… I would not sponsor a street called ’11th of spetember’ as this invokes slightly too much images of planes crashing into buildings in my head. Areolineas Argentinas (the argentininan flag carrier) seems to think otherwise as this street sign form the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Belgrano illustrates:

The street in question seems to have this name since before the 9/11 2004 but (at least to me) it is unclear what the name referrs to. One possibility would be that the name is given in commemoration of the 1973 military coup in neigbouring Chile (this is a slightly strange event to name a street after in itself but given Argentinias political history not inconcievable). The only genuine Argentinian event mentioned in the wikipedia entry for 11 september is the death of the Argentinian statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento who died on the 11th of September 1888.

One of the most remarkable things about India is the way traffic flows. traffic adjusts itself to conditions around it in a very organic way and in general there are very little rules that are actually followed (or enforced).

The rule that vehicles (and this includes busses, trucks, rickshaws, motorcycles, cycles, push-carts, donkey-carts, and various species of animals) drive on the left side of the road only applies in a relative fashion: one drives left of the right most vehicle traveling in the opposite direction. This enables traffic to find an equilibrium (although it looks far from that) that distributes the total available width of the road according to the traffic volume in both directions (except when there are dividers in the middle of the road like in most of New Delhi). The whole thing works rather smoothly, is a pleasure to observe and a joy to participate in…

Now today i am about to take my first low-budget flight in India (from Delhi to Bombay) and while checking in i noticed the same sort of collective balancing taking place. Low-cost airlines have opened up the possibility of air travel for less prosperous people and you see a lot of families traveling on these airlines. On my flight about one quarter of the passengers seem to be families and the rest individuals traveling for business.

Now if traveling with family Indians must take along excessive amounts of luggage and of course this does not vibe at all with the 15 kg baggage allowment of Air Deccan. As a result the check-in queues at the airport becomes one big distribution mechanism where travelers with over-baggage pair up with travelers that only travel with carry-on baggage in order to check-in their baggage in their name. This creates quite an amount of chaos at check-in as people constantly jump the queue in order to assemble their baggage sharing party, but in the end it seems to work out really well and almost nobody pays for overweight. This process of applied solidarity is even more remarkable if one remembers the constant reminders not to accept luggage from strangers that one is subject to at airports in the rest of the world.

Every time i have visited lawrence in Bangalore he recommends me a book to read during the rest of the trip. Last year it was Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (be careful his self presentation on his own site is really evil) which i really enjoyed.

This year he told me to read Transmission by Hari Kunzru. I have finished it yesterday night and it is again very entertaining. the main story is about an indian computer nerd who, when fired from his H-B1 job in the US, releases an unprecedented virus attack on the internets. There are a number of sub plots and one of them features an obnoxious ad agency owner who makes a pitch for the brand identity of the newly created European Immigration Agency. Instead of winning the contract he finds himself being arrested in am immigration raid by the same agency and deported to Albania:

At 2 p.m. when he was supposed to sit down with director Becker and the other members of PEBA’s public presentation working group he was at 35.000 feet, flying deportation class en route to Tirana, Albania.

It is nice to see the term which we have coined 5 years back to be used in generic fashion in a work of fiction.

I better do not mention that at the immigration control. My iPod mini seems to have a rather ahistoric view on partition: It seems to assume that it never happened, instead all of India became Pakistan. consequently there is no Indian Standard Time option in the ‘change time zone’ menu (closest thing is indeed Karachi time). on the other hand this could also be a well deserved punishment for having a half hour time offset to almost all the rest of the world and thus be without any geo-poitical implications but try to explain this to the RSS… (no not the feed stupid!)

I am on a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Sao Paulo. The 777 is equipped with KLM’s top of the line in flight entertainment system which is actually pretty good. Having access to more than 100 movies (in economy class) is rivaled only by bittorrent (note to self: try to download movies on my next connexion equipped lufthansa flight). The system also includes SMS/email capabilities (send SMS for just USD 2.50 apiece! w00t!). to compose SMS messages you have to move a cursor across an on screen keyboard with a four way controller on the remote thingy that is contained in your armrest. now this is the poorest user interface i have ever used. It took me about 10 times as long to send a SMS as it usually does (and i am ridiculously slow with my phone). The interface really sucks especially if u have to use the 4 way to move the cursor to the arrow keys on the virtual keyboard on screen in order to move the cursor in the text entry field. Extremely redundant interface layers. it becomes even more redundant (or should i say frustrating/idiotic) if one realizes that the back of the remote thingy actually is a phone complete with letters on the number keys. But of course they don’t work in the SMS section.

