Some photos from Thursday in Amsterdam

As I said in the last post, I went with ESTG (the Everyday Science and Technology Group–Phil Bell’s group pretty much) to Amsterdam. We broke up into three parties after visiting Puccini, a chocolate store (apparently, quite famous), and the Bloemenmarkt (flower market) together.







Some people went off the Anne Frank house, some to the Van Gogh Museum, and others who had been to those places before checked out the Red Light District. Then we all met back at the central plaza at 6:30. Turns out the Anne Frank house was closed for some special reason that day, and the Van Gogh folk decided to shop instead since there was so little time before the museum closed (and since we found a cool shop called Hanazuki apparently run by an artists’ collective by the same name). šŸ™‚

Then Giovanna and I stayed to try to find a cool shop we found on Tuesday and catch dinner in Amsterdam. The rest of them went back to Utrecht and got dinner over there.

The shop we found was open! Lots of cool little figurines and action figures designed by (street, urban, hip-hop, manga, skater culture) artists. Not sure how to describe it, but they’re pretty popular in magazines like Giant Robot.







Afterwards, Giovanna and I ate a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place, called Wing Kee, that was really quite good! [Edit: Looking it up on the web (now that I’m back in the States), one reviewer claims it’s the best Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam!]

OMG lots of stuff

but I’ll have to write about it in more detail later. Here’s a real quick summary:

  • I went with another student to Amsterdam on Tuesday while pre-conference workshops were going on. We mostly walked around the shopping district and downtown. We ended with the Red Light District and an Irish pub. It was pretty fun. The Red Light District was underwhelming, imho, but I think we went too early to see anything and it was broad daylight.
  • On Wed, attended the conference and then skipped out of the late afternoon stuff to sleep. Damn that jetlag. Went to dinner with a bunch of CoE folk including a few alums.
  • On Thursday, I was part of a presentation/poster session on expertise development in everyday contexts. I think it went well and I got lots of helpful feedback on my poster and ideas. Here’s a copy of the poster I used. Later, I’ll make a page on this site detailing the drafts and the eventual paper I’m writing based off the poster.

Chen Leet Noobs poster


  • Then the ESTG group went to Amsterdam again. šŸ™‚

no more free access from my hotel…

So, I got stuck in a smoking room which was causing me problems breathing while I was sleeping. I was able to get switched to a non-smoking room (with no view, no remote control, and 2 broken light bulbs). Unfortunately, the free hotspot I was able to get from my old room isn’t reachable. šŸ™

So, updates sporadically.

Sitting in the opening presentation now… Normally, I’d try live blogging, but screw it.

The Netherlands

So I’m sitting in my room at the NH Centre Utrecht hotel writing this post. It’s a little after midnight, local time, which I guess means it’s like 4pm Pacific and still Monday…

I’m here for a conference called ICLS 2008, the International Conference for the Learning Sciences, run by ISLS (replace “Conference” with “Society”). It’s held every two years, and this year it’s at the Utrecht University in The Netherlands. My first time in Europe! Wow!

Continue reading The Netherlands →

A real life Myst-like game!

Mystery on Fifth Avenue

(via NYTimes.com)

This is totally awesome. Check out the slideshow!

An adventure game with stolen art assets from other games

Limbo of the Lost or Oblivion?
via GamePlasma.com

Man, this is crazy! I wonder if they hired a contract artist who did it or if the developers fully knew what they were doing or what…

World of World of Warcraft


‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

from The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

via Terror Nova

Want to know what I’m doing this summer?

Intelligence community seeks to go virtual

I’ll be in San Jose from July 13 to August 9.
While not working for DNI, I hope to hang out with LIFE people from Stanford and, of course, play games with friends who live in the bay area. šŸ™‚

My website was down

my web hosting company had a fire!Ā  But it’s back up now.Ā  yay!

Mass Effect Review

Mass Effect Review // PC /// Eurogamer

Nice review that considers Mass Effect from a higher level regarding its story and immersiveness, as opposed to basic review of the gameplay since it’s pretty much the same as the Xbox 360 version.

 

sporadic ramblings of a gamer in academia