Kanban board for my 12 year old son

Last week my oldest son and I wiped the family whiteboard in our entrance hall and turned it into a Kanban board. The reason for this was that he, my son, was facing a period with a lot of tests at school. He's 12 and in his second year of Gymnasium. And he realised that in the coming weeks there would be a lot of tests as we're approach the end of the 3rd quarter of the school year. There was a slight sense of panic at the time, because he wasn't convinced he could prepare for all tests sufficiently.
So in order to make it more visible to him what needed to be done, and what was already done, we turned the family whiteboard into his Kanban board. With 4 columns (planned, to-do, doing and done) we choose a simple but pragmatic approach. Every gradable homework would be written down on a post-it and we choose the pink post-its for this, it's the 'Grade Ticket'. And the date of the test or on which a paper or report had to be handed in would written on the card as well as some description. The card would be placed in the column Planned. This way we make it visual what's coming up in the next few weeks.

Grade Tickets that need to be worked on are accompanied by Task Tickets, which are either yellow or green, depending on the color of the post-it at hand. This is for every Grade Ticket that my son feels as needed to be worked on. The selection criteria being that he needs to be able to finish all the work to be done before the due date without being overwhelmed with all the work to be done so he still has time to play Rainbow Six Siege and Fortnite Battle Royal with his buddies.

Like I said, we're very pragmatic about this, and I am sure that quite a few of you won't agree that this is a real Kanban Board, but my son and I don't care as long as it works. By being pragmatic, we have every Task Ticket dated as well, meaning that we write the date on which the task should be completed on it. After a week working with the board, this also means that the date means the date on which the task is actually done. The tasks are very simple ones, obviously, because they can be started and completed on the same day. These could be tasks like "Learn the translation of 25 words in Latin" or "Learn to apply the first law of physics in a vacuum". As long as it can be started and finished in a day.

What my son gets from this, is a clear overview of what tests and papers are due at what date. What tasks he needs to work on to study for the test or to hand in a paper. And when to do it. What tasks (still) need to be done today, and what has been done for a particular test. Every time he walks down the stairs because that's where the whiteboard is fitted to the wall, at the end of the stairs. There is no need to open his laptop to check on his assignments in some system provided by school, nor does he need to open his agenda. There is absolutely no need to do anything for him to know what he needs to do. "In yer face visualisation."

What my wife and I get from this, is that we now know exactly what tests he has, and what our son has already done in order to prepare for the test. We get better insights into how he's doing in relation to what he should be doing. Without having to ask all the time, which removes a lot of tension and irritation from our home.

Of course we have implemented some metrics as well. Reason being that this is an experiment so we need to know whether or not this is beneficiary for primarily our son. The metrics we're gathering are first and for all about whether or not our son feels that he is more in control of his tests and papers and the work to be done. We want to know whether the panic-metric is going down in the coming weeks. Another metric we're keeping is how much time he can play Rainbow Six Siege and Fortnite Battle Royal with his buddies. He has a 'screen allowance' of 1 hour on a schoolday and 2 hours on a non-school day. Every day he's able to spend his full allowance is counted and we're interested in whether or not he reaches the maximum possible time playing those games. And then we're keeping track of his grades and are expecting to see the same grades as before or better. Where we do factor in the subjects of the tests and the amount of tests in a single week and so on. So we compare the grades with the final few weeks of the previous periods.

So far we have some results already. First of all, our son is feeling definitely more in control and has greater confidence that he's preparing sufficiently for the tests. One of the reasons is, his words; "because I can now see what I need to do when I come down the stairs so I have less worries that I forget about a test". Another great aspect is that he too is less frustrated because we are not asking him all the time how he's doing with his home work. Already we trust him more and he is receiving more freedom, he's more autonomous, to determine when to do what. So far he has also played through all of his allowance and finished a book. So it seems he does have more time to spare. No grades yet, but we're confident.

So far, our Student's Kanban Board seems to address our son's problems, I guess we do have problem/solution fit. And our son is now using the board without any help and without any significant effort. So I guess we also have product/market fit. (our son is our market in this case).

