Dominiek.com

some random thoughts I’ve been putting down on a writeboard

Recently, I discovered a cool feature on my Macbook. If I hold the control key and scroll with my mousewheel/pad – I can zoom in and zoom out very smoothly. I’ve started using this a lot and it’s become part of my digital habits. I do it that often that colleagues almost think of me as the crazy zooming guy. This full screen zooming is good for many things during my normal productivity hours. I often use the zooming to show people certain parts of a User Interface and sometimes I use it to zoom in on a piece of text to make a statement :]. Also, it’s useful for pair programming. Now, partly because of my deteriorating eyesight, I can zoom in on something and sit back. This could be a word or a picture and while I sit back, I can really think about it. Zooming-in gets rid of all the other chaos on the screen and helps you to focus.

I guess the zooming metaphor applies to many things in life. As work – trained as an engineer – I deal a lot with the nitty gritty of things. I used to program a lot of low-level stuff like Assembly and C code. However I’ve done some more abstract technical things over the past years like: programming in a variety of languages, design patterns and thinking about user interaction. So far, I’ve been apt at being able to zoom in and out in a certain scope of my skill-sets. Most of it has been technical or related to building software. Right now I’m trying to extend my professional zoom-scope to extend areas that require right-brain thinking like design and business/strategy. Also in personal life – which is heavily intertwined with that old term ‘professional life’ – you can apply zooming very well. Zooming-in means getting short term things done, like changing the light bulb in the toilet. Zoomed out means planning ahead and equally important: changing one’s habits.

Another brother of zooming is filtering. Filtering out the irrelevance in today’s information overload is already visible in multi billion dollar industries and in a notable company called Google. The coming semantic wave – or web 3.0 if you will – stresses the importance of user interfaces that deal with the abundance of information. In recent web design trends it’s easy to spot the shift towards information abundance. Websites now have big fonts for important summarizing one-liners whereas old websites i.e. portals tried to cram as much information on the screen as possible. Zooming and filtering will be important metaphors in future User Interfaces. Google Maps and the iPhone browser are notable first examples of these so-called Zooming User Interfaces (ZUI’s).

This weekend my dad made a stopover in Tokyo for two days. Timing was great, because this week is the world famous cherry blossom season here. The cherry blossom season comes with a typical Japanese tradition: get drunk and eat under the pink flowers.

I had to confess to my dad that that’s basically what we do here in Tokyo, if we’re not working, we drink and eat, there’s not much more to do here.

Ofcourse I try to fill up all that little non-working time with Japanese learning and other cultural activities. But here in Edo nowadays, consuming is pretty much equal to culture, isn’t it?

My dad was – like any other ‘Temporary Visitor’ – amazed by all the capital spend on shopping and dining facilities and the Japanese’s complete inability to speak English. Of course this gave me the opportunity to impress him with my ‘two beers please’ Japanese!

After an awesome weekend and talking a good amount of Dutch again this weekend I celebrated my Dutch pride by cooking a traditional Dutch dish called Hutspot, here’s my recipe on OpenSourceFood

Update: Haha, by coincidence I stumpled upon these two blogs about living in Japan and thus about food/drinking: yongfook.com and gajintonic. Quote of the latter:

Japan is a pisshead’s paradise! It’s a land of happy drunks, relaxed alcohol laws, and hilarious novelty bars which are open all night. arrived in Japan expecting a spiritually-enriching cultural experience. Five years later, all I have is a truckload of dodgy drinking stories…

This weekend I moved to Tokyo to live together with my girlfriend for the time being. I decided to study some Kanji ‘at home’ this afternoon, since I have a long time gap between the job interview this morning and the Japanese conversation course tonight.

After studying for a short while I felt like eating some caramel candy, so I left for the nearest convenience store, the Family Mart. The store is only one block away and open 24/7, hence the name convenient. The last time I visited during the night, I think that’s why I didn’t notice the five-floor high giant red ‘strawberry house’ next to it, they sell hello kitty items there.

Just like last time, I observed many Mercedes cars and luxurious domestic Toyota models. This is kind of strange, everyone should be working at this hour right? Well, they are, but they go there by train (Can’t blame them, this morning the train took me through 10 kilometers of metropolis in 11 minutes!). So the cars are just for showing off to the neighbors (that you don’t talk to in Tokyo). I have no problem with that, it’s good for the environment and pretty cars are nice to see (Yes, I admit it, I like watching Top Gear, which I guess makes me a stereotype male).

Apart from many fish and chocolate candy, there was no caramel in the Family Mart. There was something called ‘karamerry’ but it had the picture of an apple on it. Chocolate it is than.

Today my vacation (natsu yasumi) is officially over. Starting today, I will start my “Web 2.0 Software Development” internship. Therefore the content of my blog will be more geeky these months :] To kick off this new season I have renamed and restyled my blog accordingly: polylingual technocratic wandering (ポリリングアルテクノクラチックウアンダリング)

• Mid-October: Tokyo, visiting my girlfriend (Yumi) and akihabara
• Begin-December: London, Japanese test
• Begin-February: Tokyo, studying for a few months (depending on some luck and finance)