Arnold Funken

Someone over at WordPress just fixed the blog theme I’m using since a while now. The fix causes the tags and categories of a posting now to be displayed, and even more just at the top of the posting. As I’ve been mostly generous with tags and categories, that third-party blog theme fix might hurt the visual impression/visual usability of my blog badly. (Though the contentual usability might win at the same time for the very same reason, as now navigation might become a bit more comfortable.)

Therefore, now I might need to deal with tags an categories seriously from now on…

NB: Still job-seeking; the company I had a promising interview with still didn’t come up with an offer.

2008/05/28

…is currently job-seeking.

2008/05/17

I’m after to ease to comprehend, learn, soak up new content. I’m interested in mechanisms of comprehension, reception and perception in general. Interaction between humans implicitly belongs there, so do communication and human-computer interaction.

The reason for that it’s old — originated from didactic approaches/misapproaches I encountered when I was a pupil. (I developed vocabulary trainer programs, you can imagine).

During my course of studies, my focus was on that. Courses like Interface Design, Usability, Human-Computer Interaction, Human Communication helped a lot to get a more deep insight, and having a strong affirmation towards to the mechanisms of comprehension, neurology, ethology and graphs did not actually harm. I’m just good at looking at things, even if they’re abstract, and to analyze them.

(Although I ran short in time to the end of my article on Why Humans Outrun Machine Interaction, it should give a good impression of how I put on a millionfold magnifying lens to get a clear look at a thing — and how I set up a similar time dilation when looking at interplays/interactions.)

Spin-off topics of my interest in communication, I might want to discuss with you too, are win:win situations, human resources/employment and economy in general. Social net communities clearly belong into this category, but they are not the only thing there.
 

I’m a long-time net user, joined in about 1994, set up my first blog in about 1998. This one blog here I started with the intend to become a better blogger, i.e. one who’s blogging every day. So, I chose to blog on a topic related to my job. But as the job’s gone, I’m dangling. I set the focus on developing social net communities. But to saturate my general interest that’s probably too narrow.

Therefore, I’m pondering to give a new title to the blog..

And I am open to job offers.

2008/03/01

Currently, I am working as a PHP programmer in a young company in Duesseldorf, Germany. I studied information economy, am quite deep in free software and open for anything that enables people.

The job’s after building a community, similar am I. While at work I still travail with PHP. (I’m coming from Perl and dropped it already quite a while ago, in favour of Ruby.) The next big thing at work might be to set up the tools for social platform using Rails.

So, I am tuned in to these matters. Some of them I find at work, some of them while I am at home, and syncing them until now happened by sending mails to colleagues who might been interested. I think, a blog might fulfill this task much more appropriately. Plus, aside of its archive service, I suspect a positive side-effect of it for me — growing some reputation here for providing interesting .. helpful links.

A word about the language of this blog. I am native German speaker but prefer writing English because of the flexibility of the language and the ease expressing ideas. Because of that, most of my postings here might go in English. However, it makes little sense to post about German matters in English, at least if the posting’s mainly advertising a link to a German page. Hence, there will be German postings here too, don’t get confused by that.

Summer Fun Projects

For this summer, I am planning a fun project.