Arc-E-Tect - Iwan Eising

Disclaimer: This article was cross-posted on the Arc-E-Tect blog and LinkedIn. The text very explicitly communicates my own personal views, experiences and practices. Any similarities with the views, experiences and practices of any of my previous or current clients, customers or employers are strictly coincidental. This post is therefore my own, and I am the sole author of it and am the sole copyright holder of it.

Book review: A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some hardship the author has endured. It puts everything into perspective. From a 'must read' perspective this deserves 4 stars. Some episodes are a bit too superhero'ish, but otherwise it's a 5 star book. But the writing style puts it on 3 stars instead. It annoyed me at times, but then I put it back to 4 stars because this story is worth spreading.
I would actually like to see this book as a mandatory read on every school in the western world... 1st year in high-school.

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Book review: Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT by Martha Heller

Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT by Martha Heller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First off, I bought this book as I loved the CIO Paradox and was looking forward to new insights on the topic. Currently involved in Agile Transformations and coaching SMB's in using IT more effectively instead of efficiently I was interested in reading on how IT can position itself as 'The Business'.

Unfortunately this is merely a book full of quotes with embellishments recorded by the author. Unlike the CIO Paradox, this book doesn't provide any insights as to what to do to actually become the business being IT. It does tell the stories of some CIO's that apparently succeeded. I say apparently, because the author leaves us readers dangling. In addition, she also fails in describing the commonalities between the interviewed CIO's and their approach towards the topic.

That said, there are some extremely interesting insights from some CIO's that struck a cord with me, and I immediately understood the value of these in my day to day activities. That's why this is a 3 star book and not a 2 star.

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Book review: The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin P. Williams

The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin P. Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A short little book that is helpful even after the first couple of pages. It explains thoroughly in a practical and useful way how to write texts, in any fashion. It's not so much about the text itself, but all about how to design your texts. What works and what not, where the author clearly defines 'works' as 'somebody is ready what you have written'.
Too often I struggle with writing reports, documents, blogs, CV's, cover letters etc. Fiddling around with fonts, colors, styles, etc. I now feel way more confident in that I can style my documents more effectively. And while typing this, I realize that pretty much everything I learned by reading this book has nog been consciously applied in this book review. Shame on me. I guess.

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Book review: The Winter Over by Matthew Iden

The Winter Over by Matthew Iden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very captivating story about a research facility. As the story progresses and unfolds, the secrets are uncovered at the same pace as I was reading the story and drew my own conclusions. No far fetched plot turns. Although the revelation of the evildoer wasn't really surprising, it was still very interesting.

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Book review: Only the Truth by Adam Croft

Only the Truth by Adam Croft
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The author is too pretentious and wanting too much to write something good, turning it into something bad. In the acknowledgement section at the back of the book he's referring to his bestseller. I feel that he tried too much to out-do himself and write something better, failing miserably at that effort.
I'm not really sure why people would give this book more than just 1 star. The story is way too far fetched, the characters behave way too artificial and the plot-twists are really bad and make no sense. There's too much happening that doesn't warrant the plot. The timeline is really not matching with the story and the money spend by the main characters and their worry about the money they have is really absolutely not accurate.
There's actually two stories in one book here. The main story and some background story of the main character and the stuff that happened in his childhood. That story was actually fairly well written and was interesting and didn't have any added value towards the main story.

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Xbox One Tip: Buy props for your avatar with a child account

Hi,

The other day my son wanted to pimp his Xbox Live avatar. So we went online with our Xbox One and checked all the props you can get for Xbox avatars... and on page 14 of the props we found one where the avatar would be doing a parcours run. My son was thrilled since he's learning how to freerun, so this was totally up his alley.

Next step was for me to go online and change his settings so he could buy stuff from the Xbox store. I've setup his account such that he can only download free apps and games and all because my credit card is attached to his account. Xbox Live Gold is paid that way.
After changing his account such that he could buy stuff, we tried to buy his avatar a parcours animation.
This is when the trouble started, because still he wasn't able to buy the props for his avatar.

Next day I went online to look for some answers, and during a chat session with a very friendly Microsoft support engineer I learned that when you have a child account, you can only buy avatar stuff on an Xbox 360 console... luckily for us, I still do have an Xbox 360, two in fact. So we went onto the the Xbox 360 and looked for the parcours prop... no luck because it's an Xbox One only prop. Bummer.

