This time around visiting London I didn’t bring my big and heavy 18-200mm lens and used my cheap and light-weight 50mm lens instead. It’s a nice lens, except that I have to focus manually and it turned out to be a hard thing to do with this lens. It’s the reason not everything is rightly in focus in this photoset, but some turned out to be wonderful.
And I hardly need an excuse to visit London.
Tube in Tube out.
Let me explain what I’m talking about. Together with Ton I was invited to join the Somesso/Headshift/Dachis Social Business Summit in London last Thursday. The program looked promising: only two speakers to kick-off the day, including the always inspiring JP Rangaswami), followed by a discussion amongst the participants. Participants were selected, so it could only be a great and knowledgeable crowd
(…) to plot the future of Social Business Design. (source)
I followed part of the online discussion around Social Business as a term and was intrigued. I thought the event in London would be a good opportunity to find out more about it and see if there is any relevance for me in this ‘trending topic’.
I would have loved to give you a content summary of the day with some insights from my side about social business, but it turned out to be a very confusing day.
I had a really hard time grasping what everyone was talking about. The language used was so abstract and often meaningless that I felt clueless what we were discussing. At first I thought it was just me, since I’m hardly dealing with large corporations these days, but others who were in the same discussions with me turned out to be just as clueless.
Although people were sharing stories throughout the day, to me it felt that there was no real exchange of ideas and insights. I saw few animated discussions. You won’t believe how many people were checking their phones even during small group discussions. Signs of an uninspired and uninvolved crowd.
Despite the lovely time I had visiting the Tate modern, drinking beer with Johnnie, dining with Paolo and Monica, ‘after-partying’ with the Danish guys, shopping and finally lunching with a friend that now lives there, the balance of this trip to London tips over to the negative side. It will make me seriously reconsider spending money on flights and hotel for any such event in the future.
Johnnie, I get your point more and more.
When I was nine my parents brought home an oboe. I knew what it was, since both my parents played in an orchestra and music was a big deal in our family. They borrowed the oboe from their orchestra for a week to see if I liked it or not.
I held the black wooden instrument in my hands, took a deep breath, blew on the reed and to everyone’s surprise I produced a sound. Not half bad for a first time. Hardly anyone manages that! It looked like a perfect match.
So I took lessons and joined the local youth orchestra. Only two other girls played oboe in my village back then, I was the youngest. We all played in the same wind orchestra.
I managed to learn the basics rather quickly. First in Emmen, since there was no teacher at the local music school. Later the three of us took lessons with a wonderful lady that came to our village and who often arranged for group lessons.
I loved playing together, but I never cared much for practicing. When the two older girls left after graduating high school, I was the only one left in the village to play oboe. It diminished my love for playing and practicing even further, but my teacher accepted it and made lessons a fun half hour by playing challenging duets together.
When I was about sixteen I was selected to become the first oboist in a regional orchestra, the Drents Jeugdorkest. Three years I played there. I even managed to keep playing there the first year I was at university. Once a month on Saturday I would travel to remote places in the province Drenthe to rehearse and give concerts with this wonderful group of people. In the end it was the only practice I got every month and I couldn’t keep up with the level of the group. I said goodbye to the orchestra after a summer tour in Rostock.
Only two times after that, during summer projects abroad when I filled a gap in my parent’s orchestra as a second oboist, I rehearsed and played. For the last, six?, years my oboe was just lying around the house, untouched.
Two weeks ago I started practicing again for a reunion concert by that youth orchestra I have such warm memories of. While practicing I noticed that the joy I once had in playing oboe, died since the last time I picked up the instrument. Last week I decided that this reunion concert would be the last one with my oboe. I’m done with it and will sell the oboe my parents gave to me. I’ll pass it on to someone who loves and needs it.
With a very loud concert I payed a worthy tribute to myself and my oboe. A pair you will never see again on stage. My sore lips are proof of my effort. After 22 years I’m done with it and I’m looking forward to challenge myself and start learning something else for the next 20 odd years.
Wednesday I’ve been filming the FabLab managers in Groningen for my documentary during the FabTafel held there. It is a 6-weekly gathering of the local FabLab-community to talk about all things related to FabLab. It was a perfect opportunity for me to interview the managers in one go.