Of course there is nobody on the whole damn plane that you could even explain – let alone complain to about – this royal (dutch) interface fuck-up. And if you ask me this is part of a much wider problem that gets more serious as more and more transactions get automated. I have serious gripes with the interfaces of the dutch and german rail ticket vending machines that effectively keep me from using them and there is no one standing next to them to listen to my complaints. The only people you could possibly complain to are the people who are slowly getting replaced by the same machines (the agents at the counters at the railway station) and that makes it feel extremely awkward to address such issues to them (‘sorry sir i think the machine that will get you fired from your job could be made a bit more user friendly so you can loose you job a bit faster…’).

Last week we had a research and development workshop at Waag Society about 20 of us had to engage in 2 days socratic talking. I still do not really know what exactly this was suposed to accomplish but there are two additional days to come, so lets see.

For the first day of the workshop we were asked to write a short account of a day at the Waag in 2015. below you find my somewhat negative vision (all the other visions i have read were positive and mostly focussed on technologically augmented tele-working scenarios):

In mei heeft is de laatste software developer ontslagen. Sindsdien werken er nog 15 mensen in de naam van de Waag. Van de 15 zijn 12 project coördinatoren. De meeste van hun werken niet alleen voor de waag maar ook voor andere instellingen. Sinds 2012 is de Waag langzaam omgevormd naar een instelling die steeds minder mensen in dienst had. Dit is het directe gevolg van het afbouw van overheidssubsidie.

Nu bestaat de waag uit twee lagen. De eerste laag is de programma raad. de mensen in de programmaraad beoordelen projectvoorstellen die door de projectcoordinatoren (de tweede laag) ingebracht worden. projectvoorstellen die aan de missie van de Waag (jaarlijks bijgesteld door de programmaraad) voldoen worden door projectcoordinatoren zelfstandig uitgevoerd. In ruil voor een commissie voor de programmaraad mogen projectcoordinatoren de naam van de Waag bij het werven van fondsen, benaderen van partners en aquireren van projecten gebruiken. Zij zijn echter niet in dienst van de waag, moeten hun inkomsten uit de projecten realiseren en moeten jaarlijks opnieuw door de programmaraad ‘goedgekeurd’ worden.

Projectccordinatoren stellen zelf hun projectteams samen. Tot voor kort konden ze hiervoor nog op een pool van software ontwikkelaars, vormgevers, productie medewerkers beroep doen. Dit system is in de laatste jaren te duur en te inflexiebel gebleken. Nu worden worden voor projecten software ontwikkelaars uit india en iran en vormgevers uit libanon, israel en egyptie engageert met wie op afstand samen gewerkt wordt. Productie medewerkers worden op freelance basis bij producten betrokken en expertise op de gebieden van communicatie, interactie of educatie worden in de regel door projectpartners aangeleverd. Projecten worden erop beoordeelt hoeveel media aandacht zij genereren. Naast het aansturen van projectteams is de belangrijkste taak van Projectcoordinatoren het plaatsen van projectinformatie op de relevante blogs en de toongevende videosyndicatie platformen