Changing his account to an adult account wouldn't help either since they look at the age of the person holding an account. I guess that's correct with the credit card attached to an account and all.

I was told Microsoft is working on this, but till then, no luck for my son. He's now enjoying his Ilo Milo prop with his avatar.

I hope this little post is off help to you,

Iwan

Book review: Secret Ally (A Halo story) by Michael Blue

Secret Ally (A Halo story): by Michael Blue
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

First of all; I was getting the feeling the author is not at all aware of the Halo universe. Although the action parts of the book were decent, they made no sense considering the parts about the Master Chief. Additionally, the timelines with the rest of the Halo universe are completely off.
Then there's the stuff about the Forerunners. Greg Bear wrote the 'truth' about the Forerunners and the relation with the humans. Secret Ally is taking a completely different tack on it.

The romance in this story and the presumably erotic parts are... well... they're so artificial, as if the author had to put something in there. Apart from the countless spelling and grammar errors in the book (no publisher doing some proof-editing?) the timeline in the book is quite often incorrect.

Nope, this is one baaaaad book about the Halo universe. 343 Industries should have it pulled from the shelves.

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Iwan
--
Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

Book review: The New New Thing, ... by Michael Lewis

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If not anything else, this book is mighty inspiring. Obviously Jim Clark is painted as a hero, but that's not important, what is important is that is paints a picture of how the democratization of the computer-world, and the Internet in particular, has changed the role of the engineer. Jim Clark is one of the first people to turn the nerd, the geek into a cool dude, one that leads instead of follows.
I particularly liked the passages on Hyperion, the sailboat with the highest mast, they were explaining a lot about the zeitgeist of those days and are amazingly comic as they convey the huge gap between the geeks and the computer illeterates very accurately.
Still remembering the days where you could make millions with just selling a domain you previously registered and the record IPO's that were day to day business it is hard to imagine nowadays that there was no internet, no online services that prevented you from leaving your home for something mundane as shopping.

I consider The New New Thing... as one of the must reads for anybody that is interested in being an entrepreneur and thinks about startups.

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Iwan
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Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

Book Review: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is one of those books I started and although I wasn't really captivated by it, I did want to know the ending. I felt there had to be a lot of symbolism in the story, but that was not really for me I guess. An awful lot of times I felt that the author just turned somebody into a god in order to tie up some loose ends in the story.
Well I'm happy I read the book, so now I don't need to wait for the TV series which was announced and which was actually the reason to get the book and read it.


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Iwan
--
Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

Teach them to fish instead of feed them fish!

Sometimes I blog about the movies I've seen, the books I've read or about the people around me. And every now and again I realise something and choose to share.

Today I had a discussion with my wife about how to motivate children and one thing let to another... inside my head... and I realised that motivation is something that is for all ages. Also, I listened to the Freakonomics podcast about 'grid' which is really insightful.

Anyhow, the discussion was about how to get kids to do what you want them to do although they don't want to do it. A lot to do about school you can imagine. But in general, a lot of my work is about getting people to do stuff that they are not really inclined to do.

Are they lacking intrinsic motivation? Well to be honest, I'm not really buying into the idea that there's something like intrinsic motivation that powers (some) people. Unless it's the motivation to stay alive. Let's be clear, 'intrinsic' means 'by its very nature'. For a more formal definition of intrinsic you should click here.

But that's not important. What is important is to figure out how to motivate your kids to do something they would rather not do but you feel that they should do... I think that's every parents challenge at some point.
The obvious thing to do is one that has the most immediate result: Reward them for doing the work. But I feel that there's two good reasons not to do this.
1. It ingrains a sense of only doing something when there's a reward.
2. It makes something you feel should be 'normal' as something that is 'special'.

So my thoughts on this have changed since recently. Not to say that I was and am always a proponent of the positive view on things. Meaning that instead of punishing undesired behaviour, you should compliment on desired behaviour.

