ChristophD's Random Musings

An Inspiring Quote from Steve Jobs [video]

2011-12-04T18:06:00.002+01:00

There is no shortage of thought-provoking, inspiring, and just generally thoughtful comments made by Steve Jobs. However this one, which has been making the rounds on many social networks lately, really might just be one of his most inspiring ones.

"When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you're life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again."

Photos from Dresden and Paris

2011-09-19T22:01:00.001+02:00

Travel-wise these past few months have been very dull around here. Since my return from Madrid at the beginning of July I spent the entire so-called summer in Upper Austria and Vienna. Now in the first half of September I finally had a chance to travel a bit as I attended the DeLFI 2011 conference in Dresden, Germany where I presented a paper about OLPC before heading to Paris, France to attend Sugar Camp #2, a 3-day gathering of OLPC and Sugar volunteers.

In Dresden I really only had one evening and half an afternoon to wander around the city so there weren’t many opportunities to take photos. As a result the corresponding Flickr album is really quite thin.

Frauenkirche in the dusk

In Paris I had more time to snap photos (album), first of all to document and share what was going on at Sugar Camp #2 and secondly because I stayed an extra day to be able to visit some places where I hadn’t been on my three prior trips to the city. One place which was very high on my agenda was Père Lachaise cemetery where famous people such as Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and many others are buried.

Jim Morrison's grave at Père Lachaise cemetery

This was also the first time that I exclusively relied on my Nexus S Android smartphone to take photos. Even though I actually had the small Canon IXUS 100IS in my back bag the convenience of quickly being able to share the photos was a major advantage of the Nexus S. I have to say I was also pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images. The IXUS 100IS would have certainly been able to take better shots under difficult conditions but overall the quality of the phone camera photos are really good enough.

Photos from Spain

2011-06-28T16:32:00.001+02:00

My five months here in Madrid are quickly coming to an end – I will fly back to Vienna on Thursday evening – so I thought this is a good time to briefly mention the photos I took on my various trips here in Spain. As always I’ve uploaded them to my Flickr account and the individual albums available there are:

My favorite view of Sevilla’s Plaza de España

Talking and Writing about OLPC / ICT4E

2011-06-01T11:47:00.001+02:00

I haven't had much time to keep this blog updated but I thought I'd take a minute to briefly mention two places where I've (more or less) recently spoken and written about OLPC and ICT4E.

The first one is a video interview that I did with educ.ar when I attended Conectar Igualdad's workshop about monitoring and evaluation in Buenos Aires back in December 2010. I'd also strongly recommend you to watch the interviews with some of the other workshop participants available here

The Association for Learning Technology is one of the (if not the) largest body in Europe which works on the intersection of technology and education. I am therefore very happy that I had the opportunity to write up my thoughts about the OLPC projects in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru for the latest edition of their quarterly newsletter. It's of course hard to get into too many details within the constraints of 2500 words but I do hope for my contribution to have four effects:

Remind people that even though it has in many cases dropped off their radar screens OLPC is still alive.
Point out the fact that Latin America is really the place to be right now when it comes to studying large-scale 1-to-1 computing in education projects.
Emphasize that Europe can learn a lot and has a lot to learn from the many projects taking place in Latin America these days.
Interest people in reading the extensive 5-part article series about OLPC in South America which I published on EduTechDebate last autumn;-)

Fascinating Aida - Cheap Flights [video]

2011-03-06T19:32:00.003+01:00

Someone played this video at a friend's place yesterday evening and it's absolutely hilarious, particularly if you've had the pleasure of taking one of these cheap flights yourself;-)

Oh, and note that the actual song ends at around 4min 10sec, the rest seems to be advertising.

Podcasts I listen to

2011-02-22T14:24:00.001+01:00

I don’t know which podcast I first started listening to regularly but it might have been Leo Larporte’s famous This Week in Tech while I lived in Washington, D.C. back in early 2008. Since then the list of podcasts I listen to has steadily increased with the possible exception of the sad day when Cranky Geeks ended. These days my list in iTunes contains about a dozen podcasts and plenty of unlistened episodes to keep me busy for quite a while.

So here’s a quick rundown of what keeps me entertained and informed on my commutes (and while I’m doing the dishes):

37 signals: 37signals is a Web services company based in the United States and while I haven’t really used them myself their online products such as Basecamp (project management), Campfire (real-time collaboration), and Highrise (contact management) seem to be very popular with many folks. Their podcast is released about once a month and some of my favorite episodes have focused on things such as 37 signals’ hiring process, a programming roundtable, and dealing with criticism of the company. What I like beyond learning about the individual topics is hearing bits and pieces about the company’s philosophy which (I think) can be summed up as having a lean, no-bullshit approach.

Chaosradio Express: If you’re seriously into computers in Austria, Germany or Switzerland chances are high that you’re listening to Chaosradio Express. The host Tim Pritlove (@timpritlove) is without a doubt the best German podcaster there is which is probably also the reason why he is one of the very few people who can actually make a living of it and do this fulltime. His shows are basically extensive interviews (many of them >2 hours) with people knowledgeable about things such as Android, ARM, board games, Hackerspaces, JavaScript, malware, privacy, etc. Well worth a listen if you understand German and are slightly geeky;-)

IBM developerWorks: While I’ve used the excellent resources provided by IBM on its developerWorks Web site on many occasions it wasn’t until a tweet by fellow Vienna University of Technology colleague @barfooz that I discovered the developerWorks podcast. So far I’ve listened to 3 or 4 episodes of the Andy Glover Java series and I’m definitely hooked.

LabCAST: LabCAST is the official video-podcast of the MIT Media Lab and presents about half a dozen of its projects per year. The episodes are short (often <5 minutes) but always offer an interesting glimpse into what’s going at what is undoubtedly one of the most interesting research facilities in the world.

Meet Mobility: Meet:Mobility is a joint project by three of the leading bloggers in the mobile computing space: Steve Paine (@chippy) from Carrypad.com and UMPCportal.com, @jkkmobile (don’t really know his real name;-) from jkkmobile.com, and Sascha Pallenberg (@sascha_p) from netbooknews.de/netbooknews.com. This is really the only mobile computing podcast that I listen to and given the broad coverage of the field, including analyses of news and conference reports, provided by these three guys I feel well informed.

NPR Science Friday: Ira Flatow’s Science Friday is an absolutely excellent radio show about all things science and technology. Yes, it sometimes is very U.S. centric but the people he interviews on the show always add interesting perspectives and insights to the table. As I write this I’ve got several dozen Science Friday episodes stored on my iPod touch, covering everything from climate change, the Microsoft Kinect, multi-tasking, to oil spills.

PRI’s The World – Global Economy: Unfortunately it looks like the Global Economy podcast won’t be continued, the last episode was published in mid-September 2010, however I’m still keeping it in my list in the hope of hearing more of these stories which always looked at economic developments from interesting angles.

PRI’s The World – Technology: If I only have time to listen to one podcast in a week then it’s always The World’s Technology podcast. Clark Boyd (@worldstechpod) is doing an exceptional job of covering “tech that matters” and regularly beats the mainstream press when it comes to discovering new developments, organizations, and services which use or apply technology in novel ways. Definitely a must-listen!

Raumzeit: After Lukas Lang (@lukaslang) raved about Tim Pritlove’s latest podcast venture Raumzeit for many weeks I finally gave it a listen and have to say his praise was definitely spot-on. Raumzeit is a German podcast sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and focuses on all thing related to space travel. The two episodes I listened to so far focused on mission planning and space waste and were both very interesting.

Software Engineering Radio: I only very recently stumbled across Software Engineering Radio thanks to a tweet by aforementioned @barfooz. I’ve listened to 3 or 4 episodes from the archive so far and really enjoyed all of them. Definitely well worth a listen for anyone interested in software engineering.

Spectrum: Deutsche Welle’s Spectrum, edited by the Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar), focuses on European science and technology news and thereby fills a gap in my often very U.S.-centric look at this topic. If I have time for a second podcast in a week beyond The World’s Tech podcast then I always listen to this one.

I have a number of other podcasts listed in iTunes - e.g. 24 horas, Alternativlos, BackStory with the American History Guys, FLOSS Weekly, GeekNights with Rym + Scott, Green Tech Today, etc. – however I don’t listen to them regularly (anymore) these days or simply haven’t had time to listen to them at all yet.

Keynote on "One Laptop per Child in Latin America and what we can learn from it" [video]

2011-02-14T03:53:00.001+01:00

I spent the past four days in Switzerland as the University of Teacher Education Central Switzerland in Goldau had invited me to give a keynote at their "One to One Computing in School" conference. The title of my talk was “One Laptop per Child in Latin America and what we can learn from it” and a recording of it is now available here, plus you can find the accompanying slides here. (Please do note that the keynote was given in German.)

Update (16.02.2011): I just got a copy of an article in the Neue Schwyzer Zeitung which talks about the conference as well as mentions my keynote. I’ve made it available for download here.

Parking App

2011-01-20T01:11:00.002+01:00

One of the classes I took this semester was a seminar on Human Computer Interaction. It turned out to be a great and thoroughly enjoyable and interesting class. The goal for all the 3-person teams in the class was to develop a horizontal prototype of a mobile application which uses open data.

CNM Studios, the team consisting of Michael Smolle, Nemanja Dubravac and yours truly, developed the prototype of Parking App which (supposedly) provides information related to parking regulations, tariffs, garages, etc. for Austrian cities. At the end of the class we had to create a video presenting the project and I think ours turned out quite well:

I’d highly recommend you to check out this blog post which includes a longer description of our project as well as information and videos about the work by our fellow colleagues.

Cheating in Computer Science

2010-12-29T00:49:00.001+01:00

Thanks to a tweet from XRDS (ACM's magazine for students) I came across a great article by William Hugh Murray. Despite its title it isn’t just about cheating in CS but rather contains a very interesting – and I feel accurate – description of the current status quo in much of the education system.

There’s a short teaser below, you can find the complete article on the Web site of Ubiquity (an ACM publication).

“I suggest that we have gotten the cart before the horse. We are less concerned with whether students learn the right thing than whether they learn in the way that we rely upon to measure how well they learn when compared to their peers. We do this without even having considered whether the measurement is even useful, much less necessary or even counter-productive. We do it without considering whether encouraging sin is a good way to teach morals. We do it for no better reason than tradition, habit, and inertia.”

Good food for though, ey? :-)

Photos from Buenos Aires (and Montevideo)

2010-12-26T19:45:00.001+01:00

The week before Christmas I had a chance to travel to Buenos Aires to attend a workshop organized by the Argentinean Ministry of Education within the context of the country’s Conectar Igualdad program. I hope to be able to blog about the workshop in more detail in the future but for now I at least managed to upload some photos which I took while exploring Buenos Aires during my stay. As always you can find the complete album over on Flickr as well as see a selection of some of my favorites below.

"El Metodo" playing on Calle Florida

Conectar Igualdad poster in Palermo

Buildings on Plaza del Congreso

Skyline at Cementario RecoletaTrain stop in La Boca

EduTechDebate: OLPC in South America

2010-11-08T17:31:00.001+01:00

As people following this blog or my tweets will know I spent my summer traveling through Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru to try and get a better understanding of how the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) projects in these countries are going.

Apart from documenting my experiences over on OLPC News, the OLPC (Austria) blog, Flickr, several OLPC and Sugar Labs related mailing lists, this blog, and plenty of tweets I also had an opportunity to share some of my thoughts during talks I gave in Montevideo, Lima, and Washington, D.C.. However the most important component of these documentation efforts awaited me after my return to Austria and have kept me quite busy over the past few weeks.

The result of these efforts is a series of five articles with a total of more than 15,000 words which was posted over on EduTechDebate.org, a discussion platform about ICT for education in developing countries which is sponsored by The World Bank’s infoDev and UNESCO:

OLPC in South America: An Overview of OLPC in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru

OLPC in Uruguay: Impressions of Plan Ceibal’s Primary School XO Laptop Saturation

OLPC in Paraguay: Will ParaguayEduca’s XO Laptop Deployment Success Scale?

