I have nothing to say, really.

Fuck off.

Week 15

17 Apr 2012

Monday, April 9th, 2012

So, Facebook bought Instagram over the weekend. One billion dollars. That’s a lot of dough, good for them. There were a lot of opinions.

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

I did not sleep a lot overnight – so that tuesday was a strange, sleepy monday at work. I probably drank two liters of coffee, destroyed my stomach and in the end, I went to the TAD. The food at Khanh’s Lilly was pretty good, as expected.

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Still slightly sleepy. Taped a new episode of Draußen nur Schnittchen – a bit rambling, but funny. If you’re capable of understanding German, listen to it.

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

My lunch sucked, but I did enjoy the cake in the afternoon.

Friday, April 13th, 2012

Friday the 13th! But I had a burger and learned about the Dancing Plague of 1518.

Saturday, April 14th, 2012

I watched the Shanghai F1 qualifying and collected a lot of Asian restaurants in Düsseldorf on Foursquare.

Sunday, April 15th, 2012

Friends in Düsseldorf! And art! And beer! And noodles! I liked that day.

Week 14

12 Apr 2012

By Dominik Schwind

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

I took Jan Manuel’s FAgU shot on Monday:

and watched the first episode of the second “Game of Thrones” episode. Obviously I was fascinated.

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

I was pretty amused by the “outrage” that happened because the unwashed Android hordes were invading our hip Instagram lands. (Little did we know…)

And in the evening, it was Knutsens time – via Skype this time.

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

I ate cake but no schnitzel.

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

I ate schnitzel but no cake.

Friday, April 6th, 2012

It was Good Friday. I mostly slept. And watched Community. It was changlorious.

Saturday, April 7th, 2012

I ate Mettwurst and went out for a few drinks with friends.

Sunday, April 8th, 2012

Easter monday. I recovered and posted a tweet about my robots.

Alternativen

30 Jan 2012

By Dominik Schwind

Butter bei die Fische

Im Krieg

Week 3

23 Jan 2012

By Dominik Schwind

Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you – in fact, most of the days were so uneventful that I don’t even remember them now, just a couple of days ago.

Monday, January 16th, 2012

I have (finally?) switched from Quicksilver to Alfred. Since I just use those as application launchers and mostly ignore their advanced features, the change was completely transparent to my daily workflow. In fact, someone could have changed them for me and I would probably have not noticed. Except that Alfred yet has to close itself at random times, something that Quicksilver was prone to do to lately.

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

I got my Facebook Moo cards. Fun!

I have given Alcatraz a chance – it’s the new TV series by J.J. Abrams and has the pretty interesting premise that the last batch of prisoners on Alcatraz somehow vanished in 1963 and now return one by one, going back to being murderers. The first two episodes weren’t bad but nothing too special – I’ll keep watching, in the hope that the “murderer of the week” type of episodes weave a nice mythology arc.
Oh, and it has Parminder Nagra who I’ve liked since Bend it like Beckham.

Oh, and Sam Neill.

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

The day Wikipedia went black.

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Or: The nerds are back in town

For the last two weeks I’ve had blissful solitude here at the office – the three guys who share the room with me were in Munich to do Munich stuff. As someone who snaps out of the zone pretty easily working two weeks without any real distraction was a pretty good thing which ended on that Friday when they came back. ¹

Saturday, January 21st, 2012

I don’t know.

I bought Onigiri again and fed one to my sister, who was crashing at my place, as she tends to do when she goes to her courses in Düsseldorf.

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

The Minecraft bug bit me again, so I basically was digging around on our server all day.

And as I said in my inception post a couple of weeks ago: it’s nothing personal, I just prefer to work in solitude, with random breaks of socializing (which does include proper meetings, not just watercooler stuff) in between. (See also.) ↩

Graffiti

17 Nov 2011

By Dominik Schwind

You’ve created graffiti, but are keeping out Banksy.

Fred Oliveira’s comment on Why Mixel Requires Facebook Login

The secret of how to make awesome online communities

09 Nov 2011

By Dominik Schwind

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long – image, timestamp, text.

The Social Graph is Neither

OHAI New Facebook

23 Sep 2011

By Dominik Schwind

Classy. [Teymur took that picture.]

Museum of Me

01 Jun 2011

By Dominik Schwind

Intel built this rather pretty visualization of Facebook Data: Museum of Me. I enjoyed having me ego stroked by a virtual fly-through of a museum exhibition of myself.

Worldwide connections

14 Dec 2010

By Dominik Schwind

If anyone should ever ask me why I’m online and still on Facebook – this picture is all the explanation. Facebook’s Paul Butler used some user data to map international friendships:

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.

Sociocultural Ignorance

14 Sep 2010

By Dominik Schwind

As it turns out, the way we can all express ourselves on Facebook today is literally constrained by the limits of what Mark Zuckerberg can see.

Anil Dash in The Facebook Reckoning, a blog post both a response to and an elaboration on the quote within this article in the New Yorker The Face of Facebook

So Google is so awesome that the company has to pause so the rest of the world can catch its breath? And we’re all so stupid that Google geniuses have to “hold our hands” as they explain things?

Mike Elgan wonders Why is Google so condescending?

It’s quite a socio-cultural dilemma isn’t it? Privileged kid builds something with major consequences but quite possibly unintentionally overlooks the possibility that harm may be done by people who have things to hide.

Clint Boulton wraps it up: Facebook, Google Arrogance Points to Sociocultural Ignorance and closes with:

Imagine if these companies tried to be evil.