Creative Mind In Progress

Return of the blog

2010-01-03T00:40:00.003+01:00

After the blog-break, I'll be back soon.

Hopefully I'll see you back here.

Kind regards,

Douwe

PICNIC09 (24th)

2009-09-25T14:52:00.001+02:00

A week ago, I received an ivitation from Gerben Mak for joining the PICNIC09 Festival. I was really thrilled because I already wanted to go there, but the ticketprice (around 100Euro) was too high for me. Luckily I could go after all.

At 6:30 AM I was waiting on the train to Amsterdam. I bought myself a large cup of coffee to stay awake, since it was way too early for me. Anyway, the train trip went pretty well until I was half way. There was a technical failure with a train, and I couldn't continue my trip on that route. After taking a big detour, I eventually ended up in Amsterdam. It was about 30 minutes walking to the “Gasfabriek” where the PICNIC was being held. When I got my badge it was over 11AM.

First I took a look around discovering the different area's, and checking out the ambiance. Not much later, I saw one of my teachers walking who had helped building on the RFID-Applications (more in RFID-hackers camp) After trying out all the RFID apps, walking around, playing a bit with the multi-touch tables and so on I went to the “Creative Bits” conference. The message sent out by the conference, as well as the RFID apps was that the real world and the digital world should be blurred more and more. The second conference, “Reality Continuum” emphasized this statement.

Whether customers are interested in merging their reality with virtual reality is still the question for me.

Right after this last presentation I have talked to some more of my teachers about their findings and inspirations at PICNIC. I hope that some of the idea's presented at PICNIC will be used for designing our CTSG; The Creative Technology Super Game.

About 8 o'clock I went home again. Pretty tired I looked back on a really interesting, and inspiring day.

The big day

2009-09-22T22:24:00.000+02:00

Today, September the 22nd was the big day for CreaTe. We, the CreaTe group/students presented ourselves to the public. This morning we started a little earlier than normal, to be able to finish our projects. Although we worked really hard on this event there still was a lot that needed to be done.

The “Walking fridge” was too stubborn to start, the multitouch table wasn't running the way it should and even the pong game, wasn't doing good. Together we worked on the remaining tasks until the first people came in. Luckily everything worked out pretty well eventually. All the teams got to finish their project.

At three o'clock Mr. van der Hoeven and his colleagues joined us. This is when Bram, our lead speaker today, summoned everyone to the stage. He presented the CreaTe group, and we all took 20 seconds to tell something about our selves. Because Bram started off in dutch everyone automatically switched to dutch too. I doubted for a second to do in in English after all, but I didn't because we presented us as a group. And if one would do his piece in English it would seem like he's not one of the CreaTe people.

On our request Anton finished Bram's speech. He gave our audience a small summary of who we are and what we're planning on doing. I really liked it that he emphasized the diversity of the group, and that all of our personal talents could workout something really nice.

When the event was over, we have been breaking everything down again. In about 2 hours the lab was empty again. And we could look back on a pretty successful day.

I hope I can say on behalf of the entire CreaTe group that we enjoyed organizing and producing the day. Together we found ourselves an Identity, we can all be proud of.

In search for I (pt2)

2009-09-19T11:28:00.000+02:00

The course I'm writing this blog for is called: "Create Identity"
It's all about the development of yourself during this course.
The title for today's blog came up when I was listening to the song, In search for I.
Most readers won't be familiar with the song, because it's a death metal one.
Anyway... The song is about the search for I:

"The I is lost in me
But I'm ready to give you
The m, it might even be the e
As I begin to search for I"

I discovered that the course name is actually incorrect.
We should not "Create" an Identity, we should search for our own, personal Identity.
Our outer identity can be described as me, I think. All of our "me's" are molded and shaped by our environments.
So we should reach out to our most inner selves and see if we can find what is our I.
Because we are a group of individuals together.

Together we create I(dentity)

In search for I (pt1)

2009-09-15T23:13:00.001+02:00

For today my blog will be a little bit out of the ordinary.
Instead of basicaly telling about my school experiences, I will now be telling some about my personal life.
Now, I will start my story on Friday. After school I went to a friend of mine, we hung out a while and planned on going to a party later that night.
I went home, took the car and drove around to pickup some more people who wanted to go to the party.
When we finally had everybody in the car we drove to the party, but on our way there it happened.
He had to hit the break, and I was too late with hitting mine. So I crashed into his car.
(This is by the way also the reason why I didn't blog the past days)

It is incredible how much goes through your mind in that one split second. Whether it's the adrenalyne kicking in, or the fear of death thats frightening you, I don't know.
But that one moment it seems you think more straight then you ever will again in your entire life.
If one is faced with death, he sees better than anytime before what he really cares about, desires, or what he's afraid of.
In fact, the real I comes up in you. Not the environment-shaped-me, but the real I.

