances explicitly, or by displaying something helpful next to the objects. The i_AM table did not offer a way to find out about an object’s functionality.
I only took a few pictures, and most of them were blurry due to the low quality camera on my cellphone but there are quite some pictures of the festival available at Flickr, including the demo of Johannes (it seems his demo was also covered by DJ BROADCAST and Eindhovens Dagblad). Another cool concept was Vinyl workout where a record was projected on the floor and could be played by running around its surface in the direction you wanted it to go. Motor karaoke was a demo I didn’t visit, but which would have been fun to try. It is a bike race where the motorcycle is powered by the player’s voice. The louder the player screams, the faster the bike will go 
Oh and the concerts were good as well
Time passed quickly this week, it’s Friday evening already. Tonight I am going to the STRP festival in Eindhoven.
STRP (pronounced “strijp” in Dutch) is a four-day festival that can be seen as a combination of a technology exposition and a music festival. Yesterday The Chemical Brothers opened the festival. Today, Radio Soulwax, Roisin Murphy, Mr. Oizo and Goose are amongst others performing.
I actually found out about this festival through Last.fm which mails me when there is an event nearby with artists I like. I had a look at the day program and found out that Johannes Taelman (one of our new colleagues) will be presenting a system he built. Another interesting project at the festival is i_AM, which is similar to the reactable and Audiopad projects. According to the authors of i_AM, the main difference with other projects that allow music composition through tangible interaction is that their system is more usable for novices. Unfortunately, I won’t arrive in Eindhoven until somewhere around midnight so I won’t be able to check out the technology demonstrations.
The concerts should be good, I’m looking forward to seeing the Dewaele Brothers.
Last week, we got all the fish out of our pond again:
We mostly grow tench. This year, we had a nice mutation among one of these fishes:
A normal tench is completely green, while this fellow’s head was dark yellow instead. The color was a bit darker than that of the golden tench. These fish tend to vary a lot in color gradation according the conditions they live in (e.g. green to brown with the normal tench). We had another tench that had a long, flowing tail almost like an oranda, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to get it on picture.
Today I traded in my old, trusty 1992 (third generation) VW Passat. It used to be my parent’s car, which I took over in 2001. It was a very reliable car, I never had big problems with it besides the normal wearing out of some parts. It had more than 357000 kms on the counter.
I took some last pictures of it this morning.
Yesterday me and Evelien (my girlfriend) moved to our apartment in Houthalen. It was time to fly the parental nest
There are of course still some things to be done, but we could already move in yesterday thanks to the help from our parents and family. The apartment is getting really cosy. We have a large terrace in the back, and a smaller one at the front, which is very nice in the summer time. Now let’s hope the weather gets better again.
I will upload some pictures of our place to my Flickr page when everything is sorted out. We are also waiting for our internet connection (should only be about 2 weeks now).
I can conclude that it’s a nice feeling to have a place of your own
