June 30, 2005
Grokster just lost in court, and the record labels are going to try to take over peer-to-peer with paid, legal versions. They'll fail again, for a reason that's obvious once you say it: if I'm paying, why would I leave my upload running? The fix is so simple it's almost embarrassing — and it turns every fan into a salesperson.
June 26, 2005
I had a few minutes to kill on the tram, so I tried writing a blog post on my cell phone. The post came out fine. What I didn't expect was that it came out noticeably shorter — apparently my brain quietly compressed the argument to fit the medium without telling me. Aristotle's complete works fit in half a Kant. Coincidence?
June 25, 2005
Two old favorites are back from the dead. Googleshare lets you type 'beatles' and 'john, paul, george, ringo' and see who actually wins the search-engine popularity contest. Mindworld is weirder: it starts with a screen of random pixels and asks every visitor one tiny question — sea or land? — until a collectively imagined map of the world slowly draws itself.
June 19, 2005
Empty beaches lined with shiny new hotels, the occasional one already collapsed (with people still living in the half that didn't), and a country where half the cars on the road are Mercedes — in supposedly the poorest country in Europe. Someone is betting big on Albania becoming the next Tunisia. Here's why I think they're about to lose that bet.
June 18, 2005
A Wired journalist sent thoughtful questions about Open Content. Douwe answered with vision and wisdom. The published article distilled all that visionary wisdom down to roughly two words. Meanwhile, Kuro5hin suggested Google should buy World66 — but warned it might be a little too wild for them. The phone number, just in case, is included.
June 16, 2005
We supposedly use only 10% of our brain. We also use only 10% of our body — ask anyone after their first squat session. All those idle nerve cells across our skin could be doing useful work. Blind people have been given crude vision through a camera wired to their back. What else could we wire up — infrared, sonar, a compass in your shoe?
June 13, 2005
The espresso in Albania is surprisingly good. Travel long enough and you start noticing a pattern: former colonies inherit one specific thing from their occupiers, and that thing tends to outlive everything else. English colonies got railways. French ones got baguettes. Germany's brief colonial stint left behind, predictably, beer. The Dutch had Indonesia for four centuries — guess what stuck.
June 12, 2005
Back from Albania. There's that familiar time warp you get on a strange trip: the first days feel like a week, and the last days vanish in a sprint to the ferry. Then a frantic run through the terminal, 42 minutes to spare, 300 Germans in the security queue — and one quiet glance at the departure board that didn't quite add up.
June 01, 2005
Switzerland is expensive. The pub charges nine francs for a beer, the supermarket sneaks meat past 100 francs a kilo, and one ATM on Bahnhofstrasse refuses to dispense less than a thousand. Mostly it is fine — you get what you pay for. Then Douwe topped up his prepaid phone with 50 francs and watched it land at a balance of 32.
May 30, 2005
The French have voted Non to the EU constitution, and the Dutch will probably follow. The strange part: most people don't actually object to it. They are just unhappy and feel like saying no. In the nineties everything was going great — growth up, crime down, a sensible prime minister biking to work. Then something flipped. What changed?
May 16, 2005
douweosinga.com made PC Magazine's list of 100 sites you didn't know you couldn't live without. Then a Googleplex colleague suggested grabbing People Magazine because Douwe had landed in the 50 Most Beautiful People list — which, on closer inspection, meant something rather different. Then the BBC chimed in. Quite the month for accidental fame.
May 09, 2005
Europeans get teased about their bizarre opening hours — shops shut on Sunday, museums on Monday, the kitchen at nine. Americans, the story goes, have everything open all the time. Out hunting for late-night food in California, Douwe found this story to be slightly oversold. And then there's the 2am rule: a club open until four, with the bar going dry at two.
May 07, 2005
Sixty years since the war ended. The Economist notes that three quarters of German soldiers who died fell on the Eastern Front. In the Netherlands, May 5th is mostly about the Canadians who arrived to liberate us — and rightly so. But the numbers tell a less comfortable story: Canada lost 37,000 people, the Soviet Union lost 27 million.
April 30, 2005
Munich for a conference, Hannover for a pub conference (a fancy word for drinking beer while talking shop), Amsterdam for Queensday, then off to Mountain View for two weeks. With wireless in the hotel lobby, a broken server back home can be fixed from anywhere. Tempting to imagine hacking on Google projects from the Thai jungle. But there's a catch.
April 20, 2005
Why do we still reach for paper travel guides when we have the whole internet at our fingertips? My brother and I had a theory, and it came down to a single page: the overview map with highlights scattered across it. Online guides never quite nailed that. So we spent a few weekends hacking in Python.
April 18, 2005
Zurich's answer to Burning Man involves the guilds that have run the city since 1336, a straw snowman called Booogg (whose name also means something that dropped out of your nose), and a pile of explosives. The faster the snowman blows up, the better the summer. This year it took more than 15 minutes.
April 13, 2005
Back from SES Munich 05, and the total food provided by Swiss during the flight added up to exactly one piece of chocolate. Which got me thinking about LOT Polish Airlines, Delhi to Amsterdam via Warsaw, and the seven full meals they once served me. The trouble was the quality. And the milk chocolate would have been a deal-breaker anyway.
April 09, 2005
I flip a coin. Heads, your income is halved for life. How much extra do you need to take that bet? Most people want a lot - and that intuition, plus John Rawls and a spreadsheet of GDP figures, leads somewhere uncomfortable. The poorest 10% in the US do worse than the poorest in Slovenia. So who was right?
March 26, 2005
Zurich is famously expensive. For European visitors, the explanation is easy: Switzerland is richer than the EU, so things cost more. For American visitors, the story breaks. Income per head is actually higher in the US, yet a haircut in Zurich costs a fortune. Stereos trade across borders, but haircuts don't - and that detail leads somewhere awkward.
March 18, 2005
Zurich in winter is a brothers Grimm fairy tale - snow-covered squares, medieval churches, winding streets, and absolutely nobody outside. Then a week or two ago, the snow vanished and the thermometer hit 19 degrees. Every cafe sprouted a terrace overnight, and people materialized from somewhere. The lake is still too cold for swimming. For how long, though?
An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.