OLPC in Peru: A Problematic Una Laptop Por Niño Program

OLPC in South America in Context of Deployments Around the World

I thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing these articles as it gave me a chance to reflect upon my experiences, go through all of my notes, look at the photos I had taken, etc.

In terms of what happened after the publication of the articles it was particularly interesting to see the reactions to my piece about Peru’s Una laptop por niño. My critical views of the project resulted in a significant pushback by Oscar Becerra (head of DIGETE - the Peruvian Ministry of Education's department which runs Una laptop por niño) who posted a numbered 19-part response to my article in the comments. Combined with two Peruvian media reports which mentioned my article, several discussions threads on Spanish mailing-lists, a Peruvian blogger translating the entire article to Spanish, an honorable (or maybe slightly less so;-) mention in Walter Bender’s Sugar Digest, and a total of 147 comments on the article itself it’s save to say that it created quite a stir and some good discussions.

Sir Ken Robinson - Changing Education Paradigms [video]

2010-10-23T20:51:00.003+02:00

Back in July I blogged about a talk from Phil Zimbardo about "The Secret Powers of Time" which the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) had subsequently animated and turned into an absolutely spectacular video.

Now this week I had another RSA Animate video being mentioned by many of the people who I follow on Twitter. This time it's based on a talk by Sir Ken Robinson who many know from his famous TED talk on "schools kill creativity". The focus of this video is Changing Education Paradigms and again it's absolutely well worth watching, both for the content as well as the fantastic presentation.

One Laptop Per Child in South America talk at The World Bank [video]

2010-09-28T20:07:00.004+02:00

While I was in the United States in early September I gave a talk about the current status quo of the OLPC projects in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru (which I had visited on my olpcnews road trip) at The World Bank. I was joined on the panel by Wayan Vota, publisher of OLPC News and EduTechDebate, and The World Bank's Sr. Education Economist Cristian Aedo. While I unfortunately ended up talking longer than planned we still had some time in the end to take audience questions which led to some very interesting discussions and insights.

Anyway, I have embedded a recording of the talk below. Please note that the session only starts at around 9:15min and that the slides I used are available for download here.

You can find the OLPC News posts I've written about my experiences in South America here and we'll be publishing plenty more information on both OLPC News and EduTechDebate over the coming weeks.

Recording of my talk at escuelab [video]

2010-08-27T22:50:00.004+02:00

On Wednesday evening I gave a talk in Lima's escuelab called "One Laptop per Child: Una perspectiva europea" (slides of the presentation). While the audience in the room - 4 people - was the smallest I ever spoke for we also had a handful of people watching the presentation via a video-stream. The talk itself wasn't that different from the one I gave in Montevideo at the end of July however the audience discussion that followed it was one of the best ones I've ever experienced. People who watched the stream submitted a handful of great questions via the chat and one person even called in to make some comments and ask something. In combination with having a teacher in the room who just received his OLPC XO laptop 2 weeks ago this made for excellent and very enjoyable audience participation. If you're interested (and speak Spanish) you can watch the whole 2h session in the embedded video below:

Learning to Change - Changing to Learn [video]

2010-08-27T09:48:00.003+02:00

Can't remember who facebook'd or tweeted this video (it might have been Sascha Pallenberg) but I found it to be quite inspiring and well done:

My favorite quote is definitely:

"It's the death of education, it's the dawn of learning."

;-)

Sharing photos from Peru in 2000, 2005 and 2010

2010-08-27T09:00:00.001+02:00

While wandering around around Trujillo earlier this week I stumbled across the store where I had some photos developed during the 11 months when I lived in the city. This made me think about how the act of sharing photos from my stays in Peru has changed over the past 10 years.

It was the year 2000 and digital cameras - let alone mobile phones with digital cameras – were still unheard of. In order to be able to give my family in Austria a better idea of how the environment I was living in looked at I took photos of my room, my house, my host-family, my school, the city center, etc. I then went to the store mentioned earlier, handed in my film-roll and then came back a day later to pick up the photos. I then wrote a short explanatory sentence on each photo and went to the post-office sending the letter off to Europe. I think it took two or three weeks before the letter arrived and another few days before I saw the e-mail from my mother saying that so.

Fast forward to 2005 when I went back to South America to travel through Peru and Bolivia for five weeks. By that time (and after weeks of research!) I was the very proud owner of a Kodak DX7590 digital camera and two 256MB SD cards. Being trigger-happy I filled up the cards within a few days and for a moment I was at a loss about what to do next. Luckily I wasn’t the first traveler in that situation so Internet cafés had started offering burning photos from memory cards to CD for a little fee. Being worried about losing my photos in case my back bag was stolen I actually got two CDs with copies of each SD card. I ended up carrying one set of CDs on me at all times with the second set being stored at the hostels I was staying in. As I was keen to share the photos with family and friends I spent more than one afternoon sitting in an Internet café, complaining about the upload speed (or lack thereof) and hoping that my e-mails with the photos attached would actually make it across the Internet.

Now in 2010 things have again changed. Instead of my Kodak DX7590 (which unfortunately has shown considerable signs of age after having been a trusted travel companion across Taiwan, China, Mongolia, Russia, USA, Nepal and Europe) I relied on a Canon IXUS 100 IS. In some ways that move meant giving up flexibility in terms of being able to adjust photo settings. On the other hand it gives me more flexibility due to the fact that the camera is so small that I have it on me at all times. And as the saying goes: the best camera is the one you have on you. Equipped with multiple 8GB SD cards and my laptop storage wasn’t going to be a problem either.

In terms of photo sharing I started using Flickr two or three years ago and have been quite happy with it. In particular it has helped me keep up some discipline when it comes to going through my photos, finding the “best of” from each series and also keeping track of what each photo shows since 100_7704.JPG isn’t a particularly useful photo title. I subsequently also mention photo uploads on Twitter and highlight some of them here on the blog.

For my current OLPC News South America Road Trip our publisher Wayan also hooked up the @olpcnews twitter-feed to my Flickr account. This means that every upload photo that I tag with olpc is automatically mentioned on the @olpcnews feed and subsequently also re-tweeted on Wayan’s twitter feed. As a result many of my photos tagged with olpc receive upwards of 150 views with some of them even getting more than 300 views.

What a difference 10 years make, right?

I can only imagine what things will be like the next time I’m back in Peru (hopefully in less than 5 years). Already this time ‘round I could have done the whole geo-tagged, real-time upload thing if my mobile phone wasn’t three years old.

One thing I expect to see in the future are mash-ups that can automatically superimpose relevant information on the photos (e.g. details about the city a photo was taken in) or put photos in useful correlation (e.g. showing photos of the same square or church which I or others took five years earlier).

Oh, and of course the cameras / phones / retinal implants these photos will be taken with will all have >25 MegaPixels, yet still come with crappy lenses and optics…. ;-)

Illustration and Visualization

2010-08-24T02:09:00.001+02:00

Thanks to a tweet by @dchris I found this truly awesome “illustrated guide to a Ph.D.” by a Matt Might - Assistant Professor at School of Computing, University of Utah - which I’d really recommend you to take a look at.

(Even more so because it’s done with a particularly strong sense of purpose - scroll down to where it says “why genetics research?” to find out what I’m talking about.)

To me this is a perfect example of just how powerful illustrations and visualizations can be. I should really spend some time learning more about these crafts because I think my studies, work and writing could really benefit from knowing better how and when to apply illustrations and visualizations to communicate something.

More photos from Peru

2010-08-21T03:07:00.001+02:00

Thanks to the relatively good Internet connectivity at my friend’s house here in Chiclayo I was finally able to upload several dozen photos that I took in Peru over the past week or so. You can see some of my favorites below and find the whole Peru album here.

Laguna

Playing soccer with a view

Using Record to take photos is very popular

Typical street vendor in Huaraz

/me, my XO and a llama

Upcoming talks in Lima and D.C.

2010-08-20T08:55:00.001+02:00

One of the side-effects of my involvement with the One Laptop per Child project has been that it has given me a chance to regularly speak about and present the project. The audiences I’ve presented for in the past 3 years range from visitors of 26C3 and students at various Austrian universities to OLPC aficionados in Washington, D.C. back in December 2007.

Now the main focus of my current OLPC News South America road trip was to listen and talk with – rather than for – people involved in the South American OLPC / Sugar projects. However I’m happy that I’m also getting a chance to speak about my experiences a couple of time.

The miniJAM! artistico on my last day in Montevideo was a great start that also allowed me to practice presenting in Spanish (which I did for the first time since I finished school). I mainly talked about the activities of the OLPC / Sugar communities in Europe as well as contrasting my experiences in Uruguay with the ones I made volunteering with OLE Nepal in 2009.

Now last week the details for two upcoming talks were finalized:

Wednesday, August 25: 7:30PM – Escuelab, Lima: One Laptop per Child: Una perspectiva europea

Monday, August 30: 12:30PM – World Bank, Washington, D.C.: One Laptop Per Child in South America: Reports from on-the-ground

If you happen to live in these cities and/or know people there who might be interested in learning more about OLPC and Sugar Labs in general and my views of the status quo of the projects in Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru in particular then please spread the word and stop by at the talks.

First photos from Peru

2010-08-15T06:41:00.001+02:00

Due to the lackluster Internet connection in my current hostel in Huaraz I hadn’t really had a chance to upload photos from my first week here in Peru. But tonight - with a couple of hours to spare between an early dinner and going out for drinks - I sat down and started the process. Of course this is turning out to be even slower than I had expected (current upload speed is 9.2KB/s) so let’s see just how far I get before I run out of patience…

For now I’ll leave you with this photo with a view of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range:

Update: Yippie, 100% complete! Head over to the Peru album on Flickr for some impressions of Lima and Huaraz.

Photos from Paraguay

2010-08-08T04:38:00.001+02:00

I’m making use of the surprisingly fast Internet access in my hostel here in Lima to finally upload some photos from the past two weeks which I spent in Paraguay.

To say that I had a great time there would be quite the understatement. With outstanding company, a very dynamic olpc project run by ParaguayEduca, multiple interesting school-visits, a long-awaited hands-on with OLPC’s XO-1.5 HS laptop, and an amazing weekend trip to the waterfalls at Iguazu and the Itaipu dam my time in Paraguay was packed with awesome experiences.

From a touristic point of view the Iguazu and Itaipu trip will very likely be the highlight of this year’s travels. As always the photos can’t do these places justice and it’s also hard to describe them in words. The one thing I can say is that the waterfalls at Iguazu are one of the most impressive natural sights I’ve ever seen (right up there with the Gobi desert!). The massive human artifact that is the Itaipu dam on the other hand also left quite an impression on me.

Iguazu waterfalls

Itaipu dam

Apart from that weekend I spent most of my time at ParaguayEduca’s office, talking to people there and working on olpcnews articles. Additionally I went to Caacupé a couple of times to visit some of the schools there which are part of ParaguayEduca’s 4000 XO pilot project. Needless to say I had a great time observing how the teachers and students use their XOs, especially when they were as much into it as this pupil:

Hard at work

Click on the links for more photos from Paraguay and the Iguazu / Itaipu trip.

Impressions from the olpc realness summit

2010-07-26T03:16:00.001+02:00

At the end of May I participated in the olpc realness summit which the fine folks from Waveplace had organized. Reading my corresponding announcement on olpcnews it’s not hard to see that I was excited about that event, and not just because it took place in the Caribbean;-)

“To say that I'm excited about this gathering of people would be quite the understatement. In fact this summit will likely turn out to be the single most interesting and exciting week since I first got involved with One Laptop per Child 3 years ago!”

