kerimsatirli.com

If there is one thing that I hate, it is most probably getting up early. It is not like I can not get up early, it is just that I have a strong dislike against getting up early.

I am not lazy, but rather nocturnal and a big part of my creative cycle revolves around the late (and sometimes: early) hours of the day.

Some people have suggested that being nocturnal, as far as humans go, is a conditioned behavior and even though I partially agree, I do not care enough to actually change my set way of operating, not unless I absolutely have to.

Having to get up at 5 am (!) to prepare for a set-call at 7 am some 60 miles away from where you actually slept, in my book, qualifies as one of these situations where deviating from your normal way of doing things is acceptable.

Ten days ago, Wiendelt invited me to take part in a shoot for the CliniClowns’ show Neuzenroode, where I acted as the boom-mic operator.

Not even five days later, I got another chance at joining both Wiendelt and GabeB (our resident singer-songwriter) for a shoot comissioned by the NISB, and that is where the story began.

The shoot was split into two days, Monday was in Maassluis, Wednesday was in Zwolle, both locations being a fair distance from Amsterdam meant getting up early, very early, namely during a time when every sane person is actually sleeping.

Still, the morning started off nicely with a fairly sized bowl of cereals and the Foo Fighters’ Times Like These playing on the radio, I already knew that the day would turn out to be good, and it would. I am going to spare you the details, but shooting can be quite entertaining, especially if you have company that can make it worth your while.

Apart from having a great day, I also learned a valuable lesson: cables are never long enough for the task you need them, yet always long enough to get in the way, which can be quite annoying when you have someone moving around your boom-mic all the time and stepping on the cable (I figured out a simple way of solving the problem with the help of a keychain and some ducttape).

That’s it for this entry, the only thing left to say is: thanks Wiendelt and GabeB for inviting me and a very big thank you to GabeB for hooking me up with a place to crash, thereby actually making it possible for me to join the team during the shoot.

I realize that I have been talking about my involvement with xolo.tv for some time now, but I always forgot to really show people what it is that we do. Well, fret not, I am not going to show you, right now, but I am going to share something special with you.

All you have to do is (left) click on this link and a new window will open with the video in it.

A note of advice: the clip is roughly 17mb in size, so you might not want to do this on a mobile connection unless you really are dying get to know the team.

It has been something close to four weeks now since my last intern report and while I initially planned to make this a weekly returning series, it turns out that working fulltime can do weird things to your scheduling as well as your stamina. One of those things is that, after a full day, I sometimes feel so spent that I simply cannot bring myself to write something that is actually worth posting and often just end up scrapping the whole piece.

Lucky me, xolo.tv has what could be considered an implementation of the Google Labs idea, where you get to spend 20% of your work time on personal projects; with the biggest difference being that, at xolo.tv, I actually get to choose what I want to work on, while Google limits your freedom to something that may be used to expand the company’s product portfolio.

Be that as it may, I find myself spending most of my time with treks through the intricacies of ExpressionEngine, which is finding more and more support here every day; if not only for the fact that the system, excuse the strong language here, damn flexible, that we have not yet been able to come up with a problem that cannot be tackled with it.

Apart from my techy backend work, I have also forayed into the area of frontend development and am actually starting the first phase of a huge project this week. Once phase one is completed, I will make sure to post about it here, suffice to say that the project is bigger than most of the ‘jobs I have done in the past and combines a great number of different techniques to form a solution that delivers content across a large scale of mediums, yet is able to target highly specific needs.

While, technically speaking, the project should be considered “work”, I perceive it much more as a reward given to me by the powers that be; the reward itself stemming from work I completed earlier on, where I proved that I could carry my load and come up with solutions that, most of the time, simply worked.

In fact, my direct boss was (and hopefully: still is) so happy about my work, that he decided to give me a recommendation on LinkedIn:

On a related note: it still feels weird to think of someone as my boss. In my short time in the field, I have always been independent. Yes, I have worked with others and yes, I have had clients that required reporting, but I never had a real boss. It is an interesting setting indeed…

As if a recommendation on LinkedIn was not enough, Gabriel Bauer, our resident movie-shooting-director-turned-producer-and-what-not dedicated a whole song to me (well, me and the two other IT guys) and the guy has got talent too (beware, the clip comes in at a hefty 25mb):

That’s it for now, more is coming soonish

It has been a tad more than a week now, since my last intern report and I am finally finding some time to actually post something here.