When thinking of a topic to write about in my blog, I thought it would really fit the title in search for I.
I have to admit it is not the story I wanted to tell in first place about the "search for I".
So tomorrow I will upload the original "In search for I".

CreaTive to the core

2009-09-10T23:18:00.006+02:00

Today Gerrit (van der Hoeven) our "CreaTe boss" entered our classroom with the message that the task we did yesterday wasn't too good. We had to write down on paper (yes that stuff once invented to make books and stuff) what we had learned from the last techno drama about mouse usage. Most of us, including myself just wrote down what happened like a braindump. Just showing the teacher we understood what we had just seen. And that was, as Gerrit told us the problem. In highschool we learned to write things in a way the teachers would know WE understood. Now, we have to write in a more academic way to let SOMEONE ELSE understand what we experienced, developed or discovered.
I think he really had a point after all, because when you're finished with the university nobody cares if you understand a situation or a job. Your employer wants to see results or products. So next time we'll need to write more structured but also more as a binding story, in stead of a complete memory dump.

We also got to play with a LMC Simulator (Little Man's Computer), wich was quite a lot of fun.
Link to simulator
It is a very down to the core simulation of what goes around in a computer. If you want to do fun stuff with the simulator you'll have to put a lot of effort in it, because its only 100 command lines long. Alright, I had to defy the poor little simulator and I tried to write a simple self-mutating program. Although I really tried I didn't really get it to work unfortunately. The thing actually inspired me to try to build a little man's computer myself, but I'll wait with the project until I'm a bit more advanced in the machine language.

Some blahblah about the recent developments

2009-09-08T22:46:00.003+02:00

Monday we created teams for building the xplab.
At first there were 4 groups all given something like 10 - 15 minutes to develop their ideas about the lab. Then presenting the group and their plans.
One group split up and merged with the remaining 3 groups. With some extra intelligence on the table the ideas altered a little, and we got a little more time for working out the plans.
The slogan I though of for our group was: Together We CreaTe.
Because of all the divergent intellectual in our class, and all the different abilities I thought it would be nice to use this slogan.
A bit like: "Together we stand, Divided we fall"

Today, the plans created yesterday had to get more serious. So we spend the morning talking about how and what the final plans are.
The tasks were split up, and given to us to work on. I got to work on the presentation method, in like the screens beamers and stage stuff.
There was still a lot of brainstorming though, about some new ideas. Hopefully everything will work out for the opening, since that will decide the image of our study.

As promised

2009-09-03T22:55:00.005+02:00

As promised yesterday, I'd write down my assignment I got on Tuesday.
I will write it down as some sort of short curriculum vitae.

For starters, my name is Douwe Bart Mulder.
I'm born in Almelo close to my home town Wierden, the 27th of June 1990.
Which makes me 19 at the time of writing.
Although I'm searching for a room I still live at home with my parents, and my younger brother and sister.
My main skills are founded in the computer science. I like to program in e.g. Basic (or visual basic), or in C (or something similar). For quite a while I'm helping out with professional drive-in shows, both building the show and performing. I don't fear talking to crowds, though I like to be a bit prepared before doing so.

The assignment given to us by Anton Eliens, also included telling eachother what would be our favorite super power. Mine would certainly be "time warping". Why? Well... I'd love to be more capable of managing my time. Spending some more time over here and some less time over there, maybe stopping the time for a sec (hehe) or things like that....
Why we had to think about this? The superpower you choose tells a lot about your habits, and you (in)ability's in the real world. That's why Anton wanted us to try to think of one and explain why.

Talking about being able to warp time. It would be nice and handy to be able to post your blog one day back in time. Since you might have noticed, I'm and I will be uploading about a day back or so. I don't know why, but I like to think about things over before writing about it I guess.
Well, I'll be blogging about today, tomorrow then.

Quick start

2009-09-02T22:49:00.002+02:00

Well last monday I started with the course Creative Technology.
This was offcourse after a long (Twente has got the longest orientation in the Netherlands!!) period of partying, hanging out and learning a lot of new people.

We started off with a pretty global introduction into what the visions and ideals about this new study are. It was all a little too abstract to me, but fun to see that the people who established the Creative Technology course were so excited.
So full with new impressions and ideas we started on tuesday with a simple exercise, for getting to know each other better. Trying to get a hold of each others capabilities, wich differed from sports to the real hardcore geek stuff. The thing we all (well almost everyone) had in common was music.
Almost everybody in our group practices an instrument or is a real die hard music fan.
I'll try not to go into detail to much yet.

The assignment we got I'll upload tomorrow.
Its a general 1 minute pitch presentation, in which you needed to "sell" yourself to the class.

Today we had the first course in the introduction of computer science.
We learned about processing; the basic standards of internet and some random tool usage like the wiki script. Although I'm a very frequent wiki user, I never really used the wiki script before.
For now I need to go and get some sleep since I need to get out of bed at 6:50. Which is quite a challenge for a student.