To say that the days I spent on St. John were awesome would also be an understatement. On the one hand it was great to meet lots of very awesome and inspiring people and hear about their work. On the other hand I also had the chance to spend 1 1/2 hours each day at Gifft Hill School where some of the girls from Columbus School for Girls, led by Christine Murakami and Dana Paine, were teaching a group of students eToys. I loved being in that room every day to work with the pupils and also ended up giving some short introductory lessons on various aspects of Sugar.

Gifft Hill School pupils

Anyway, I finally got around to look at the photos I took on St. John and upload a bunch of them to the olpc realness summit 2010 album on Flickr. At the same time I’ve also started following up on some of the ideas discussed during the summit and I hope to see some progress made in that area over the coming weeks.

Maho Bay Panorama

More photos from Uruguay

2010-07-26T03:13:00.001+02:00

I arrived in Paraguay’s capital Asunción last night and given that it is a Sunday I decided to go for some relaxing here at Casa de Innocenti (a.k.a. Beertarium). Among other things I spent some time looking at the photos I took over the past few days and uploaded several dozen of them to the Uruguay album. I always have a hard time choosing favorites but the ones below are some of nicer ones in my opinion.

Lunch is served

Awesome store front

Pupils in 3rd grade

Perfect light

Another sunset

Photos from a weekend in Piriápolis

2010-07-21T05:38:00.003+02:00

My weekend was spent hanging out in Piriápolis – a popular coastal town east of Montevideo - with my Uruguayan hosts Pablo & Micaela and Mark from Holland. It’s safe to say that the grand majority of the time was dedicated to purchasing, preparing and eating asado.

When we didn’t eat we mostly talked about OLPC, went for walks (where we talked about OLPC), read (mostly about OLPC stuff), and wrote (about OLPC related topics).

Can you see the pattern? Do I really need to explicitly say that a weekend focused on sharing asado and thoughts about OLPC with great company was amazing? :-)

Anyway, I just uploaded a bunch of photos from this weekend to Flickr and you can find them all here. In case you want to see the full Uurguay album then this is the link to click on.

Parrilla

/me is Apostle of the Apoxolypse

2010-07-21T04:23:00.001+02:00

While taking a spin around the Web by checking some RSS feeds in Google Reader I saw that a new blog post called “Apostle of the Apoxolypse: Derndorfer's wandering star" had been published over on the OLPC blog. Not being quite sure what to expect I read the entry and basically couldn’t stop laughing all the way through. So obviously I’ll have to recommend you to read the entry which you can do here.

Thanks a lot SJ, you totally made my week!

Look ma, I'm on the Internet

eXpO fotos in Montevideo

2010-07-16T16:17:00.001+02:00

Yesterday I went to see a photo exhibition here in Montevideo. That alone wouldn’t really be blog-worthy but what was special about this exhibition is that all the photos had been taken by Uruguayan pupils on their XOs (remember that in Uruguay every pupil who goes to a public primary school – about 400,000 – has received an XO as part of Plan Ceibal). I wrote up a quick, and photo-heavy, story with my impressions for olpcnews so I’d suggest you check out the article for more information and photos.

First photos from Montevideo

2010-07-13T01:01:00.004+02:00

After spending the majority of the day catching up on news, e-mails and arranging a bunch of meetings for the coming days I went out to wander around Montevideo for a bit. Unfortunately the light wasn't too good for taking photos however I think the ones I uploaded to the Uruguay set do give a decent first impression of what things look like around here.

House on Av. 18 de Julio

Phil Zimbardo - The Secret Powers of Time [video]

2010-07-12T16:14:00.005+02:00

I stumbled across this video via the blog of Caterina Fake (a Flickr co-founder) and found it to be interesting in a number of dimensions. First of all I've been interested in the topic of time and how it's perceived differently by individuals and cultures for quite some time. Secondly the way the video is animated is simply spectacular and thereby really adds to the content that's being presented. After some quick googling I discovered that the video was prepared by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) and they provide a number of other videos that seem worthwhile watching (if only I had the time to watch them...;-). Thirdly the video is based on a lecture by psychologist Philip Zimbardo who, as I discovered via Wikipedia, is well known for being the brain behind the famous Standford prison experiment. To cut a long story short: I'd definitely recommend you to watch this 10min video, I promise it will be well worth your time.

P.S. Paul Graham's latest essay deals with "How to Lose Time and Money" and therefore complements this video quite nicely...

olpcnews South America road trip

2010-07-12T03:21:00.007+02:00

Yes, I'm back on the road doing some traveling!! This time 'round I even have a name for my trip: the olpcnews South America road trip. While I'm not going to go into all the details here - this is what this olpcnews article is for - I'm going to be traveling through Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru for the next 6 weeks to visit the OLPC projects in these countries. So while my focus will very much be on documenting my findings and impressions over on olpcnews I'll use this blog for posting my more personal and non-olpc ramblings.

For now I'm going to leave with you with a photo of Palacio Salvo here in Montevideo but rest assured that I'll be adding plenty of photos to my Flickr account over the coming days and weeks...

Google's Urs Holzle on speeding up the Web [video]

2010-07-01T15:38:00.003+02:00

I stumbled across this video of Url Holzle, Google's Senior VP of Operations, talking about speeding up the Web at the Velocity 2010 conference over on Data Center Knowledge and found it to be absolutely fascinating!

Java 4-ever [video]

2010-06-26T18:02:00.003+02:00

This video really is geek-humor at its very best! :-D

Jeff Bezos: "We are What We Choose"

2010-06-22T22:43:00.005+02:00

I found these Baccalaureate remarks that Amazon's Jeff Bezos delivered to the Princenton Class of 2010 via @interfaced and found them to be quite inspiring. I've added a short teaser below but I'd really recommend you to read the whole speech:

My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

Entrepreneur State of Mind [video]

2010-06-17T18:45:00.003+02:00

Since I'm already in blog-posting rather than getting-things-done mode I might as well post a third video. The YouTube description really says it all:

"It's a spoof of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys' "Empire State of Mind," from the guys behind Grasshopper.com (thank you!). We made it because there's a new type of dork that is cooler than ever. Look at tech entrepreneurs, hipsters, Computer Science Barbie - they're all super popular new dorks!"

Everything is OK [video]

2010-06-17T18:38:00.005+02:00

Speaking of great videos here's another one that recently caught my attention:

Isn't it absolutely hilarious?! This really is activism at its very best!! :-)

BP Spills Coffee [video]

2010-06-17T18:29:00.006+02:00

I assume most of you know this one already but if you don't I'd really recommend you to watch it:

This is definitely one of those videos where you're not sure whether you're supposed to laugh or cry, right?

One Laptop per Child at GADI 2010

2010-05-10T02:41:00.001+02:00

As I had previously mentioned back in March I gave a talk about OLPC in the “ICT and Society” (“Gesellschaftliche Aspekte der Informationstechnologie”) lecture series at Graz University of Technology. A recording of the 45min presentation (which I gave in German) is now available here and if you’re interested in a copy of the slides then please e-mail me.

Excellent Wired.com article on Facebook

2010-05-10T02:24:00.001+02:00

I just stumbled across the Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative article over on Wired.com and think it’s a truly excellent summary of many of the reasons why I strongly believe that:

“Forget about spam, identity theft, black hats and December 21 2012. Facebook is what everyone today should really be afraid of.“

The reason why I find it so scary isn’t just the site’s ever increasing number of users (more than 400 million at the time of writing – that is more than 5% of the world’s population!). Rather it’s the fact that Facebook will set more than one precedent when it comes to how people use the Internet and think about privacy (online as well as offline) in this 21st century.

Hence to me Ryan Singel’s introductory sentence already make more sense than most of the stuff that all these social media experts normally babble about in the media and at conferences:

“Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.“

So next time before you post something on Facebook think about whether you really want a company with these kinds of Terms to own your data:

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

Update (2010-05-10): Just stumbled across an excellent info-graphics called The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook by Matt McKeon and I’d really recommend you to take a look at it! (found via @mjollnir)

Crossing Europe 2010

2010-04-25T23:39:00.001+02:00

As I’m sitting here on the train on my way back to Vienna I can’t help but think: “Wow, what an amazing festival it’s been!”. The festival in question was the 7th edition of what is undoubtedly the cultural highlight of my calendar: the Crossing Europe film-festival taking place in Linz, Upper Austria.

Even though I didn’t manage to see quite as many films as in previous years – I think that record is still 18 or 19 – I’ve never before been so satisfied with the program. Out of the 15 films which I saw since Thursday afternoon only 3 were absolutely disasters and the rest ranged between really good and absolutely amazing. In fact it’s never been harder for me to try and pick my favorite(s).

Having said that I think it’s safe to say that Zvonimir Jurić and Goran Dević definitely deserved winning the jury’s award for Crnci / The Blacks (Croatia). The movie is an excellent and thought-provoking account of a small Croatian special forces unit and its members’ emotional states during the last hours of the war in Yugoslavia.

Other films that I particularly liked were

Iki dil bir bavul / On the Way to School (Turkey) which is centered around a young Turk’s experiences in his first year of being a teacher in a remote Kurdish part of the country.
Kak ya provyol etim letom / How I ended this Summer (Russia) which focuses on an unlikely 2-man team living in a weather station in the Arctic.

Three other movies that deserve a special mention are:

South (Austria) for the filmmakers dedicating 12 years of their life to making it happen.
Kynodontas / Dogtooth (Greece) for being seriously, I mean very seriously disturbing (in that regard it’s right up there with Twentynine Palms which I saw at the first Crossing Europe).
Hadewijch (France) for simply being the most pointless and boring movie I have seen in my entire life.

(Incidentally I just found out that Twentynine Palms and Hadewijch are from the same writer/director…)

Apart from the movies itself the overall atmosphere at Crossing Europe is always awesome. I met a lot of people which I hadn’t since last year’s festival and a number of interesting folks from all around Europe.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed Crossing Europe 2010 and would like to thank all the people who made it happen!

You can find more information about Crossing Europe on the festival’s Web site, its blog and via @crossingeurope on Twitter.

P.S. Oh, and don’t forget about Crossing Europe 2011 taking place from April 12 through 17, 2011;-)

Jeff Jarvis @ TEDxNYed: This is bullshit

2010-04-19T14:15:00.003+02:00

One of my favorite ways to spend spare time in the past 3 years has been to watch talks given at the annual TED conference. More recently TED has established a new format called TEDx which has enabled independent groups to organize TED-styled conferences all around the world. At one of these gatherings Jeff Jarvis gave a a great talk called “This is bullshit” and I’d thoroughly recommend watching it since it contains a lot of interesting thoughts and spot-on observations on both education and the news-media:

this i don’t believe

2010-04-07T01:23:00.001+02:00

Normally I use Twitter to share links but this comic from atheistcartoons.com which I just found via Google Reader Play is just too good not to be reposted here:

Source

Un jour... à Paris... ensembles pour OLPC et Sugar...

2010-04-02T23:07:00.001+02:00

Back in mid-May 2009 many members of the European and North American Sugar and OLPC communities followed OLPC France’s invitation to attend Sugar Camp 2009 in Paris. As expected the meeting turned out to be a great success and it was literally one of the best weekends I had in 2009.

Laurence Buchmann, a French filmmaker, documented Sugar Camp 2009 by interviewing many participants and filming some of the activities going on there. The resulting 13 minute video called “Un jour... à Paris... ensembles pour OLPC et Sugar...” was now posted over on dailymotion.com and I think it gives a great insight into and overview of both the Sugar project itself and the larger Sugar and OLPC communities.

Upcoming presentation at TU Graz on March 24

2010-03-16T18:36:00.001+01:00

I’m really looking forward to next week as I’ll be spending 2 days in Graz. The main reason why I’m going is that I’ve again been invited to give a talk on OLPC as part of the “ICT and Society” (“Gesellschaftliche Aspekte der Informationstechnologie”) lecture series at Graz University of Technology. Apart from the really impressive set of speakers one of the coolest aspects of this yearly lecture series is that it’s also being livestreamed. So if you’re interested in watching my talk (which I’ll give in German) then mark your calendars and head over to http://curry.tugraz.at/ at 4:15PM on Wednesday, March 24, and tune in. I’m also thinking about how to best integrate some sort of backstream so even remote participants can ask questions, most likely I’ll rely on Twitter and a public Google Wave to achieve that.