But nowadays I try to figure out what it is that my kids want, especially what they try to achieve and try to figure out what's holding them back. That could be anything, could be a lack of time, knowledge, abilities or funds. Point in case, my oldest son wants to buy a Game PC, one that allows him to play Ark: Survival on the highest detail level without any lag. Awesome were it not that these PC's are fairly expensive. Too expensive for him to buy at this point in time and since he's to young still to have a job after school, there's not really a way for him to earn some money and save up for the PC.
One way to address this as a parent is to use his desire for a Game PC to make him get good grades in school. Not to say that he's doing poorly in school, quite the opposite, he's doing really well at school. He might do better if he studied harder. My view is that his grades are excellent but I would like him to learn how to put in some effort to achieve something. The caveat here is that if we reward him with higher grades, I'm sure that he still isn't putting in the effort but does get rewarded. So, we could reward him for putting in the time for school. Spend more hours on his homework would earn him a reward, but that's still not really helping. Why would he spend more time on his homework if he's already doing well? Valid question with no real good answer in my point of view.
But there's a different approach to it, one that I think is favourable over rewarding. That's empowering.

So, he wants a Game PC and needs some money to buy the PC. He's too young to get a job so, there's a practical problem for him there. We want him to learn to put in some effort into achieving something, but the lesson we want to teach is that in order to achieve his goals he needs to put in some effort. So instead of helping him to achieve his goal of getting the funds for his PC, I help him to be able to get the funds. Sort of teaching him to fish, instead of getting him his fish.

How does this work?

He wants to earn money and his idea is to write an App and make millions with it. Although 250 Euro would be enough for now. So I teach him how to develop an App, with the promise that I will give him a loan that he can pay back with the revenu of the App, so he doesn't need to wait for the App to make a ton of money before he can buy the PC. I know from experience that having an App and make money out of it, is not a trivial task. And him developing the App is already the effort we want him to put in, it's the lesson to be thought.
So he'll get an interest free loan that will be paid for by the proceeds of the App. And the deal is, that he needs to think carefully about the App because the better the business model behind the App, the bigger the loan he can get. Things like "why would somebody want the App?" and "How to make money with the App?" are important.

So he'll get the money for his PC, if he puts the work into it. And what do we get? A son that understands that he's got his own success in his own hands, provided he's willing to work for it.

I call this "motivation by empowerment", it's the classic "teaching to fish instead feeding fish".

So does it work? I think so, because in the past week we've spend quite a bit of work together on programming, he's doing the work, I help him when needed. He's doing it, because he understands that it will allow him to develop the App. Of course he's not complaining that much, after all he gets to spend more time on his laptop than the one hour a day he's allowed to. There's the immediate reward for you: Embrace the empowerment and you'll get rewarded. It's the short term reward with the long term reward. But he's not free to do what he wants on the laptop, nope, he has to work for his App.

Back to the real world, work. A big chunk of my day to day work is making sure that my clients change their way of working, their culture, their methods and processes. There's no point in doing it for them, build their systems, thinker about their new processes and so on. Doesn't work that way, because once you leave, your achievements leave with you. Instead I focus on the fishing and do not care about the fish. No point for me to draw conclusions, instead I help my clients to conclude. It's a matter of empowering instead of anything else.

Movie review: The Great Wall IMAX 3D

Last Saturday I went to the Pathe Arena in Amsterdam. For those of you who don't know, it's a cineplex and they have an IMAX theater.
I went to see three movies, Split, The Great Wall IMAX 3D and Sleepless. In this post I will write a short review of The Great Wall IMAX 3D.

So The Great Wall, featuring among others Matt Damon is about an adventurer traveling with a band of fellow adventurers through medieval China, looking for gun powder, the black powder, which was in those days only a myth.
Our hero is good with bow and arrow and he's willing to show the Chinese that his mastery of this weapon is unrivaled.
Pretty soon in the movie we find out that there's a reason why the Great Wall was build by the Chinese. Okay, so in the movie's opening credits, they already tell us that the wall was build to keep out 'creatures' and we find out soon enough that this is true. Of course our protagonist elects to fight among the Chinese to fend off the critters and along the way gets to find out all about the mythical black powder.

So far for the story without spoilers. On with the review.

I can be short: The Great Wall is a good two hours of entertainment. See it in IMAX 3D and it'll be entertainment on a large scale. As far as the story goes, it's far from original. I would characterize it as a mediaval Independence Day. Up to the point that I think they swapped the laser guns with bow-and-arrows and that's about it. So no, the story is not original and far from impressive.
The special effects are pretty good, but I wasn't awe struck. Even the IMAX screen didn't blow me away.

