Joost

This summer I spend 2 weeks in Italy together with Chantal. We started off in Rome, spending our time in Trastevere. We visited all the main tourist attractions, because I hadn’t visited Rome before. Time passed by pretty quickly and we traveled to Florence by BlaBlaCar. After a day of traveling, it’s great to jump in a pool!

Florence is an amazing city, especially when you can watch the sun set over the city, the food is good and if you dive a bit into Italian culture you’ll find hidden gems! Next up was San Gimigniano, a little town with lots of towers. We stayed in an agriturismo for 1 night, I cannot recommend this enough if you are somewhere in Tuscania. We visited Pisa before going to La Spezia, which would be our take off point for the main goal of our trip: Cinque Terre.

Cinque Terre is series of villages at the waterfront of Liguria, and I’d like to show you one image for every village:

Riomaggiore

On sunday the 10th of June I left my parents place on a double-bike. Together with a friend we cycled to Zwolle, took a train and prepared ourselves in the evening for a trip to London. As we took the boat to Harwich the next day I didn’t know what to expect as I hadn’t visited England before.

As we talked with locals it turns out it’s much more enjoyable if you take the small hilly roads towards your destination.

Another year passed an I’m due to update my projects page and create another one for next year! To close past year and explore the next I’ve used YearCompass for my reflections. It took me over 3 afternoons to completely fill it out, but it’s an enjoyable ride! It’s great looking backwards into your calendar and see all that you have achieved. I’ve also concatenated all my 8:36pm photos into a video like I do every year.

Long overdue, but now I have some time to spend writing a blogpost. The previous month I’ve spend 3 weeks in Sri Lanka! For two weeks, we discovered the island, visiting beaches, jungle, towns and cities. The culture is wonderful and people are very friendly. It’s also been a great opportunity to try out some new things, for example dabbling in photography and exploring apps like VSCO. In this post, all of the pictures have been shot with a S-120 and then improved with VSCO.

Over the past few months I’ve been steadily involved with a project that aims to recreate an war/control/intelligence room that you see in movies. The one difference is that the room is ment for decision-makers within bigger companies. Often, urgent en relevant questions go unanswered, but the Intelligence Room helps fixing this. During the Big Improvement Day we showcased our concept and I’ve created a little Django app that matches all attendees based on topics they provided when signing up for the event.

Last year I gave a little talk at the Cross Media Cafe in Hilversum. Happily afterwards I gave a little interview and people took a few photos. This year started pretty nice with some media coverage, but at the end of february a book landed in the mail:

I made a scan of the page and it’s available on Scribd. And together with the working group of patient generated data, we’ve written a white paper about the data that persons generate that healthcare could use.

Like last year, I made a small video of all my 8:36pm photos. With a bit of help from my brother, I managed to get everything into after effects and put it together. Let the nostalgia commence:

Looking back in a glance, the things I notice are: less computer work, more socializing and the increment in the amount of beverages and food photos. Next to that, I failed keeping up this year and missed a lot of photos.

Taking a week off from my study, hopping on the plane to San Francisco on monday morning at 10 o’clock. Arrived at noon and we managed to hack our way into the AirBnB place. Uptime: 24 hours. Grab a beer with Yuri and Peter. Decide to visit the Apple Store and do some misc shopping. Italian dinner. Crash on a couch. Conclusion: way better then classes I’m supposed to be in.

Two weeks ago I left the small village of Sloten in The Netherlands with a lofty goal, to reach Rome in Italy. On a tandem bicycle with a friend. A total distance around 2300km was meant to be covered. In the fourth day, we left the Netherlands and went into Germany.. Traveling trough the Ruhr area and cycling next to the Rhine. Next, the Swabian Jura and with 2 weeks we covered most of Germany.

Together with Heinze I’ve guided and taught several students from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam about data and data-visualisation. In 3 days packed with GPS-trackers, stories, examples and code we’ve made some interesting visualisations. Some were shown in Carre during the education conference organised by the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Thanks Captain Video for the awesome setup with a cube: Ofcourse I’ve also made my own data-visualisation. The data consists of minute-by-minute data available trough the Fitbit data API.