Apart from the presentation I’m also looking forward meeting the fine folks involved in the Austrian OLPC pilot project at Pädagogische Hochschule Steiermark again. Plus I’ll also get to meet some other friends and I’m pretty certain that I’ll spend at least one evening enjoying the great food and drinks at Sägewerk.

New Millenium Learners Conference 2010

2010-02-25T00:22:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a tweet with an announcement that the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" would take place here in Vienna between February 22 and 24. I now spent the past 2 1/2 days at the conference which turned out to be really interesting and inspiring.

I won’t go into any further details here since I covered the conference in three quite extensive blog-posts over on olpcnews.com: day 1, day 2 and day 3.

As you can see over there I used ustream.tv quite extensively to broadcast and record the various sessions and I hope to be able to blog about my experience with it in the not-too-distant future.

Recently read (February 2010)

2010-02-13T18:01:00.001+01:00

I haven't been too good when it comes to tackling the large number of unread books that are strewn all over my room. I did however read three of them in the recent months that I'd briefly like to talk about here:

I originally stumbled across "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures" by Heidi Postlewait, Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thomson while wandering through a small bookstore in Kathmandu's Thamel area during my first week in Nepal last summer. Not being quite sure what to make of the title and the cover (see below) I forgot about it again until the book came up during a discussion with some Australian friends a couple of days later. Hearing that it was supposed to be an interesting read I put it on my Amazon wishlist and ordered it upon my return to Austria.

The book is basically a collective memoir by the three authors who met as recently joined and idealistic United Nations employees in Cambodia in the 1990s. Their accounts detail their involvement in various UN missions from Cambodia to Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and Bosnia. The mood of the book changes dramatically as they describe their experiences ranging from the good life they often had in Cambodia, to personal losses and the nerve-wrecking experience of excavating the victims of massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia. Some of the descriptions, especially the ones related to the massacres, are indeed haunting. Overall the book provides an interesting insight into the lives and experiences of three dedicated individuals who each in their own way tries to make the world a better place. It was really hard for me to put the book down and so I finished it within two or three days.

I can't recall where or how I originally heard about Thomas Pynchon's "Inherent Vice". However when I was hanging out at the Thalia book store in Hamburg on my way home from Stockholm I saw the cover and remembered that the book was on my "to-be-read" list. After diving into the book for 30min I knew that it would make for a great holiday read. Turns out I was right because I really had a great time reading this novel which one comment on Amazon perfectly describes as:

"A hilarious cross between The Big Lebowski and Illuminatus! (the trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea -- not to be confused with the similarly-titled bestseller), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Raymond Chandler novels."

BTW, this book isn't recommend for people who get annoyed by the word "groovy"!

Last but not least, the book that kept me up until 4AM last Monday was "The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders" by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier. The book is a beautifully designed mixture of a graphic novel and photos taken by Didier Lefevre when he accompanied a team from Médecins sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) into northern Afghanistan in 1986. To say that the book is powerful would be quite the understatement. Its content and visual presentation combined with Lefevre's great photos are literally mind-blowing. For me this was also the first time I've seen such a mixture of illustrated and photographed panels and this makes it all the more memorable an experience. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who even has the faintest interest in travel photography, the work of MSF, Afghanistan and/or the account of a traveler on the journey of his life.

Next up on my reading list are Junot Díaz's "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and "The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World" by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan. I had started reading both books last year but never got around to finishing them.

Mmm, on the other hand William Gibson’s “Spook Country” and the famous “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have also been on my list for quite some time…

Nicely done video on OLE Nepal

2010-01-21T00:50:00.001+01:00

Found this video on Twitter the other day and thought it’s worth sharing here:

OLE Nepal from INVISIBLE HAND on Vimeo.

Of course it doesn’t come close to my favorite OLPC feel-good video from about 2 years ago… ;-)

Interview with meetforeal.com

2010-01-09T21:31:00.001+01:00

At 26C3 Adrian (@amonter5) from meetforeal.com (@meetforeal) did a short interview with me about OLPC, Sugar Labs and the current state of things. The video was posted earlier today and you can watch it below:

I have to say that I’m quite content with it except for the fact that I have to learn to suppress those “ammm“-s. Oh, and next time I should also consider putting on some make-up before an interview because you can see every minute of sleep deprivation in those bags under my eyes… :-D

Stuart McMillen – Part of Nature

2010-01-03T04:19:00.001+01:00

While catching up on some tweets I stumbled across the amazing "Part of Nature" comic by Stuart McMillen. I’d definitely recommend looking at it as it nicely sums up many of the main issues when it comes to topics such as climate change, resource consumption, sustainability, etc.

P.S. McMillen’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” comic is also well worth seeing.

26C3 – Here be dragons

2009-12-31T18:46:00.001+01:00

Back in early October a tweet by someone I follow alerted me to the fact that the deadline for submissions to the 26th Chaos Communication Congress was less than 48 hours away. In a lunch break I whipped up a quick proposal for a lecture called “After the Hype – The current state of One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs”. A couple of weeks later I learned that my submission had been accepted.

So just like last year I spent the time between Christmas and New Year’s having a great time hanging out at 26C3. For those not familiar with the Chaos Communication Congress: it’s a yearly event organized by the famous Chaos Computer Club (Wikipedia entry) that brings together hackers, researchers, artists and many other interesting people.

I saw a ton of great lectures, got introduced to many interesting projects and learned about research into the scary security issues of GSM and the mobile phone eco-system in general. But almost more importantly I met tons of awesome people, some of which I had known previously but hadn’t seen in many months and others which were strangers only a few days ago.

It’s hard to describe the atmosphere at 26C3 to people who have never been to such an event. Things that come to mind when I think of it are energy, pure awesomeness, liberation, deep thought, an urge to understand, thinking outside the box, challenges, etc. (Oh and it’s also hard to think of 26C3 without being reminded of the perpetual sound of Club Mate bottles falling over;-) To me personally 26C3 is definitely one of the coolest spaces I’ve been to in 2009.

One thing that was also great is that all the talks were streamed over the Internet so even people who couldn’t attend the congress in person or simply didn’t make it into the often packed lecture halls could watch them. Additionally the videos are being made available for download, you can find more details and the download links here.

Two talks which I consider to be absolute must-sees are:

GSM: SRSLY? (details, video)
WikiLeaks Release 1.0 (details, video)

I saw many other great talks and more that I couldn’t attend in-person but hope to watch over the coming days and weeks.

As for my own talk I have to say that I was quite happy with it even though I literally only finished the slides 10 minutes before I went on-stage. The feedback I got after the talk - in-person, via Twitter and via the 26C3 Web site – was also very encouraging. Of course after a quick look over the recording of my talk I found a number of areas I should definitely improve on in the future but I guess it’s always an iterative and evolutionary process. If you’re interested in watching After the Hype – The current state of One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs you can do so by downloading the video (~700MB), the slides are available for download here.

In the end I want to thank all of the people who made 26C3 happen, especially the organizers, angels and volunteers behind the scenes. Here’s to you for an awesome event!

Sendung ohne Namen - Kopenhagen

2009-12-08T02:19:00.001+01:00

Bin auf Twitter dank @smeidu über dieses wirklich genial gemachte Video von Greenpeace Österreich gestolpert um die 1.000.000 Taten für den Klimaschutz Kampagne zu unterstützen:

52 hours on the train within 6 days

2009-11-20T01:06:00.001+01:00

As I’m typing these lines I’m sitting on a train going through Denmark at 200km/h on its way from Copenhagen to Hamburg. When I arrive in Hamburg I’ll have a couple of hours to wander through the city (which I had previously visited in 2002) before the final leg of my journey will take me back to Vienna where I’ll arrive on Thursday morning.

The reason why I went up north was that I participated in a very interesting workshop on “ICT and Climate Change” held at the Swedish Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications in Stockholm on Monday. The workshop brought together about a dozen researchers and experts from across Europe to present their work, discuss various aspects within the larger context of ICT and climate change and suggest areas and topics which require further research.

Yours truly during his talk

Since I had never been that far north I scheduled my trains so that I could spend a couple of hours in Copenhagen on the way to/from Stockholm, another couple of hours in Hamburg and an extra day in Stockholm.

So Tuesday was spent exploring the Swedish capital which I found to be a really nice city. Especially Gamla Stan (the Old Town) and Söderalm are great places to wander around or just hang out.

I also liked Copenhagen quite a lot even though I only had 2x ~4 hours there to more or less randomly walk around the city centre.

As ever so often Wikitravel turned out to be an excellent and very useful guide when it came to exploring these cities. Especially since I had saved pdf versions of the Stockholm and Copenhagen entries onto my XO-1 which really makes for an excellent digital companion when exploring cities.

The train rides themselves were all really quite relaxing even though it sounded like an insane undertaking when I bought the tickets. I simply enjoy travelling on trains a lot and still think it’s the nicest (but of course not necessarily the most convenient or time-/cost-efficient) way to get around.

Once I’m back in Vienna I’ll pretty much stay put there until Christmas. The only exception is a short half-day trip to Salzburg next Tuesday where I’ve been invited to give a guest-lecture about OLPC at Salzburg University.

Mobile phone contracts for modern nomads?

2009-11-09T15:06:00.001+01:00

While I had previously mentioned that I was looking for a new mobile phone I had totally ignored the fact that I would of course also have to think about which contract to get. At the moment I’m signed up with T-Mobile Austria where my 2-year contract is soon coming to an end. In general I’m quite happy with it though by today’s standards I’m probably slightly overpaying for the service I’m getting, especially considering I only have 100MB of data per month at my disposal.

Now the thing is that getting a new phone would also necessitate a new contract since (a) phones are heavily subsidized when you get a new contract and (b) 100MB per month certainly won’t be enough with my next phone (regardless of which model it will end up being).

However the issue I’m running into is the 2-year minimum contract. Both in 2008 and 2009 I spent several months living and working abroad where my Austrian phone was of very limited use to me. So basically out of the 22 months of my current contract I’ve spent 7 months paying my monthly fee without really using the service. That’s ~€250 literally going down the drain…

Now while I don’t have any fixed plans yet for the next 12 to 18 months I’m again very likely to spend at least half a year living abroad again. And no, I’m not particularly keen on donating another €250 to T-Mobile Austria.

Thinking about this issue for a bit I realized that my newspaper subscription has been very flexible when it comes to me being abroad. All I have to do is send a quick note telling them how long they should stop sending me the paper, regardless of whether it’s for three days or three months. It’s an on-demand service and that’s something that I really appreciate.

Of course T-Mobile Austria isn’t nearly as forthcoming and the nice call-center lady I spoke to basically said that people in my situation were out of luck. I mean seriously, how hard can it be for them to put my contract on hold for x-months, maybe charging me a small one-time or monthly fee for the service, and then simply let me continue the contract upon my return? Companies who are in the dead tree business can do this, why can’t businesses dealing with modern ICT offer a similar service?

At the end of the day looking at this situation really makes me feel like a 21st-century nomad stuck in the dark ages…

To iPhone 3GS or not to iPhone 3GS

2009-09-28T14:54:00.001+02:00

I somehow managed to lose my mobile phone while in Nepal so I’m not having to deal with something I had hoped to be able to avoid until early 2010: Having to get a new mobile phone.

While my previous phone, a Nokia 6120, was far from perfect it got the job done and combined with my iPod touch (1st gen) I was quite happy with my mobile communication devices. However a lot has happened since I bought the 6120 in early 2008 so now I can’t but consider buying an iPhone 3GS even though I’ve been known to rant against the iPhone, iTunes, Apple, closed systems, etc. in the past.

