As I said previously, I’m in Amsterdam for a long weekend. Just me and the missus. It’s Saturday evening and so far we’ve had a great time.

Got in to the centraal station friday morning and wandered west down one of the lanes looking for somewhere suitable for breakfast. Came across a coffee shop called Barney’s and stopped there for pancakes, eggs and bacon. Very tasty. We sat opposite some other english people who had just driven straight from Plymouth and parked outside. They seemed pretty boxed already, making their way through a large bag of something! I get the impression Barney’s is a popular spot as it features in the Lonely Planet.

Anyway, we headed to our hotel from there which isn’t far from the Vondelpark. One of the great things about Amsterdam is you can walk everywhere, although the tram is available if you’re lazy.
We’re staying at a b&b called Flynt. It is a small (3 rooms) family run place. The owners are very easy going (well they are dutch). There is a kitchen which is well stocked and we are free to help ourselves. This is good for them too as they don’t have to get up and make our breakfast! Wasn’t sure when we first arrived as they have a couple of dogs which kept barking. From experience you can forget a lie in with dogs in the house but they didn’t make any noise this morning - got up about 11. Now that is one of the real benefits of a trip like this. Since being a parent I can count the number of times I’ve slept to 11 on one hand.

Dutch Influence and Power

Walking around Amsterdam felt so familiar. I know I’ve been here before but it was different. Having just recently been to New York it occured to me that the two cities are incredibly similar. I don’t know if I’ve got this wrong but I seem to remember that NY was originally called New Amsterdam in its founding days. Then the brits got their mits on it and changed the name. The architecture is strikingly similar. Beautiful tall, thin terrace houses. I love the place. The edge it has on New York is the scale and the canals. It is just a beautiful city. Combine that with the dutch attitude and you can’t get much better.

It seems the dutch influence on the world is far greater than we self-centred Brits realise. There are so many shops and banks here that I know realise are actually Dutch owned. Thinking about even LexisNexis is Dutch owned - Reed Elsevier (world’s 3rd largest publishing house) has it’s headquarters round here somewhere.

Another Dutch super power based here in the dam is Heineken. We visited their brewery today. It is a good tour. Value for money too as for11 euro entry you also get three beers through the course of the tour. The whole thing is very modern. Not sure when it opened but it was all based around a lot of audio/visual entertainment including various interactive intranet, websites etc. They showed a very impressive corporate showreel that made you want to sign up exclusively to Heineken for the rest of your drinking live. The presentation was amzingly slick with a soundtrack by Tiesto. It seems they own 80 different brands of beer including Amstel, Murphy’s and Cruz Campo. Just shows, here we are thinking there are all these different breweries providing a diverse drinking choice when actually they’re all owned by a handful of major players. Guess the same could be said of most industries.

The Real Amsterdam

One thing that I have discovered about Amsterdam this time round is that there is so much more to it than the Centrum district with it’s red light sleaze, coffee shops and cheap food. This time we been all round the Jordaan district, checking out the boutiques in the 9 lanes (?) area.

Last night we ate at Brasserie Harkema in lower Centrum. The venue is a vast old warehouse beautifully designed and the food was excellent. We had three courses (including a perfect steak), two glasses of white and a bottle of red and the bill was 80 euros. You can’t knock that. After that we had a few drinks at Bar Bep followed by a couple at the Supper Club. I recommend all of them - we were definitely in the minority as non-dutch.

Today we made our way east from the hotel through the Vondelpark and what I can only describe as the ‘kensington” of Amstrdam. The area is beautiful. Away from the canals true, but it is made up of wide, quiet avenues of imposing townhouses and real villagey/community feel. I loved it. That took us to great street market along the Albert Cuypstraat where we ate frites with mayo. From there we just meandered up the east side of the city and back down towards the hotel. I even picked up a new pair of shoes for 50 euros!

The plan tonight is, seeing as we’re here, we’ll check out a sex show. I skipped all that previously but it’s one of those things that has to be done really!

I just spent the last week out in the States. I flew out to Dayton, Ohio on the Sunday where I spent the week through to Friday and then jumped on the plane to New York for a couple of days.

The reason for my trip to Dayton was that the LexisNexis UX department had their second annual UX week. This involved bringing together members of the team from across the States and Europe to participate in activities and talks on a range of usability subjects.