All in all I would consider this a movie you should consider as your main attraction of entertainment on a night out. There's no dull moment during the 105 minutes as they were pretty action packed. No real annoying story quircks.

Overall verdict: Happy to have seen it, no reason to see it again. 3/5 stars

Yin and Yang, that's exactly who we are...

... it's just not clear who's who. By 'we' I mean my wife and I.

This morning I realised that my wife and I, as parents, are pretty much all the time in a perfect equilibrium. Perfectly balanced. For some reason, there's always the balance between mission command parenthood and mission control when it comes to our two kids.

As I've written before, I'm blessed with two amazingly awesome sons, at the time of this writing age 11 and 9 and a one-in-a-trillion wife, who is at the time of this writing still as young at heart as ever.

So this morning as pretty much all of the time we deal with one of the kids, one of us took the role of the strict and firm parent and automagically the other became the parent showing the patience and understanding. The result, a son that clearly knew what was expected of him, and was perfectly aware of the fact that he could rely on the support troops, the cavalry if you wish, when push came to shove.

Yup, my wife and I, Yin and Yang. Sometimes she's one and I'm the other, most of the times it's the other way around. And every now and again, we're confused and are both Yin. Or Yang for that matter.

The really nice thing about all of this, is that whenever I'm in doubt whether I handled some situation with either of the boys the right way, I know that there's a mom that will balance things out.


It's nice to be Yin, or Yang, when you know that there's a Yang, or Yin.

Iwan

One-on-one with your kids is awesome

My wife and I share two awesome kids. Both boys, two awesome boys.

With that out of the way, it's time to explain some things about our household. By now it shouldn't be a surprise when I disclose that we have to sons, my wife and I. And although the youngest is rather competitive, competition for our attention is not really an issue... anymore. It used to be, but that's history since quite some time.

Nowadays the boys have turned into even more different personalities then before. Which is a blessing since there's hardly a point to compare the two of them. Makes life a lot easier as a parent.
But since their 'personality divergence' is only increasing, it becomes more and more important to have those one-on-one moments with the boys. So there's time for the talks that you can have as a parent with your kid. You talk about them, about you, school, sports, etc. There's just no way to have the in depth talks when both boys are around. There's no unwillingness, it's just not doable.

So my wife and I agreed that in addition to our annual weekend together to celebrate our anniversary, just the two of us. We also are going to spend a weekend with the boys, one-on-one. So over the course of a year both of us have spend a weekend away with either of the boys. Consequently, the other spends time at home with the other boy. That way we get to spend time doing things either boy enjoys, talk about stuff either boy loves to talk about and we get the chance to discuss what we want to discuss with them, in a totally carefree environment.

Last weekend we had such a weekend. I've been spending the weekend with the youngest of the two, at home. My wife was away with the oldest. And it was awesome, for all four of us. It was unanimous.

Iwan

It's a new year... 2017, let's make it a happy new year

Hi everybody,

My first post in 2017 in this blog will be about what 2017 might have in store for my world.



But first, check out this link: Article for Backfield Group. It's an article, in Dutch, I wrote last year about the changing role of the project manager. There's also a blog post about this topic, which you can read here.





Now on to the good stuff, being 2017.

There's some awesome stuff coming up for me. The coolest thing happening this year, if all goes well, is that my boys will get their PADI OpenWater certificate this summer. Last year they finished their PADI Master Seal course.




Also planned for 2017 is finishing my Coursera Scala Course, which doesn't mean that I'll be a Scala developer, but it will mean that I actually understand what all that fuzz about functional programming and BigData and Map-Reduce and stuff is about.

Also pretty awesome is that at least in the first 6 months of this year, I will continue with assisting during the Science classes at the Columbusschool in Almere, the Netherlands. Teaching gifted children on how to think about science, how to apply it and how to become the next generations of big brains.



Writing the above mentioned article really inspired me and so maybe I'll be actually starting writing my first book and (self-)publish it. Time will be the bottleneck here, also because I'm really pumped about a startup a friend of mine asked me to work on together with her in the second half of this year.