The past few days have been busy; we have been doing a whole lot of testing, evaluating and fine tuning of one of the core components , but it is safe to say that the solution we came up with is working as expected, in fact, it is working so good that we are undershooting the projected and optimized reference values by anything between 16 and 25 per cent, hoah! to that.

Besides testing, we have also moved forward with a number of web-development related projects and I managed to convince my superiors to make use of ExpressionEngine, one of the web’s most powerful CMS as far as I know.

A few weeks ago, I posted on the topic of team dynamics and how important they are for the well-functioning of a group of people that are supposed to work together and now, after three weeks of working at xolo.tv, I can safely conclude that this team has an awesome flow.

Yes, even good teams have those moments where individual members get a tad cranky, but like in every good relationship, it is way better to talk about the things that annoy you than to keep them to yourself and, finally, erupt like a volcano and most probably damaging a relationship (for good).

It is also interesting to see that humans are not unlike dogs, at least in the way they approach each other: the first few days, I had the feeling that we were mainly trying to figure out what my position would be exactly, kind of like a group of dogs sniffing each other out and deciding if the other is a threat or an ally.

So far, I have not been bitten, so I figure they do not consider me hostile and judging by the stuff I get to do, I am actually getting the feeling that they are starting to warm up to me. And … let me tell you, it feels good to be appreciated, because that makes you want to perform even better, impress the others even more.

When I first pitched the idea of me doing my internship at xolo.tv, I was offered a chance that few interns get: I could pick my own project. Now, you have to understand that my college has some guidelines as to what an intern should do, but technically speaking, everything that xolo.tv had available, fell within those guidelines and I had carte blanche.

In the past years, I have learned that having cojones is one of the main ingredients that you need if you plan on making a difference and that, dear reader, is something I want(ed) to do at xolo.tv, to make a difference.

At a highly dynamic company like this, with a high output of deliverables, finding something that actually makes a difference can be rather difficult, unless you are foolish enough to propose to deliver a solution that works faster (in terms of time), costs less (in terms of usage) and offers a more customized feature package; the fact that this solution is one of the core components of the xolo.tv platform is just additional icing on the cake.

What it is exactly that I am doing is something I cannot tell you, due to an NDA I signed, suffice to say that it is important, interesting and even innovative.

While we gear up for the release, you might want to check out a few of the pictures we took ‘around the office.

Being offered a chance to work on something like this is, simply put, freakin’ awesome and very educative at the same time and I figure that the best way to finish this report is by giving you something to think about:

Ain’t nothing like a man that can do what he wanna…

When I moved to the Netherlands a couple of years ago, my parents decided to choose the beautiful town of Oss as our hometown.

While there is nothing wrong with Oss in itself, after all, this is the city where the world’s most famous anti conceptive, the anti-baby pill, originated, Oss’ location is anything but close to the place xolo.tv is located in, Amsterdam.

What this basically means is that I get to enjoy the Dutch Public transport on a (close to) daily basis and as such, have made some interesting discoveries:

I have been commuting by train from Oss to Breda for more than two years now and have not had a single month withouth any delays, but never had more than two days with delays directly after each other … until now.

My first day at xolo.tv started with me nearly being late, not the kind of first impression you wanna make, not even if it is out of your own control and since the Dutch Railway operators love consistency, I was graced with delays of ten to fifteen minutes every day of my first week.

On my normal route, from Oss to Breda, ten minutes do not matter, because the same train I enter in Oss, is the same one that takes me straight to Breda but the situation is quite different when you are going to Amsterdam. There is at least two trains, at worst three, which means less consistency for the traveller.

And consistency is something I start(ed) to depend on: interning in Amsterdam is great, travelling close to four hours every day - not so much, because when you have to change trains all the time, your sleeping pattern gets all mixed up and my body, for one reason or another, is very unappreciative of that.

On a more interesting note, however: since I am interning in Amsterdam, I am actually getting more sleep than I did before, due to the fact that I simply cannot stay up too late anymore and also thanks to the downtime I have in trains, downtime that is used to sleep and just let my mind relax.