Naast 10 projectcoordinatoren die applicaties en oplossingen produceren zijn er twee die maatschappelijke onderwerpen die uit de informatie revolutie zijn voortgekomen onder de aandacht brengen. hun werk bestaat voornamelijk uit het verzamelen van bijdragen van experts op een bepaalt terrein. deze bijdragen worden dan voor in verschillende formaten (audiocursussen, videofeatures, lespakketten) verzamelt en vervolgens op blogs, gespecialieserde knowledge sharing en videosyndicatie platformen geplaatst. in veel gevallen wordt ook in opdracht van overheidsinstellingen, universiteiten, musea en onderwijsinstellingen gewerkt die zo goedkoep een deel van hun programmas kunnen vullen of externe expertise inwinnen. In de laatste zijn er ook weer een aantal conferenties gehouden. Sinds 2007 toen duidelijk was geworden dat de fossile energie energiebronnen van de aarde sneller dan verwacht uitgeput zouden zijn, zijn er bijna geen conferenties meer gehouden omdat het invliegen van sprekers niet meer betaalbaar bleek. in de laatste jaren is er in de underground echter echter een cultuur van lokale conferenties over maatschappelijk relevante onderwerpen ontstaan. Deze lokale conferenties hebben een steeds grotere impact op de sociale structuur van de samenleving gekregen en Waag society is recentelijk begonnen om gesteund op de netwerken van zijn internationale partners (vaak zijn dat jonge softwareontwikklaars en designers die bij andere projecten betrokken zijn) contacten tussen locale initiatieven in andere regios te bemiddelen. Uit deze genetwerkte conferenties komen in de laatste tijd vaker nieuwe project ideen naar voren maar deze worden vaak buiten het waag framework gerealiseerd omdat het moeilijk is gebleken om hiervoor financiële steun bij lokale geldschieters te verkrijgen.

Voor de meeste projectcordinatoren zijn deze zijprojecten echter een van de belangrijkste reden om verder voor de Waag te werken omdat dit toegang tot deze netwerken betekend.

At tegel half of the people in front of the check in counter seem to belong to one family whose patriarch is constantly busy telling te members of the extended group where they should be (basically the men at the counter and the women waiting on the other side of the hall).

On both flights (half of the passengers of the full A300-600 leaving berlin seem to make up for three quarters of the full A320 leaving frankfurt) the normative system of the family patriarch proves to be stronger than that of Lufthansa’s ticketing algorithm. both flights take of with 15 minutes of delay mainly due to intensive trading of boarding cards that only stops when the patriarchs family is distributed in the plane according to his wishes (basically boys in the front, girls in the back). The whole flight the patriarch is patrolling the aisle of the plane with much more rigor than the lufthansa crew who has been told to be more respectful and friendly (read: bring more beer by the 5 dudes on the 3 place row just behind me). By now they have retreated to the galley and one needs to go there if one wants another drink…. There was a slight escalation earlier when the party crowd behind me was blocking the aisle, but that situation was defused by the middle-aged gentleman from Stuttgart (of all places!) who told the stewardess to ‘smile a bit more’ and ‘leave the young men alone’. this is the same person who – at the check in at Frankfurt – when told him that the flight was overbooked – fell down at his knees and started to tell them that they could not do this to him as his mother had died and was buried tomorrow and that he could not be denied to board the plane…

While i am writing this the guy next to me – who belongs to the clan of the patriarch – is staring at my screen. so i ask him if he is reading what i am writing but he assures me that he is just looking at the clock in my menu bar. Turns out that he is coming back to lebanon for the first time in 20 years (he left the country when he was 6). He seems to be scared, but i cannot tell if it is because of flying or because of the fact that he comes back to Lebanon after 20 years – ‘things have changed a lot since i left’ there is another person that is looking at my screen: the guy in the window seat. from looking at his screen earlier i know that he is working for Microsoft Lebanon. Later i ask him what he is doing for ms in lebanon. He is a technical consultant who came back from canada 9 months ago. Microsoft Lebanon is the regional representative for ms in lebanon, cyprus, syria – ‘but not right now since syria is on the shit-list’ – jordan, the west bank and iraq – ‘but we do not go there, it is to dangerous, but we have a hired representative’. we talk a bit, i tell him what i do and ask him a bit about their operations. They mainly do MNC work but also government jobs. asked about syria he tells me that they do not operate there but upon my suggestion he tells me that they assume that the syrian government also runs on ms software, albeit pirated. I suggest that this is probably also good for them because once the US topples the government there, they will be used to run MS. He tells me that this is exactly how they see it. Before leaving the plane he gives me his card and suggests that i should meet with his colleague Khaleed who is running their educational operations.