So besides writing that book, a startup seems to be in my stars. What it's all about is still sort of a secret, and there's plenty of work to be done still, but we're really serious about it and our current commitments prevent us from already starting with it. Hmmmm, a delayed startup? Nope, the thinking is already there, it's just that doing that is postponed.


Of course, 2016 had enough in store for me to blog about, which I'll do in the coming period. So keep an eye out for this blog and you'll be able to catch up on my life in 2016.

Iwan
--
Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

Book Review: Firewall, by Andy McNab

Firewall by Andy McNab
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The fun part of the Nick Stone series is that the hero is not some sort of super special forces guy. He's fallible, human and has serious issues. I love the Seal Team Six No More books by Doug Murray, because the heroes die every now and then. But you know things will work out in the end. With the Nick Stone books all you know is that Nick will survive because there's another book in the Nick Stone series. That's all you know, for the rest the book stays wide open.
Furthermore, it is cleat that McNab is only writing what he knows about. There's no tech mumbo jumbo that makes no sense to the technical inclined reader. McNab knows about being in 'a drama' and how to get out of it. This part is significant because the story is about hi-tec computer stuff, and at no point McNab is pretending to understand that stuff, instead he makes it very clear he doesn't through Nick Stone. But he also makes it clear that this is irrelevant. It's a motive for the baddies in the story, but the details are left out, because they don't matter.

I can recommend this book to all of you that like thrillers about special forces fellas that are not super heroes.

View all my reviews


Iwan
--
Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

Hello...? Hello...? HELLO! Are you still there?

Hi,

It's been a while, like over 3 years, since I last posted on this blog. I thought it was time again to spend some time here instead of over at my IT Architecture and Strategy blog.

So don't expect too much this time around. Just some scene setting for you to put my posts back into context again.

This blog will be about me and my life in the Netherlands... and outside of the Netherlands, seen from a Dutch point of view. And rest assured, it doesn't mean that it will be about how somebody stoned like a donkey, wearing wooden shoes to the brothel is looking at whatever he sees.

So, me. Yeah well. Still got a wife, same one as before, and two kids, also the same. Although they're all a bit older than 3 years ago. And I live in the Netherlands, still. So no Walking like an Egyptian. I've been traveling around the globe for business as well as pleasure. And was connected to two startups in the past couple of years. One being Only Once BV and the other being dopay.

Still love to visit the movies and to play games on one of my Xboxes. Also still enjoying some TV series and reading a lot for somebody with slightly over 24 hours in a day. Oh yeah, I started assisting with science lessons in two groups with gifted children to make their days in school just a bit more interesting than usual.

And that my dear reader is about all for this time and I hope that I will be able to publish a new post in the really near future.


Iwan
--
Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

The dust has settled, please let's not get religious

About a month ago, Microsoft unveiled their new console, the Xbox One which is due to be released in November. Yes, I'm already saving up some money to get me One. This was months after Sony had unveiled its PS4, although they never really unveiled their new console until this month's E3. For me the Nintendo has never been an option as they're always too much focused on, well games for kids. And yes, I know, I'm the conscious parent and think the Xbox 360 is superior over the PS3 because of Microsoft's view on how to safeguard the kids from playing those games that I as a parent deem not suitable for my kids. It's kind of counter intuitive that I don't have a Wii in my home. I was actually planning to buy one, but Nintendo only had the white console at the time and my wife just agreed to get brand new AV components in our house, lest they were black. Sorry Nintendo. And when they released the black Wii and after I had come up with a good excuse to get one, Microsoft announced the Kinect, and out the door went my excuse to get the Wii. I'm still considering myself luck for that. The Kinect beats the Wii.
I do have a PS3, but only because the 360 doesn't have a Blu-Ray player.

So, back to the new line up. PS4 versus the Xbox One (X1 for short in this post).