Back on topic, however, public transport. When you travel a lot, you get to meet a number of interesting or funny people and you experience a whole range of peculiar situations.

Commuting during rush-hour means that trains are crowded and everyone is longing for a place to sit; me on the other hand, I do not mind standing for one part of the journey, after all - sitting is what I do at the office (when we are not playing with the frisbees that is).

So the other day, while I was standing near one of the exits, I noticed another male who was fascinated by the amount of people that had to use the John (his words). He had been traveling with the same train for about half an hour at that point and completed another part of his journey (an additional 45 minutes) with me.

The guy literally made a listing of people using the toilet and his total count, after an hour and fifteen minutes, came down to 26 people. His conclusion was that some chef somewhere the day before had probably screwed up royally and that, in turn, prompted that much bowel movement.

I know that, sometimes, we should just stop to admire the little things in life, the things money cannot buy, I am just wondering if the things this guy was fascinated with are those small things (no pun intended)…

In the past years, I have worked for a great number of companies; they all served a different purpose – while one was purely about content generation, another was producing software and yet another focused on the building of websites for corporate communication.

I have long been fascinated by what is called the “social web” and it is with great pleasure that I can finally announce what a handful of people have known for about a month now: I am the latest intern to join Dutch-American start-up xolo.tv.

I was in the fortunate position of being able to choose from a handful of different companies for my first internship, but in the end, the products that xolo.tv are developing are the ones that appeal to me the most.

xolo.tv’s platform was first introduced to me back during PICNIC’07, when Marc van Woudenberg gave an impromptu presentation to a number of people during an early dinner, after the conclusion of the European Bloggers Conference.

I seeded quite a bit at PICNIC with my custom-made moo.com LinkedIn cards and Marc was one of the lucky recipients but since I did not have enough time to actually get a good talk going, I figured that nothing much would come of it.

For one reason or another however, Marc got back to me and after studying my profile on LinkedIn and approached me to set up a meeting for November 2007. Hah, take that all you nay-sayers who think that LinkedIn cannot be used to get a job!

To be honest, I had no real clue as to what to expect from the talks up-front. Marc seemed to think highly enough of me to devote some of his valuable time to a meeting. I was impressed, plain and simple, but at the same time puzzled, so puzzled that I did not know how to prepare for the meeting and did all I could: learn about all past clients of xolo.tv, create a presentation (yes, just in case) on how they could expand their customer-base and

I had never had a formal interview, mostly because I always gained “access” to a job by sweet-talking my way in, not that there is anything wrong with it, but it is a totally different thing than what happened at xolo.tv.

What impressed, yet at the same time, scared me the most was the warm welcome I received. I burst in during lunch (which just so happened to be a tradition their other intern started) and was invited to join them and grab a bite to eat.

Soon thereafter, the talks started where I got a chance to showcase cuizine.tv and was then cross-examined by a number of xolo.tv employees and finally, after receiving a number of interesting and not that easy to answer questions, I was left with mixed feelings.

I knew one thing and that was that I wanted to work there. I also knew that the people working their all are specialists in one way or another and I somehow had to find a reason to convince them, because, frankly, I just had to do this, if not only for the reason that one of the clients was Bløf (yes, it’s true and yes, this was not my main motivation).

During the course of the meeting, Marc expressed his interest in setting up a follow-up meeting for December 2007 and it is safe to say that I was starting to get a good feeling about the whole deal.

The second meeting was much easier-going, basically all we did was sign a few papers and grab some drinks to celebrate, all the while discussing the secrets and intricacies of the female mind - go figure.

As part of my Bachelor’s Degree, I am currently doing an internship at xolo.tv, a company that focuses on a number of things that revolve around social media, video production and media sharing.

While the biggest part of my internship consists of actually interning and learning new things, a small part of the whole experience (and a rather big part of the grade) is related to keeping a journal that is accessible to anyone who is interested.

Considering that I am very proud of being able to intern at xolo.tv and at the same time too lazy to set up a new blog, just for the purpose of writing weekly reports, I figured that I might as well post my reports here.

Yesterday marked the conclusion of our most recent project, the current batch of juniors at CMD Breda have now officially concluded the bigger part of their study and can now move on to internships, minors and other awesome stuff.

Yesterday marked the conclusion of nine weeks of hard work and lots of annoyances for just about everyone even remotely involved with our group.