One thing that surprised me a bit is how limited the alternatives to the iPhone are when it comes to high-end phones. I do generally keep tabs on what’s happening in the mobile phone markets but had still expected to find some hidden germ that I hadn’t heard of before. So based on my requirements (with voice, text messages, e-mail, Web browsing and Twitter representing 99% of what I do with my mobile devices) I’m currently looking at the following options:

Apple iPhone 3GS (16GB): Can’t say much more than that this is my preferred choice at the moment even though most of my previously mentioned rant reasons still hold true. The 3GS is simply an amazing product even though there are some details that I’m not too fond of. One thing I’m really going to miss compared to my 6120 is that unlocking the screen will leave me looking at my app home screen whereas I’d much prefer to see upcoming appointments, to-dos, etc. and similar information as presented on more business orientated Symbian S60 and Blackberry phones. However at the price €150 I’d pay for the 3GS with 16GB might simply prove too hard to refuse.

Blackberry Bold: Had I lost my phone 6 months ago I wouldn’t have hesitated and gotten the Blackberry Bold. I really like it’s design and keyboard and the software seems solid enough. However now I can’t help but feel that it’s lacking the application infrastructure that make Android devices and iPhones such interesting platforms in the mid- to long-term.

Nokia E75: I hadn’t paid much attention to what Nokia was up to in the smartphone segment lately but did remember that I found the E75’s form factor to be quite enticing. After reading some reviews it seems to be a really solid smartphone that could probably fulfill 95% of my requirements with ease. The one thing that is a big letdown though is the small screen size.

Nokia N900: Now this one device that I’m seriously interested in, especially after reading these hands-on comments. While I haven’t used an N900 in person Nokia seems to have gotten a lot of things right with this device, both on the hardware and software side of things. While it remains to be seen how the software ecosystem evolves compared to the Apple and Android competition I’m confident that we’ll see many interesting Maemo applications appear in the next 6 to 12 months. The one thing that kills this choice for me is the price of >€500 and the fact that it’s not offered by any Austrian carriers at the moment (and I’m not holding my breath for that to happen anytime soon).

T-Mobile G2 (aka HTC Hero): This is proving to be the hardest competitor for the iPhone 3GS and I’m quite tempted to go with the G2. I’m really impressed with what HTC did with the software and in many ways the G2 and related ecosystem contains less restrictions than fruitland. Subsequently I also believe that over the course of the next 6 to 12 months there’s a higher chance of seeing innovative apps (mostly thinking of Augmented Reality stuff here) on Android rather than the iPhone. With this and similar arguments the G2 appeals more to my geek side whereas the iPhone 3GS is better at pleasing the customer in me (who wants something that works). However after reading half a dozen reviews I can’t help but be afraid that the G2’s hardware is simply too underpowered to be a reliable platform 18 months down the road (which is the timeframe for my next mobile phone upgrade) which is quite a downside.

It’s with these thoughts in my head that I’ll make my way to the T-Mobile store in just a bit… I’ll of course keep you posted on my decision.

My last 24 hours in Kathmandu

2009-09-25T12:49:00.001+02:00

I can’t believe it’s already been 3 months since I posted that I was on my way to Nepal. Now it’s Friday afternoon of my last day of work here at OLE Nepal and in a bit more than 24 hours I’ll get on my plane to head home to Vienna via Doha.

It’s all a bit crazy at the moment and this last week since my return from trekking (which I’ve also still gotta blog about) has gone by unbelievably quickly. After arriving back in Kathmandu on Sunday evening we decided to indulge in civilization by going for dinner at the awesome 1905 restaurant.

On Monday we spent some time hanging out with our trekking guide and his family who had kindly invited us to their house for lunch. Afterwards we went to see the Swayambhu stupa which is quite an impressive sight and offers great views over the city. In the evening we had great Thai dinner at Yin Yang in Thamel followed by some beers at one of my favorite bars, De La Soul.

On Tuesday we still hung out in Kathmandu’s center for a bit before I dropped off my visiting Austrian friend at the airport. The evening was spent hanging out with some friends on a nice terrace overlooking Kathmandu.

Wednesday I went back to work and then to my last Sanepa poker-night in the evening and yesterday we had a great OLE Nepal dinner-party to celebrate the Dashain festival.

Today I was woken up by a call from Pablo Flores of Project Ceibal fame who arrived in Kathmandu in the early morning. After picking him up I spent several hours finishing up various remaining work tasks and in the afternoon we had an interesting meeting with him to discuss a broad variety of topics.

Now the plan for the remaining 24 hours here in Nepal is to have dinner with some friends at Bhumi in Lazimpat before heading to Thamel for drinks. Depending on how long we stay out I then might try and attend some of the animal sacrifices happening tomorrow morning. In the afternoon I’ll be going to my last Hash Run before then directly heading to the airport to make my way home…

Notes from a Nepali deployment

2009-09-23T20:44:00.001+02:00

As previously mentioned I unfortunately haven’t been too great when it comes to blogging about my experiences here in Nepal. The one thing I did manage to write up are some of my impressions from a visit at two schools here in the Kathmandu Valley where students in grades 2, 3 and 6 are using XOs. The two-part article was published on olpcnews in early September, let me know what you think about it:

Notes from a Nepali deployment, Part I: Updating

Notes from a Nepali deployment, Part II: Challenges

OLPC Austria meetups in autumn

2009-09-23T07:41:00.001+02:00

After the summer break OLPC Austria is going to restart its monthly public meetups at the Museumsquartier in Wien in October. Apart from the normal socializing component this time ‘round we have organized a series of presentations that will look at the OLPC project from a global perspective and present the current state of affairs in various countries.

For that purpose presentations about the projects in Nepal (October 3), Peru (November 7) and Graz (December 5) will take place as part of our public meetings each first Saturday in the month, always starting at 3PM at Museumsquartier Quartier 21, Room D.

I’ll of course report on these meetups as we go along and might even try to set up some live streaming of the presentations. But most importantly I hope to see you there in this thing called meatspace! :-)

Trekking

2009-09-09T21:11:00.001+02:00

Just a quick note to say that I’m off to do some trekking in the Langtang valley region (north of Kathmandu) for the next 11 days. Needless to say I’m seriously excited! :-)

All of today was spent organizing things like the bus tickets, national park entries, figuring out the route, buying some appropriate clothes, etc. As always with these things they all took longer than expected but now I’m sure we’re well prepared for what’s ahead.

Things will get started tomorrow morning at around 7AM when we get on a 7~9 hour bus ride that will take us up north. The first day of walking will be Friday and we should arrive at Kyanjin Gompa, which will be our base, on Sunday evening. From there we plan to do one or two day-trips, of course depending on how well how things go with the walking and the altitude (Kyanjin Gompa lies on ~3800m above sea-level and one of the peaks we’d maybe like to tackle is ~4900m).

Well, I better turn off the laptop and get some sleep, seeing that the alarm clock will go off in roughly 4 1/2 hours…

Will report back in case I stumble across an Internet café (haha) or upon my scheduled return to Kathmandu in 11 days.

Blogging about Karma

2009-09-07T20:11:00.001+02:00

Admittedly I haven’t done too great a job in keeping the blog updated with my impressions from my time here in Nepal. Looking back at the archives the entries have been mostly limited to links to my Flickr album.

(Though I am somewhat proud that I’m at least taking the time to go through all the photos as soon as I get home from taking them to compile best of selections. There’s still several thousand photos from my previous trips in China/Mongolia/Russia and USA/Canada which I haven’t even looked at!)

Anyway, one of the topics which I haven’t really talked about here is the work I’ve been doing as part of my volunteering gig at OLE Nepal. The project I’ve been spending most of my time on is Karma (Web site / entry on wiki.sugarlabs.org) which was supported by Google as part of their Summer of Code program.

In a nutshell the goal of the Karma project is to provide an easy-to-use framework for interactive learning activities based on HTML 5 and Javascript. I’ve been mostly working on several issues related to the user interface and I’ve documented some of my work over on the Karma blog:

Since this is the first time that I’m really working with HTML, CSS and Javascript things take a little longer to get done but I’m really learning a lot and having a great time doing it. Plus being able to collaborate with two awesome fellows, Bryan and Felipe, makes the project all that more more enjoyable, even those weekly IRC meetings at 8AM on Tuesdays;-)

There’s lots of things I miss…

2009-09-05T21:33:00.001+02:00

…and living here in Kathmandu on September 27 will definitely be one of them.

330° panorama from the OLE Nepal offices

2009-09-02T21:19:00.001+02:00

Admittedly I’ve been quite obsessed with panorama photos lately mainly thanks to Microsoft Research's awesome Image Composite Editor. So today I took my camera to work and sneaked up on the roof in the morning while everyone else was in a meeting;-)

I have to say that I’m really quite happy with the resulting 330° panorama! I’ve included a small version of it below but admittedly it doesn’t really do the whole scene justice so I’d recommend you to look at the full-size (8770 x 1180 pixel, 3MB) shot for an impression of the environment around our office.

On a related side-note I took two more photos today which worked out quite well thanks to the awesome late-afternoon / early-evening light:

View from the office

The hill across the Ring Road at 6PM

Hope you like ‘em!

Kathmandu photos

2009-08-30T20:04:00.001+02:00

After being here for almost 8 weeks I finally managed to spend an afternoon exploring the greater area around Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. Until today my exposure of Kathmandu had been mostly limited to Thamel which happens to be the part of town were many restaurants, bars and most of Kathmandu’s night-life can be found. Anyway, today I had a great time wandering through the city with Daniel and Vikki, hanging out on Durbar Square, climbing up the Bhimsen Tower, enjoying delicious lunch at a tiny Korean restaurant and dinner at OR2K and – I’ve never been more surprised – actually finding a quiet street in Kathmandu. To cut a long story short: I had a great day!

Not surprisingly I took a ridiculous amount of photos and I now spent the past 3 hours going through them, picking the best ones and subsequently tagging and uploading them to the Kathmandu album on Flickr.

New York City in Photos

2009-08-28T08:51:00.001+02:00

I recently stumbled across a great ongoing series of photographic impressions of New York City by Austrian radio station FM4’s Christian Lehner. It’s quite possibly the most interesting photo series I’ve seen in quite awhile and really makes me want to go back to visit New York again.

Who’s That Guy

Here’s a list of all the collections published so far:

(Do note that while the introductory text is in German the photos all have accompanying English titles, plus the images really do speak for themselves.)

You can find a list of other articles by Christian Lehner here.

Photos of the Teej festival in Patan

2009-08-23T18:18:00.001+02:00

I spent the afternoon hanging out on Patan’s Durbar Square where I enjoyed observing the Teej festivities going on there. I took quite a lot of photos and have uploaded a small best of selection to Flickr – you can find them in the Teej Festival album.

I also took a short video of the festivities which you can find here.

Technology Review’s TR35 2009

2009-08-19T09:29:00.001+02:00

Every year since 1999 the MIT’s Technology Review selects 35 Young Innovators Under 35 whose work the magazines editors consider to be exciting and potentially world changing. Needless to say that the list always makes for a great and very inspiring read. This year is no exception and after reading through all the entries here’s a list of the 10 research efforts I find to be the most interesting:

Jeffrey Bigham (28) – efforts to enable blind people to use the Internet
Adam Dunkels (31) – Honey, I Shrunk the Internet Protocol
Nathan Eagle (32) – innovative use of mobile phones
José Gómez-Márquez (32) [Humanitarian of the Year] – inventing low-cost and appropriate tools to improve health especially in developing nations
Jeffrey Heer (30) – Protovis visualization toolkit
Anat Levin (31) – interesting use of digital cameras
Pranav Mistry (28) – Sixth Sense wearable computing project (if you haven’t seen it yet then you should really watch the TED talk on the project)
Aydogan Ozcan (30) – interesting efforts to replace microscrope lenses with a combination of inexpensive chips and software
Vik Singh (24!) – allowing third parties to make us of Yahoo’s search technology
Jaime Teevan (32) – improving search results by drawing on other available information

Video on the “Social Media Revolution”

2009-08-18T09:07:00.001+02:00

Disclaimer: I’m not necessarily the biggest fan of buzzwords such as social media. Additionally here’s not many words that are as over utilized when it comes to technology as revolution. However I do have to admit that this video is very nicely done and also quite thought provoking. Enjoy!

