That Was The Week That Was — 9th June 2019

Headed to Heidelberg on the Tuesday as I was speaking at a Trend Micro Partner Talk event the next morning. I was giving the keynote as well as showing the work I had created just for the event from attendee data.

I wasn't really prepared for the wall of heat that hit me when the plane door opened after landing in Frankfurt. It was around 30 degrees — freak weather apparently — but I wasn't complaining just yet. I'd booked the train to Heidelberg via the Train Line app, which I use all the time for my train travel and it made things that much easier as I didn't need to mess with ticket terminals once arriving in Germany. On getting to the hotel at about 8pm I ordered the obligatory club sandwich (hotel law) and then worked on the final bits of my talk.

The talk itself went really well. There was even a large queue of people asking me to sign the work I had made as an A5 postcard. Afterwards I had a whole day in which to wander around the beautiful town of Heidelberg. Apparently in a town of 160,000 people they have over 12 million tourists — many of whom are American on a pilgrimage to see where Elvis was stationed during the second world war.

As I wandered around in the crazy heat, I found refuge in a nice little stationery shop in the hope I could buy a new fountain pen either from Lamy or Kaweco — both of which are Heidelberg brands. I left a few minutes later with a red Kaweco sport and associated accessories. I then went from place to place just writing stuff. Have to say I was loving this new pen.

I'm always fascinated by the individual compartments on the first class trains you often find in Germany. As I pulled apart the sliding door it reminded me of no particular scene from Poirot as I took my seat amongst the strangers. Unlike in those books, the journey passed without incident — murder or otherwise.

After getting back at midnight on the Wednesday night, the next day was putting together my talk for the Birmingham Design Festival which I was speaking at on the Friday — my last talk in the diary till October.

A contract came through for my next piece of work — a short period of prototyping that I can hopefully talk about soon. The payment terms of fourteen days was nice to see on a corporate contract; pretty unusual.

I installed a new piece of software called Runway — essentially machine learning for artists. Had a quick look at it but haven't played with it too much yet though something I'll certainly be looking into more.

New sneakers in the form of Tretorn Racket arrived. Love them, just need to only wear when not raining.

On the Friday I headed to the Birmingham Design Festival to give a talk about my work with data and how I got out of last year's creative rut. Even though it was pouring with rain it thankfully didn't stop people turning up to hear my talk and ask some great questions at the end.

Eventually getting home after two delayed trains — making me jealous of German trains again — I was glad to not be travelling anywhere in the coming weeks.