As always, our group consisted of students representing the four different majors our faculty offers and that is where the problems began: traditionally speaking, a faculty like ours always attracts more media designers than technologists, there are generally more interface designers than marketeers / project planners and with projects that rely heavily on the technical side of things and good branding, this, eventually leads to problems.

It is said that the first few meetings of any group are essential. Think of two dogs that meet for the first time - they will sniff each other out, try to gain as much information about the other as they can and then move on. During the next meeting, they will have some sort of idea of what to expect and based on that will either take a friendly or hostile stance towards the other.

This is the very spot where it went wrong for our group. Our first meeting ended in a situation where no one was willing to be the team leader and I can understand that; after all, leading a group of five is no easy job, let alone a group of 32 other students, but in the end, if your major includes the very classes needed to lead a team, namely project management, team building and all, you should at least be capable of taking the helming and steering the group towards a mediocre final product.

Now, do not get me wrong, I am not bitter or harbor any hard feelings, not in the least, but I feel that there is a great number of things that could have, that should have been done better.

The biggest issue I have with this project is that we worked in teams of 33 people where everyone seemed to have the same voting rights. Democracy is fine and all that, but as long as everyone can veto many things, the outcome of a project will be uncertain.

I believe that, if the project were to have internal representatives that would be allowed to vote (and represent a group of say five or six people) and that those votes were to be considered final, that we would have gotten through the planning / brainstorming stage a lot faster.

Another pet peeve of mine is that our group had little to no regard for application development protocols. I do, of course, realize that with things like this, last-minute changes are part of the whole deal and I would not mind those changes if they were only to fix a bug or two, but if those changes include building new features, days after a feature-freeze has been issued, I get annoyed.

I get even more annoyed when the building of those features results in bugs that kill other, more essential functionality of the main application due to a lack of testing (which was my fault however).

I am a technologist at heart, I suck at designing and I know that, but I try to make up for that lack by knowing just about everything there is to know about the project at hand and I dislike it when people tell me to do things differently when I know that that my solution is going to be used in the end.

One such situation occurred with the building of one of our sub-sites; back in November, I suggested that we include a member registration system, because it would not make sense for everyone to be able to upload data to the site, but I was veto’ed against. A couple of weeks later, all of a sudden, the request for a member system came in and I had to realize it, long story short: I believe that I understood the way the whole thing would have to be set-up a lot better than those that actually envisioned it.

After weeks of work, much of it being redundant, as in: building features, removing them and rebuilding them, we finally entered the home stretch and with only a couple of days to go, I was confident that we would be able to pull it off (we did!), yet, for one reason or another, it had to be a lot more difficult than it should have been:

Everyone who has ever worked with a live audio / video feed knows that a script is an absolute must, not because I have a hard time remembering things (I do), but because it is essential for everyone involved to know when something is going to happen and how long it is going to last.

It is safe to say that the team involved with the live feed begged for a script, yet we did not receive one. Due to the shuffling of the various clips, we could not make our own, yet the team lead had the audacity to complain about the clips not being played out perfectly in the dry-run.

These things simply annoy me to no end and I am happy, very happy that we are finally done with it. I have learned a lot in the past nine weeks: a bit about streaming with the Flash Media Server and the Darwin Server and a whole lot about team dynamics and how the lack thereof can make everything exponentially worse.

It is no secret that I love NRC.next, a newspaper that is aimed at people aged 25 to 35 with little to no sparetime. NRC.next is my main source of up-to-date information and provides me with the latest happenings in the world that I did not pick up through CNN.

One of the great things about NRC.next is that ever so often, there is some way to participate in the creation of the newspaper in one way or another; this time around, students from sister-college St. Joost Breda were offered a shot at getting their work published on the front page.

The guidelines were rather simple: students were tasked to come up with two pictures, one for the front page and one for the actual article.

The students had a mere week to find a solution and in the end, Sophie Verstappen, sophomore student of St. Joost, came through with an interesting picture that fit the overall theme of the article very well.

In more personal news: I have never been a photographer nor do I see myself ever becoming one, apart from the occasional snap I take just about everywhere I go, yet two of my pictures of this year’s Edu-Fair in Utrecht were used for a short article that gave a short account of the event.