Bhaktapur photos now on Flickr

2009-08-17T20:14:00.001+02:00

On Sunday I went to Bhaktapur, the third city here in the Kathmandu Valley (besides Kathmandu and Patan). While the trip back and forth was amazingly bumpy and slow it was well worth it as the city is absolutely stunning! So while I’m quite happy with some of the photos I took they simply don’t come close to doing the squares and streets there justice.

Anyway, you can find a selection of photos in the Bhaktapur album and for the lazy ones I’m including two panorama shots that I’m particularly fond of:

180° Panorama of Bhaktapur's Durbar Square

Panorama of Bhaktapur's Taumadhi Tole square

Wahlwerbespot der Piratenpartei

2009-08-14T10:46:00.001+02:00

Die Piratenpartei Sachen-Anhalt hat für die anstehende Bundestagswahl 2009 diesen wirklich ausgezeichneten Wahlwerbespot produziert:

Photos from Hash Run 1607

2009-08-09T20:02:00.001+02:00

I just uploaded some photos from this weekend’s awesome but seriously exhausting (well, at least when you’re not feeling too great to begin with) Hash Run 1607. You can find the photos here.

Next weekend I hope to bring my video camera along which could make for a nice YouTube video:-)

XKCD: Supported Features

2009-08-05T08:44:00.001+02:00

The mockery of Linux development in today's XKCD is pure genius:-D

Short film: “The Bill”

2009-08-04T19:05:00.001+02:00

Someone mentioned this short film on Twitter the other day and today I finally had a chance to watch it. Definitely very nicely done and some good food for thought…

More photos on Flickr

2009-08-02T19:04:00.001+02:00

I’ve just added a bunch of photos taken this weekend to the Nepal 2009 collection on Flickr.

The first set are some impressions from Run 1606 of the Himalayan Hash House Harriers (“a drinking club with a running problem” – see the corresponding Wikipedia entry for more information on the Hash House Harriers).

I’ve also added some more photos of Patan which I took during a nice 3 hour walk through the city earlier today. You can find them in the Patan set I started 2 weeks ago.

Different country, different lifestyle

2009-07-29T10:58:00.001+02:00

One of the things that always strikes me when spending some extended period in another country is how quickly one’s lifestyle changes and adapts to the local environment. Interestingly this includes many areas of life such as sleep patterns, nutrition, communication, etc. which are normally seen as being very ingrained and hard to change.

Anyway, below is a list of areas where I consider my Vienna and Kathmandu lives to be (radically) different.

Sleep: Back home I generally average between 4.5 and 6 hours of sleep per night during the week. Here in Nepal I normally manage to get 6 to 7 hours of sleep which really does make quite a difference in terms of how quickly I manage to get out of bed in the morning.

Food: While I could write a whole weekly column just on the topic of food I’m going to keep it short by saying that my diet here is radically different. Instead of starting into my day with a huge cup of black tea, bread with whatever the fridge offers and yoghurt my Nepali breakfast consists of bottled water and some crackers, a chocolate bar or (if we’ve been to the awesome local German bakery down the street the day before) some croissants or something. Lunch at the office is always daal bhaat (Nepali national meal which consists of rice with various vegetables with quite a bit of curry and chilies) which is served at 11:30AM. In Vienna on the other hand I tend to go out for lunch at 12:30PM or 1PM. Sometimes I buy a snack at the supermarket but most often I eat at university or one of the many eateries close to home or work. In the evenings I almost always eat at home whereas here we always go out to eat something.

Caffeine: I don’t think my caffeine intake has ever been this low in the past 6 years or so. While I’m not much of a coffee drinker - I normally might have 3 or 4 cups a week (and twice that during crunch-periods) - I do drink quite a lot of black tea, ice tea and Coca Cola back home. Around here I only drink two small cups of Chya (tea with milk and some sort of spices) a day and the occasional glass of Coca Cola. I guess it’s really the increased amount of sleep that allows me to stay productive without my regular caffeine fix.

Mobile phone: While I’m not reachable on my mobile phone 24/7 (I turn it off when I sleep) it certainly is a key communication tool for me to stay in touch with family, friends and colleagues. I also use it extensively to check my e-mails when I’m out and about and to manage my schedule, to-do lists and notes. However since my Austrian phone doesn’t work here I bought a cheap €20 Nokia phone (which comes with a very useful flashlight!) and got a local SIM last week. Now except for my daily use of that flashlight and the alarm clock I’ve maybe made and received less than half a dozen short phone calls. Which is interesting because that’s also the way I used my first mobile phone (in late 2001) before these things became mandatory and ubiquitous.

iPod touch: There’s hardly a waking hour in Austria when I don’t have my iPod touch on me or at least within an arm’s length of wherever I’m sitting. I use it to listen to podcasts from/to work or when riding the metro, check my e-mails and tweets all throughout the day, surf the Web while sitting in lectures or cafés, etc. So I definitely use it *a lot*. In Nepal on the other hand I’ve yet to use the iPod even once. The walk to work is too short to merit listening to a podcast, when I’m out in the evenings or on weekends I prefer to take in the environment around me rather than listen to music and at home I now actually spend more time reading books and articles instead of keeping constant tabs on what’s going on in the depths of the Internet.

Books: As mentioned both above and in a previously blog entry I tend to be quite bad when it comes to reading books while I’m Vienna. However here I’ve already read two books in the 3 weeks since I arrived.

Language: Even when I’m in Austria I tend to spend a lot of time reading, writing and listening to things in English which naturally also leads to quite a bit of my thinking seemingly being in English. However since I got here I’ve barely written a dozen German e-mails and, what’s more important, have maybe spent a total of 30min talking in German with various people. This is certainly quite an interesting experience which I haven’t really had since my exchange year in Peru in 2000-2001.

Barry Eisler – Killing Rain

2009-07-27T18:07:00.001+02:00

One of the things I’m generally pretty bad at when I’m at home in Vienna is reading books. While I have half a dozen books sitting on the shelf right next to my bed there never seem to be enough in the hours in the day to actually open and read them. I didn’t even manage to read more than 20 pages in my Lonely Planet Nepal guide before getting on the plane even though the book was actually lying next to my cushion for several weeks.

Anyway, when I’m travelling or just generally abroad I’m normally quite good when it comes to reading and over the last few days I had quite a good time with Barry Eisler’s Killing Rain. In general it’s hardly more than your average assassin thriller with relatively predictable characters, twists and turns. However the lively and detailed descriptions of the various Asian capitals the story takes place in made it a really enjoyable read. Plus it’s a classic page-turner and I really couldn't put it down. (In both of these regards it also reminded me of William Gibson’s Patter Recognition which I had read some months ago.)

So if you’re looking for an enjoyable and not-too-deep distraction I can certainly recommend this book.

1st school visit

2009-07-23T12:45:00.001+02:00

Today I visited two schools in the greater Kathmandu area where OLE Nepal has distributed a total of ~180 XO-1 laptops. You can expect a full report over the coming days and for now I’m leaving you with this photo.

Each to their own (wave)

2009-07-22T20:38:00.001+02:00

Earlier today I stumbled across an interesting article over on mashable.com. In it the author, Ben Parr, asks: Google Wave: Is the World Ready?

(In case you haven’t heard about Google Wave [wikipedia entry]: It’s a soon to be launched service that aims to combine e-mail, instant messaging, social networking and wiki-like features into a single coherent package. If I remember correctly one of the tag lines at its introduction was something along the lines of: what e-mail would look like if it were invented today)

The article makes some good points about Google Wave breaking many of the currently established online communication patters which might not necessarily fly with many users. Subsequently the author draws the conclusion that Google Wave will either succeed spectacularly or completely bomb.

In my mind this is somewhat of an odd statement to make given that on the Internet many forms of communication are used in parallel. I for example use e-mail, blogging, twitter, forums, wikis, IRC, (to a lesser degree these days) instant messaging and (very seldomly) Facebook. All of these communication tools have their specific up- and downsides, yet at the end of the day I use all of them.

Now even if Google Wave turns out to be the best thing since sliced bread it won’t completely replace all of these other tools. Initially it would probably find a niche (e.g. communicating with my more geeky friends and university colleagues) and then slowly start taking over some of the other communication tasks. However each technology / platform has its set of advantages which will result in it being used.

I therefore view Google Wave as an additional offer that, based on what I’ve seen so far, could be quite attractive for many purposes. But it won’t take over as my single way of communication and I believe the majority of the other 1.5 billion using the Internet today will feel the same way. Hence Google Wave will probably neither be a total failure nor an astounding success but rather something in between (like most other technologies).

Impressions from Durbar Square, Patan

2009-07-21T04:12:00.001+02:00

I’ve just finished uploading a small best of selection from the photos I took while hanging out at Durbar Square in Patan [Google Maps] on Saturday. Hope you like them!

My Nepal 2009 album on Flickr.

Signing contracts in Nepal

2009-07-19T18:19:00.001+02:00

Today I finally managed to drag myself to a store an get a SIM card and mobile phone since only being reachable when I was online got a bit tiresome in terms of arranging meetings with people. (On a side note: I’m really quite unhappy that my regular Austrian phone is SIM locked and that the fine folks over at T-Mobile Austria don’t even have a roaming partner here in Nepal!)

Anyway, since yesterday’s attempt to get connected failed as I needed my passport and a photo (both of which I didn’t have on me) I went back there today and thought that things should go smoothly. However as it turns out one copy of my password, what the staff had told me yesterday, wasn’t enough so one of the guys working in the shop accompanied me to a copy-shop where we got another copy. Returning to the store it turns out that I’d also need a copy of my visa which they had of course forgotten to mention earlier…

However the real fun began once I started to fill out the forms in order to get my SIM card. Not being all that enthusiastic when it comes to forms to begin with I obviously ended up not filling in some of the information. So when the shop clerk subsequently inquired about my father’s name I was slightly surprised to say the least. It was only after a short chuckle on my part which was quickly ended by a very serious look by the clerk that I realized that she was serious. And to top it off the form also asked for my grandfather’s name, luckily I managed to resist the temptation to ask whether they wanted the one from my father’s side or mother’s side.

The next challenge presented itself when they asked me where I lived. Since there basically are no addresses here in Nepal you normally describe you location relative to the nearest chowk (a street corner in most cases). However I quickly realized that trying to describe where I lived was a pretty pointless endeavor. I do find my way walking around the neighborhood and manage to tell cab drivers where to go. But explaining to someone who speaks very broken English where exactly you live without actually walking or driving along the road is beyond my capabilities. So after some deliberation by the shop clerks the field, which understandably covers a third of a page, remained empty.

Next up I was asked to sign the contract at three different spots, funnily enough one signature was required to confirm the information of where I lived. Thinking I was done it took me awhile to realize that the inkpads suddenly laying on the table were waiting for me. So I confirmed the contract with fingerprints from my left and right thumb (US immigration anyone?). And just when I thought everything was over I was again asked to sign something, this time the photo which was attached to the application form.

So 30min after I walked into the store I left it being 1000 Rupees poorer, having thumbs with blue ink that probably won’t come off for a few days but proudly owning a SIM card.

Why this Friday evening is different than others

2009-07-17T23:08:00.001+02:00

I’m in Kathmandu, Nepal. (Okay, that one was too easy.)

I don’t usually crash invitation-only garden parties where all drinks and food (and amazing food that is) are free (with neither having an invitation nor an excuse for leaving early that is).

