Thanks to everyone at Strass Intractive, the Peking Express website is online and swinging! My colleagues designed the constraint-based space inspired in Latin American feeling, Dave took care of the Database and CMS and I flashed the lot together.

Check it out, I’m kinda proud of what we did in the time we did it

I wan! I was te “Strasser Of The Day” trophy! I stole it from Dave playing pool. He was letting me win, but that’s okay. I wan! It wasn’t easy though, in spite of being left wan. But I wan!

Perhaps you noticed a little orange icon in your browser while watching this site. That’s a newsfeed, or RSS-feed. Click it to see the newsfeed, or subscribe to it. That way, you can read all my crap without having to load 3Mb of flash animation you want to skip anyway I’v added titles to the feed which aren’t even in the diary yet; images are the same. Ah, modern times.

I tried to make pictures without people in them. Which, by itself, is easy enough; making them look interesting not. I removed selected colors information from the images: blue in one, green in another, to focus on the remaining colors. Check out the FlickR set, it’s interesting; I think I’ll stick to shooting people though

My boss got us moustaches to celebrate our creation of the Peking Express website (online in a few days)! Yeay! I bet you never had a boss who bought you a fake moustache!

I should definitely get a Senseo maker at home. Our coffee maker is leaking, so instead of making the house smell like fresh coffee, the kitchen smells like something is burning. At work we do have a Senseo machine. Maybe that’s too easy though. Maybe I’ll start drinking more coffee at home, just because it’s so easy to make. The drug clearly has a grip on me.

There’s a sign in the park by the bridge in Temse, that translates to “Respect this parc, it will heighten your joy in life”. Judging by the moss on the plaque, it’s been warning citizens for a while. It’s true though: parks do heighten our joy in life. Maybe just not with those exact words.

People often fight the automatic doors on the train. They click the handle and jam the door open, unaware of the engines that are used to this work. But then, they try to close them. These doors close automatically, so when trying to shut them, they resist. This does not scare people off. They will use force till the doors shut themselves, triggered by the timer.

I keep these people in mind while working on corporate websites and interfaces. These are the people who will click buttons twice in fast succession, who will drag over clickable items while slipping. These are people the interface must be protected from.

We baked cookies! With eatable colorants! We have a small hot air oven that heats up quickly, so we made 3 batches during the afternoon. Safe to say it takes a bit less to grind and digest them. The little fella on the picture looks a bit like the gingerbread man!

Like all wannabe photographers it was pointed out to me that my camera was getting more dough on it than allowed my the manual, so I limited myself to these (on FlickR)

The site’s life! Mainly because I got tired of talking about it without being able to show it, but hey: the site is life!

The first tests date from from june 2004. It was to be a wooden frame, like the ones found in dusty Natural History museums, through which you saw my street. Just below the (photorealistic 3D) surface, crazy stuff awaited your click. Check out “Street Level” in the projects section, there’s a few screen videos. I gave up the idea because it just wasn’t strong enough.

In october 2006 I continued with the strongest idea: the floating city. I created a 3D city that was to rotate in the air. You could click on all buildings in all positions to navigate the site. That proved technically impossible

So february 2007, I decided not to spin it and make it black-and-white, inspired by the gorgeous dithering algorithm of Bill Atkinson. So a pessimist would say this update was 4 years in the making, an optimist would point out that I threw away 2 entire versions, so it was only one year.

Luckily, I have some fresh ideas for the next version.