I hadn’t expected to go. I have handed in my notice with the company, leaving on the 1st of June, so thought I’d miss out and have to stay in London to focus on finishing off my project commitments. As it turned out I was able to get on top of this and so given the chance to fly over and take part.

As a result, I was suddenly put in the position of having to give a presentation on the Monday, after lunch, on the subject of accessibility. Given the short notice I spent the flight over writing up my notes for the slides in a word document, then when I got to my hotel at 4:30pm local time I set to work putting it all together in a flash presentation. Luckily I was able to use the Monday morning to wrap it up, adding the finishing touches. I’d hoped to cover more, including a review of the global product and perhaps some images to break it up but needless to say I ran out of time.

However, I think the depth of the information made the presentation credible, even if i struggled at times to remember the flow (having not had time to practice and review). I will upload the presentation to my site shortly so that it available for download.

The rest of the week was fun. Lots of things to keep us busy including, on the Thursday, a visual design competition. I had originally come up with the idea as a test across all disciplines. The test covering all aspects of interface design. I thought it would be interesting to see how each discipline coped with having to handle over areas of the process. In my mind I thought it would show that visual designer were the most prepared to handle other roles and could take a project from concept to completion.

The reality was that only visual design took part so it really just became a visual design test. In my mind it was a chance for us to step away from branding convention and try something new. I reality, on review it seemed that the designers couldn’t break away from existing visual styling. To be honest I was disappointed with the results. We only had 2 to 3 hours to come up with something but that is no excuse. It was a great opportunity for everyone to showcase their skills but it never materialized.

The resulting presentation at the end of the day to the whole of UX was fairly predictable too. I think people missed the point of the exercise and couldn’t see past ‘brand’ conventions. My design that had an underlying LexisNexis feel but tackled the brand in a completely different way:

• focused on ‘the grid’ removing the use of red
• tackled the poor navigation of the existing interface
• incorporated some marketing techniques
• introduced new graphical elements for a web 2.0 feel

As Carl pointed out, the other designs were essentially cut and pastes of other interface designs with the appropriate content overlaid.Click here to see my design.

On a social level it was great to see everyone, meet those I’d only spoken to by phone, and then get the chance to say goodbye one last time.

Before returning to London, I did a short stop over in New York, staying with my friend Andy just off 72nd & Broadway.
It didn’t look like we were going to make it at first. I had a car all week, a ford explorer, which I dropped at the airport on Friday afternoon but when we checked in all flights to New York were canceled. I ended up hiring a mini-van and driving everyone to Cincinnati so we could make a flight to JFK! On the way we passed a major crash on the opposite side of the freeway with cars flipped all over the place. Nasty.

Got in to NY at 10 and cabbed it to Broadway. Made it to Andy’s for 11 and went out to his local. Just like Cheers, everyone knew his name. Ha. Despite this we managed to drag ourselves down to a bar and watch the FA cup final the next morning.

That afternoon I went for a run round Central Park. Did a loop of the perimeter and then round the reservoir in the middle, clocking up about 16km. The result of this is that I have broken 500km since I started with Nike +! Pretty good going I reckon. Hopefully I’ll be well clear of 1000km before the end of the year.

Saturday night I met up with the other LexisNexis guys and went out for dinner at an over priced restaurant called Smith & Wollensky. They do steaks, the cheapest which is about £30. They might be big but you don’t really need that much food anyway. Plus, the wine was even more of a skank. I bought a bottle of house red and a white, and the price was roughly £60!! So much for America being cheaper the the UK. That really left a sour taste in the mouth. Especially when there are so many great, cheap places to go.

That aside I had a fun night. We met up with Andy again and went to a few bars in the West Village. The night turned vague toward the end, which I think was about 4am?

The pity of the trip was that I had so much work to do for Caroline Sylge’s website that I spent the whole of Sunday working until I got the plane back to the UK.

Who knows when I’ll next head state side. I hope it’s before my new jeans wear out!

If you happen to have a spare 5 minutes I suggest you check out my friend Carl Hubbers’ blog. He is currently ‘on tour’ with his kiwi mates sailing round the Caribbean following his fellow country men as they surprise everyone with their knowledge of cricket, even beating the English in the first game.

Despite spending every day on a boat he has managed to update his blog daily with tales of their tomfoolery. Check it out…