I don’t usually remember the awesome BBQ that we had in Washington, D.C. in early June 2008.

I don’t usually meet a bunch of people where 80% of them work for one NGO or another.

I don’t usually meet people who will work in Afghanistan for extended periods of time.

I don’t usually have a girl order a drink for me (unless it’s well past the official - and even unofficial - closing time and she knows the bar staff really well).

I don’t usually happen to bump into the main country correspondent for a major international news publication while hanging out at a random bar.

I don’t usually get stopped by police and military police on my cab ride home from going out.

I don’t usually come home after an evening out in town and think it’s interesting enough to merit a blog post;-)

First photos going up on Flickr…

2009-07-17T13:05:00.001+02:00

I just uploaded a handful of photos that I took this morning to my new Nepal 2009 album on Flickr. So far the album is limited to some initial impressions from home and work but I hope to go out and get some touristy shots (especially at the gorgeous Durbar Square in Patan) over the weekend.

Thoughts on Educational Content Management

2009-07-16T13:12:00.001+02:00

I posted some thoughts on Educational Content Management, which is one of the areas which I’m working on right now, over on the OLE Nepal blog:

One of the tasks that I’ll be working on during my brief stint here in Nepal is researching and (hopefully) implementing a way to organize all the different media objects produced by OLE Nepal as basis for their E-Paath learning activities. Currently we are talking about several thousand images, sounds, texts and videos but it’s not hard to imagine their repository containing hundred thousand or more artefacts in the not-too-distant future. Apart from the specific OLE Nepal use-case I also believe that even larger content repositories have to be a core consideration for both the larger OLPC and SugarLabs efforts.

You can find the complete blog entry here.

“Ethical living”

2009-07-15T20:08:00.001+02:00

I’m currently reading A Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Live Ethically by The Guardian journalist Leo Hickman. The title basically says what it’s all about and while I’m only on page 60 or so I’m certainly finding it an interesting read.

Similarly an upcoming documentary will focus on the efforts of Colin Beavan aka No Impact Man to live in New York City with his wife and daughter without having any net impact on the environment. Having seen the trailer I’ll definitely try and see the film (if it even hits the Austrian cinemas that is).

Both efforts are quite obviously insane on oh-so-many levels but I do think they provide some good food-for-thought and inspiration to start thinking about your own way of life and impact on the environment.

Random observations after 6 days in Nepal

2009-07-12T18:44:00.001+02:00

Kathmandu could easily be called NGOville as the number of NGOs in this city is simply insane. Especially the part of town where I live (near Sanepa Chowk) hosts what must be at least two dozen NGOs, ranging from UN organizations to World Vision and GTZ.

Traffic here is just insanely chaotic. And watching it is an experience in itself.

There are basically no street names here in Kathmandu. Directions are given based on the closest chowk which, if I understood it correctly, is normally a major street crossing or market area.

Nepalis eat fast, seriously fast. We are served lunch at work and people are normally done with the second plate right when I’m about half-way through my first one.

Building construction here basically seems to be done without the use of machinery. There are two major construction sites on my way to work and the only machine I’ve seen on both sites is a concrete mixer.

If what the guy I met on the weekend told me was true then I actually spoke to the person who made F1 the standard help-key on PCs.

The streets and newspapers are full of advertisements for (pre-)schools, colleges, universities and other educational institutions. One of them even boasts to be connected with the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg, Austria.

Apparently Sunday is the start of the week around here. Which also means that children have to go to school on Sundays. And in many schools their only time off is Saturday afternoon.

It’s slightly odd to live in a house where a guard is on-site 24/7.

This past weekend must have been one of the most relaxing ones I’ve had in quite awhile.

I originally wanted to mention something about my new disconnected life-style here in Nepal (with only 8 hours of Internet access while I’m at work and not owning a mobile phone) but seeing how I just got connected to the Internet here at home I’ll have to revisit my thoughts on this topics.

An important point of the recently announced Nepali budget for the next year are infrastructure projects such as the road network. Apparently 3 districts are still not connected to the national road network.

Hopefully I’ll have time for a more structured post next week…

Going to Nepal…

2009-07-06T21:57:00.001+02:00

YES, I’m back on the road! :-)

I’m typing these lines as I’m making use of a kiosk with free WiFi and charging here at Doha International Airport while waiting for my flight to Kathmandu.

I’ll be in Nepal until the end of September, hanging out with my friends of OLE Nepal and soon to be joined by the one and only Daniel Drake.

However before I get too carried away getting my online fix (and potentially missing my plane like at PDX last year;-) I’ll rather head to my gate and see that I keep this blog updated over the coming weeks and months.

TED: Dan Ariely asks “Are we in control of our own decisions?”

2009-06-24T23:13:00.001+02:00

I just watched another TED video since it came up during a discussion at university today. Here’s the summary:

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

Dan Ariely’s other talk on our buggy moral code is also well worth watching!

Radio Ö1 piece on OLPC

2009-06-22T23:37:00.001+02:00

As previously mentioned I was interviewed by Austrian radio station Ö1 about OLPC last week. The piece aired today and it’s now available via the Digitales Leben podcast feed.

Science News Cycle [phdcomics.com]

2009-06-22T02:47:00.001+02:00

I recently happen to re-discover phdcomics.com which I hadn’t read in quite some time. Among the many awesome comics this one strikes me as being one of the funniest. Enjoy!

If research papers had a comment section is also pretty damn good!

FS Misik Folge 82

2009-06-22T00:44:00.001+02:00

Ich bin vor einigen Monaten über den Blog bzw. Twitter-Feed von Robert Misik gestolpert und seither von seinen Artikeln und Videos immer wieder begeistert gewesen. Eines der Highlights dabei ist sicherlich der FS Misik Videocast für den STANDARD (der übrigens vor kurzem sein derStandard.at/TV Portal gelauncht hat).

Die neueste Folge beschäftigt sich mit den aktuellen Entwicklungen im Iran und die Rolle die hierbei Internet Services wie Flickr, Twitter und YouTube spielen. Es wurde in der vergangenen Woche sehr viel über das Thema geschrieben, und falls ich die Zeit finde will ich in den nächsten Tagen auch noch meinen Senf dazugeben, aber das Video ist in meinen Augen ein sehr guter Einstieg und Überblick in die Materie:

FS Misik Folge 82 - Irans Aufstand - live im Internet

P.S. Misiks Warnung ist übrigens ernst zu nehmen, einige der gezeigten Szenen sind nichts für schwache Nerven!

Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on creativity

2009-06-21T03:04:00.001+02:00

I’m spending this Saturday evening catching up on reading and watching lots of online videos. Among other things I decided to re-watch (for what must be the 5th or 6th time) Ken Robinson’s talk about creativity and education at TED 2006. It’s definitely among my all-time favorite TED talks and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who has an interest in education:

www.derndorfer.eu is mine

2009-06-19T20:09:00.001+02:00

Yes, I finally did: I got my own domain! I’ve been talking about getting into the domain-grabbing business for quite some time and I’m happy that nobody snapped up www.derndorfer.eu before me.

If you check out the URL you’ll see that I’m still a bit clueless as to what exactly to do there so if you know of any cool personal Web sites I should look at for inspiration then please give me a shout.

For the moment I’ll stick with using it as a one-stop mini-bio page of sorts. However maybe at one point or another I do get around to consolidating my various online streams into a coherent something.

Lichterkette – Wien – 18/06/2009

2009-06-19T01:30:00.001+02:00

Apologies for this post being in German…

Um gegen die vor allem in den letzten Wochen und Monaten wiedermal besonders furchtbaren politischen Zustände zu protestieren haben zwei Studentinnen die (v.A. über Facebook organisierte) Aktion Lichterkette gestartet. Der Aufruftext zur Aktion lautete:

Österreich 2009: Wahlkämpfe mit Hetzplakaten an jeder Straßenecke, gezielte Fehlinformationen durch rechte Parteien und manche Medien, rechtsextreme Burschenschafter in hohen Ämtern und Institutionen, tätliche Angriffe auf KZ-Opfer… alles ganz normal. …

Normal??? Ärgern allein hilft nicht.

Wir finden Menschenverachtung und Diskriminierung nicht normal.

Setzen wir gemeinsam ein starkes Zeichen…

FÜR respektvolles Miteinander

FÜR menschenwürdige Behandlung für jede_n

FÜR Freude an Vielfalt statt Abkapseln in Einfalt

FÜR Zivilcourage statt Wegschauen

FÜR ehrliche Diskussionen statt Propagandalügen … durch eine PROtestaktion mit anschließender Lichterkette um das Parlament am 18.6.2009, ab 19Uhr.

Es wird vor dem Parlament ein Programm mit Musikgruppen und Redebeiträgen geben, dann wird das Parlament umkettet. Tropffreie Fackeln werden von uns zu Verfügung gestellt.

Da ich mich noch (sehr) entfernt an das Lichtermeer gegen Fremdeshass Mitte der 90-er erinnern kann konnte ich mir die Sache heute natürlich nicht entgehen lassen.

War dann auch relativ pünktlich vor Ort und habe meine Eindrücke auf Twitter (einem Micro-Blogging Service, siehe twitter.com bzw. den entsprechenden Wikipedia Eintrag, mein Feed ist unter http://twitter.com/random_musings zu finden) festgehalten und zur besseren Übersichtlichkeit mit den entsprechenden Fotos hier nochmals zusammengefasst:

http://twitpic.com/7q070 - Eindruck von der Lichterketten-Aktion vor'm Parlament...

Hätt ich das gewusst wär ich später gekommen;-) RT @juekop: Fackeln gibt's dann um 21h. Also noch genug Zeit zu kommen. #Lichterkette

http://twitpic.com/7q1p4 - Blick Richtung Bühne. #lichterkette

Verhaltener Applaus für 'ne mässig spannende Rede... #lichterkette

Wenn mich nicht alles täuscht hab ich Eva Glawischnig und Laura Rudas grad hier in der Menge gesehen. #Lichterkette

LOL, die Rede wurde von Papier abgelesen, kein Wunder, dass sie so sch***** ist. #Lichterkette

Chefin der Wiener Grünen (vergess den Namen immer wieder) ist auch hier. #Lichterkette

http://twitpic.com/7q2zp - Die Musik ist gar ned mal schlecht:-) #Lichterkette

"Eure Schande heisst Graf" T-Shirts sind hier recht weit verbreitet. #Lichterkette

http://twitpic.com/7q3me - Grüne Parteispitze mit Anti-Graf Banner. #Lichterkette

Interessant, grad ein "Asyl für Guantanamo Gefangene" Plakat gesehen... #Lichterkette

RT @augeIug: martin graf und seine burschis sind auch da - und lassen sich von der polizei schützen #lichterkette

RT @pi_ya: UND es reicht für eine ringsperre!!! #lichterkette

http://twitpic.com/7q55p - Gesamteindruck von der #Lichterkette

Ringsperren sind schon was feines, würd mir wünschen es wär immer so;-) #wien #ring #lichterkette

Rudas wird grad vom ORF interviewt. Kann mir nicht vorstellen, dass da viel rauskommt. #Lichterkette #Parteisoldat

Jetzt ertönt linke feel-good mucke von der Bühne. "gib nicht auf lalalala";-) #Lichterkette

Langsam kommt Bewegung in die Sache und die ersten Fackeln brennen auch schon. #Lichterkette

Sehr cool sieht's aus! :-) #Lichterkette

So langsam wird das hier ja 'ne richtige Kette! #Lichterkette

http://twitpic.com/7qhhr - Die beste Stimmung gibt's wie immer bei der Trommlergruppe #Lichterkette

Ich war sehr angetan von der Aktion und es hat mich auch gefreut viele Freunde und Bekannte dort zu treffen. Die Stimmung war wirklich ausgezeichnet und besonders die Heterogenität der (laut Schätzungen knapp 3500) Teilnehmer hat mir sehr gut gefallen. Über die Nachhaltigkeit einer solchen Veranstaltung kann man natürlich immer diskutieren aber ich finde es auf jeden Fall wichtig und sinnvoll als Teil der Zivilgesellschaft ein Zeichen gegen die (leider nicht nur) aktuellen politischen Unsitten und für mehr Toleranz zu setzen. In 140 Zeichen klingt das dann so:

Zuerst die MQ-Protestaktion, jetzt die Lichterkette - vielleicht besteht ja doch noch Hoffnung für Österreich! #haha;-)

Weitere Berichte und Fotos:

derStandard.at: “Hier stehen so viele Ideen”

derStandard.at: “Lichterkette 2009” Fotos

POLIBLOG: "Ein Lichtermeer ums Parlament"

Zur Politik: “Bilder von der Anti-Rechtsextremen-Lichterkette in Wien”

Fotos von POLIBLOG und anderen auf Flickr

80+1 Panel Discussion on New Approaches to Education

2009-06-18T18:54:00.001+02:00

On Monday I’ll be heading to Linz to participate in a panel discussion on New Approaches to Education which is part of the 80+1 project. Here’s what the Web site has to say about the event:

Expert panel discussion and open forum on the subject of new approaches to education; panelists include Christoph Derndorfer, one of the first members of OLPC Austria, freelance writer Armin Himmelrath and, via Skype from China, Calvin Chin, CEO of Qifang.