FabLab Groningen is a new Lab, officially opening end of this month. It houses in an building called Het Paleis (The Palace). A wonderful building filled with beginning entrepreneurs and artists located in an area of the city that is still under construction. An inspiring and creative surrounding and a perfect location for a FabLab.
I have now loads of interview material that I have to go through. It will be a challenge to keep the documentary short 
A chore long overdue, upgrading Wordpress on this site, combined with an enduring cold turned out to be a good reason to redesign this site.
Today I came across Olle’s site and he uses the Thematic theme framework. I loved the simpleness. After upgrading I installed this theme and added my personal touch to it, resulting in what you see now.
The colorbar is a variation on the colours I used for my new business site: elminewijnia.eu. A while back I wrote about letting go of the name Skallagrigg for my company name and migrate my online business-face elsewhere. And so I did. The .eu-domain is now a mostly static, bilingual site where I describe my services, showcase some of my work and tell more about me. So if you’re still wondering what I do for a living, you know where to go.
This will remain my blog. Indefinitely
Watch Kustaa Saksi tell about how he transformed one of his illustrations into a 3D object (in de second half of the video)
Joris van Tubergen talks on open innovation and FabLab from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.
The robot was created by Edwin Dertien: http://edwindertien.nl/
More on the robot in English: http://hackaday.com/2009/02/20/flatpack-walker/
Recorded at ProtoSpace: http://protospace.nl
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I created this as part of the longer documentary that I’m working on. One of the decisions I have to make is whether I ask the Dutch speaking people I will interview to tell their story in English. I’m not a fan of that, because you get language-poorer stories than when people would be talking in their native tongue.
So the consequence is that I need subtitles when I do the interviews in Dutch, since I want to show it to an international public.
This article by Andrew Balis convinced me that it could be done properly in Final Cut.
My workflow:
1. I exported the audio-file of the clips I chose at a 60% pace and used that to transcribe the story. Slowing the audio down was crucial since it gave me more time to write while listening and stop the file every now and then without having to rewind all the time.
2. Then I translated the text into English.
3. I created two subtitle templates for 1 and 2 lines, according to the above mentioned article.
4. I copied the text per (part of a) sentence in a text-overlay using the template, listening carefully to match the English text with the spoken content.
A lot of work, but since this clip is 2m21 it didn’t take as much time as I thought it would before I started.
If you have any feedback on the subtitles, like pace, size, or the translation itself, please let me know! It is very important to me that it works for most people.
It’s been on my list for a while now, to experiment with stop-motion. Creating a viral for SHiFT using Lego is the perfect excuse to work a tad late. 73 pictures each displayed for 3 frames long. Here’s the result.
SHiFT 2010: DIY from Elmine Wijnia on Vimeo.
This is my personal blog which I started in 2003. At first it was called Communigations, a variation on Communicative Investigations. The blog transformed itself more into a personal investigation than being a blog on communication and therefore needed a new name.
As a fencer, the name of this blog reflects how I write my thoughts into coherent stories, fence them off from all the sidepaths and rapidly go back and forth, covering various topics that interest me.
Read more about me or about my work at elminewijnia.eu
Ada Lovelace Day
Today it’s Ada Lovelace Day:
My blogpost for #ald10 is dedicated to three women that I know well.
My colleague Joitske.
Joitske has a background in the developing world. She lived in Africa for several years with her family and used all kinds of methods and technology to connect to people and get her work done. These days she makes a living by guiding others online, doing projects from her home in The Netherlands.
She uses technology to achieve her goals.
My friend Lilia.
Lilia practically published all of her PhD online, before she knew what she would write in her thesis. It took her readers seven years to see her complete work. Lilia wrote her thesis into existence and now that she’s known as dr. Lilia she does the same for the life that will be.
She uses technology to fulfill her needs.
My mother Fenneke.
Fenneke has been taken photo’s as long as I can remember. We even had a dark room in the attic. I would often stand by her side waiting for the chemicals to reveal the image on paper. A time consuming hobby and for quite some time she hardly developed pictures herself. Then digital photography became affordable and she jumped on it straight away. Ever since her first digital camera she grew her kit and developed advanced skills in photo-editing. Aged sixty-two she started to give digital photography workshops to help others gain more from their digital camera.
She uses technology to capture her imagination.