The discussion will take place on the Hauptplatz (main square) at 7PM and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

In related news I was interviewed by radio Ö1 yesterday because they’re doing a daily (well Monday through Thursday that is) 5min piece on subjects related to 80+1. The piece on OLPC with yours truly will probably air on Monday or Tuesday at 4:55PM. If you happen to hear it please let me know what you thought of it.

ICT4D.at Stammtisch

2009-04-20T01:19:00.001+02:00

One of the many great things that I really enjoyed during my 4-month stay in the United States last year were the regular meetups of the OLPC Learning Club DC and Technology Salon. Especially being a novice when it comes to ICT4D (short for Information and Communication Technology for Development) it was extremely interesting to be able to listen and talk to people who have been working on various projects and efforts in the field for quite some time.

Coming back to Austria I quickly started to miss these kinds of gatherings. With OLPC Austria we’ve been mostly focused on day-to-day activities, especially with regard to our small Austrian OLPC / Sugar pilot. So while we’ve had discussions about ICT in education, brain-storming sessions on future activities, etc. there was relatively little time to think about the for development side of things.

So I was very pleasantly surprised when I read that ICT4D.at, a small and relatively new Austrian NGO whose goal is to contribute to the larger and global ICT4D movement, is planning on setting up regular meetings for folks who are interested in ICT4D here in Vienna.

The first meeting took place on Saturday evening and while only a handful of people were there I really enjoyed it. It was nice to see people with different backgrounds and coming from different walks of life who are all interested in the same topic. Plus even in this day and age it’s just so much better to meet people face-to-face compared to just communicating via e-mail, Skype or whatever.

Anyway, I’m seriously excited about this opportunity and really looking forward to the next meetings!

Did You Know 3.0

2009-03-31T00:37:00.001+02:00

I vividly remember the first time I saw the 2.0 version of Did You Know during one of the very first meetings of OLPC Austria back in mid-2007. To say that I was stunned would be quite the understatement. In fact it was probably one of the most powerful videos I had ever seen.

Now I discovered that an updated version 3.0 has been released and after looking at it and comparing it with 2.0 I’d say that it’s an outstanding update. Definitely watch it in case you haven’t seen it already!

(via elearningblog.tugraz.at)

How time flies

2009-03-26T03:49:00.001+01:00

I just realized that it’s been exactly one year since I flew to Washington, D.C. to start my 3-month internship at the Austrian Embassy’s Office of Science and Technology. Really makes me realize just how quickly time flies by these days.

The internship, life in D.C., my subsequent month of traveling in Canada and the United States, the return to Austria, the 6-week summer internship, coming back to Vienna and university, a super-busy autumn where I got tons of things done, going to Brussels for a weekend, the relaxing Christmas holidays, all the studying and exams in January, going to back to Brussels for FOSDEM, spending a couple of days in London. All that and a hundred other things that I can’t even remember happened in the past 12 months. It’s definitely been a great ride and looking ahead I’m pretty sure I won’t have to worry about being bored in the next 12 months…

(P.S. On some level this post is a hyper-condensed version of something like A look back at 2007 which I had originally planned to write around this New Year’s. Quite obviously I relaxed a bit too much during the Christmas holidays to actually get the post written.)

Jon Stewart vs. Jim Cramer

2009-03-24T22:19:00.003+01:00

I know I'm late to the game but I just now managed to watch the Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) vs. Jim Cramer (Fast Money) showdown from March 12. In case you haven't seen it yet you really should, it truly is television at its very best!

Watchmen

2009-03-24T02:28:00.001+01:00

Last summer I somehow stumbled across the Watchmen trailer and was immediately fascinated even though at the time I had no idea what this whole Watchmen thing was all about (Wikipedia to the rescue).

Anyway, after watching Slumdog Millionaire on Tuesday I again went to the cinema on Wednesday evening, this time to see Watchmen. Just like on the day before I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Even though to my disgrace I have to admit to actually owning the printed graphic novel yet never having gotten further than the first 30 pages or so.

The movie is off to a great start, the intro sequence alone is breathtaking, never mind the initial struggle depicted after it. Then we’re slowly introduced to the different characters and the setting the story takes place in. It’s hard if not impossible not to be fascinated by the depth and intensity of the scenario and the various (former) superheros in it.

While there’s no single main character in the movie it’s not hard for me to pick my personal favorite: Rorschach.

Which directly leads to my main criticism: there are simply too many characters and too little screen time for all of them to be sufficiently well introduced. Of course this is the inherent challenge of turning a complex written original into a motion-picture and there’ll never be perfect solution.

It’s this point that I feel really breaks the movie because a bit more than a half into the 162 minute runtime I was starting to get a little confused due to a feeling of having lost sight of the original story. Don’t get me wrong, the second half is still an enjoyable experience, however with the novelty of the story and the visual (and acoustic - Leonard Cohen had probably never envisioned Hallelujah to be the background for such a scene) representation wearing off I became less enthusiastic overall.

Walking out of the cinema at the end of the night I couldn’t help but feel that things could have gone better. While admittedly realizing in the same moment that it’s probably impossible to get a better interpretation of such a complex universe on the big screen. On some level it feels like the film is really just an appetizer to convince me to finally dive into the original comic.

And you know what, it seems to work. While writing this entry I dusted off of my copy and now have the best intentions to read it within the next 2 weeks or so.

At the end of the day the question of whether I liked the movie or not is kind of hard to answer. For the major part it was definitely enjoyable and worth seeing, yet it left somewhat of a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. Overall however it was definitely an interesting experience.

P.S. Wired Magazine published an interesting behind the scenes article on the Watchmen movie and its history. Definitely well worth reading even though it might contain some spoilers for people who haven’t seen the film so be aware of that.

Slumdog Millionaire

2009-03-24T01:05:00.001+01:00

Last Tuesday I had a chance to go to the Austrian premiere of Slumdog Millionaire. With all the excitement surrounding the movie’s 8 Oscars I had certainly read quite a bit about it but still wasn’t really sure what to expect.

As it turns out the film can probably be best described as an exotic fairy tale. And a very well crafted, thoughtful and enjoyable fairy tale at that. Plus it’s got a sort of feel-good air around it which is something that I normally don’t necessarily enjoy too much (happy endings are for wimps, right?;-) however in this case it works really well. It’s certainly been a while since I last left a cinema with such a warm and fuzzy feeling in my stomach…

Anyway, the first third of the film which gives some insights into the childhood of Jamal, the main character, very much reminded me of City of God (a real must-see by the way). In terms of the locations (slum in India vs. favela in Brazil), the main characters’ stories and the intensity of the footage both movies strike me as remarkably similar. However Slumdog Millionaire has a slight edge thanks to the great soundtrack which is nicely used all throughout the movie.

Towards the middle of the 2 hour film as Jamal swiftly proceeds in the Who wants to be a millionaire? show and the cutbacks go to more recent events the pace starts to slow down. At this point it becomes quite clear how the story will end, yet a lot of craftsmanship has gone into making sure that it’s an enjoyable experience all along. And it really works, I literally enjoyed every single minute and scene even though I was aware of the fact that if executed differently this part of the movie could have turned into a real letdown.

I really don’t want to go into more details as it would spoil a lot of the pleasure of seeing the movie yourself (which you really should!!). The one last thing I want to say is that the actors portraying the main characters, both as children and young adults, are doing an amazing job which goes a long way in giving Slumdog Millionaire (what I assume to be) an authentic touch. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Freida Pinto (who plays Latika) in several mainstream productions over the coming years. Rumor has it that she might be the next Bond girl and apparently Woody Allen is also interested in working with her for his next movie.

To cut a long story short: Go to your nearest cinema and watch Slumdog Millionaire as soon as possible, you’ll definitely enjoy it!

I’ve embedded the trailer below just in case my comments aren’t convincing enough.

P.S. Yes, I admit it, the movie makes me want to travel to India… :-)

2019 Extended Version

2009-03-20T00:48:00.002+01:00

I just found a much longer version of Microsoft's 2019 video that I had mentioned earlier this week. To me it's certainly mind boggling to think that technology similar to the one portrayed in the video will one day really be available! Kinda puts me in a dreamy state of mind... :-)

2019

2009-03-16T04:19:00.002+01:00

Quite an interesting video about what Microsoft thinks the world might look like ten years from now.

(via e-Learning Blog, Venture Beat)

Movies, movies, movies…

2009-03-16T03:48:00.001+01:00

As you can see from the last couple of entries I’ve been quite good with keeping up with the insane amount of great movies these days. Unfortunately I often find myself lacking the time to really write anything up about them so here’s just a quick overview of films I saw in the more recent past and what I thought of them:

Milk

It’s hard to write anything about Milk since everything seems to have been said already... In my mind just watching it to see Sean Penn’s outstanding performance is totally worth it, never mind that the “rest” of the movie is great as well. Plus I really like the notion of movies bringing historic characters and events to a broader audience. A great movie indeed.

Revanche

What can I say, this is probably one of the best Austrian movies ever and it certainly deserved to be nominated for the Foreign Feature Oscar (which it unfortunately didn’t win). The story is very well written, the actors are amazing, the difference between urban and rural areas / people / life is nicely portrayed, etc. Austrian film-making at its best and a definite must-see in my opinion!

The Beach

As somewhat of a travel aficionado who hasn’t quite given up the dream of managing to get off the beaten track at one point or another I can’t help but find The Beach’s basic storyline to be appealing. Seriously, who wouldn’t want to visit the island described in the movie? So the first half of it was really entertaining and good, the second half however was somehow bland and predictable. Still, overall it’s an entertaining flick as long as you don’t expect too much substance.

Valkyrie

I’m certainly not a big Tom Cruise fan but found Valkyrie to be quite a good movie, though admittedly I had had quite low expectations. Definitely one of the better World War II related films in the recent years.

Frost/Nixon

Initially I wasn’t quite sure what to expect here but ended up being really drawn into the movie. It obviously wouldn’t work without the great performances by Michael Sheen (David Frost) Frank Langella (Richard Nixon) who both convey an amazing intensity and on-screen presence. Undoubtedly seeing them perform the play at West End and on Broadway in 2006/2007 must have been an unforgettable experience.

Next up on my to-be-watched list are:

Slumdog Millionaire (I won two tickets for Tuesday’s Austria premiere of the movie:-), The Wrestler and Knochenmann…

Lost Generation

2009-03-12T02:11:00.001+01:00

Truly one of the best videos I’ve seen in the past few months. An absolute must-see!