It's interesting to see that the X1 will have a Blu-Ray drive, ditching the DVD drive and the necessity of putting games on multiple discs. Something Sony had already done with the P3. Does this mean that Microsoft is going to cannibalize it's own Xbox Video service by allowing consumers to buy movies on BD and play them on the X1? Probably, but this is, I think, a strategic move to get the X1 to be the entertainment hub in our living room. It'll most certainly push the PS3 I own out of the livingroom, probably move it to our entertainment room, it's on the top floor of our home with a beamer (1080i, 720p) and a pretty decent 7.1 sound system hooked up to it. I got the PS3 back in the day solely for the BluRay drive in it. The kids play every now and again Little Big Planet on it. But hardly to be honest.
From what I've seen so far, Sony is still banking on the game playing crowd. Although music and movie streaming is still there and seams to be more prominently than on the PS3, they seem to be focusing on the games. To be honest, I think the PS4 looks better than the X1, from the outside. From the inside I don't care too much. For me it's all about the games, up to a point of course. The Wii has never been up to par with the rest of the previous next-gen consoles. The thing is that with great power comes great, well opportunities. And where I have seen the 360 and the PS3 shine is not only in enhanced graphics, but more importantly in great AI.This seems to be the area where the new next gen consoles will venture. They'll have to. And from that perspective the X1's cloud capabilities seem to be the ones that will make a difference.

Back to the new consoles. Just a little side step. Since I have no clue as to create an inset, here's the text I wanted to put there. The X1 is about €100 more expensive at release time over the PS4. But it does mean that you'll have the Kinect with it and online multi-player. Both you'll have to buy with the PS4 in addition to the console. So I guess from a price perspective, it's not that different. Although I wouldn't mind getting the X1 without the Kinect. I have 4 360's in my home and one with an RRoD, but that doesn't count. The 360's are for playing games (living room and my entertainment room) and one for the bedroom where it is used as a Media Center Extender. Like I stated earlier, my entertainment eco system is based around Microsoft products.
In case you were counting, yes, I have one spare Xbox. It's just there being a spare 360. I bought it because I was living elsewhere and wanted a 360 there as well. With a Kinect, so now I have two Kinects as well. One is spare and I don't use it. And this is exactly my point, I don't need a Kinect with every Xbox I have. More over because it's not really usable beyond games in the Netherlands. Yup Halo Waypoint supports the voice commands, but it only understands the English voice commands, so it's virtually unusable by my two kids (age 6 and 8) as their English is not good enough to control the 360 by voice.
So dropping the X1's price by €100 and not getting the Kinect would be a perfect option.

Based on what I've seen so far from both the PS4 and the X1, I think the X1 is more for me. I really like the additional capabilities of the X1 in terms of being my living room media hub. But I'm fully aware that these are most likely never going to find their way to the Netherlands. If Microsoft would strike a deal with Ziggo and UPC, Holland's two main cable companies, this would be a really cool step forward in their service. Having an X1 instead of the UPC Horizon set-top box would be a game changer. But I am fully aware that Holland is a very small market compared to Germany, UK, France when talking about Europe. Still I hope Microsoft is reading this blog and taking it to heart.
Then there's Sony with the new PS4 and what it can do. When it boils down to games, they've already shown some pretty sweet stuff. Killzone looks darn dandy on the new console and games like Destiny are not exclusive titles either. My question would be what games will be available when I want to buy the new console... and what about my friends, will they stay with their 360 and move to the X1, or move from PS3 to X1 or from 360 to PS4?

And one really, really important aspect is about how I can control my kids concerning their gaming habits. I'm very impressed by Microsoft in this regard and would like to see more. I devoted my previous blog post to this aspect. Sony is still not handling this very well. On the PS3 there's nothing existing like that, or at least nothing comparable to what Microsoft is offering.

This is the end of this post, but definitely not the end of this topic, not for me.

10 things I would like to see in the new Xbox, as a parent

Hi,

Today, May 21st, Microsoft will announce their new game console. It goes by numerous names on the interweb, but I stick with Xbox NG for now. NG obviously stands for Next Gen.
Of course there's been a lot of speculation already about what it will be able to do and how it will be revolutionary and all, but there are some things missing in the current Xbox that I would like to see in the new one.

In this blog post I'm focusing on those features that I think are the competitive edge of the Xbox 360 over the PS3 and the Wii. Based on what I know, so I might be wrong here and there. And those features I'm singling out are related to me being a parent.

Just for context, I'm a dad of two sons, 6 and 8, and both love the Xbox. They love 'screens' in general and playing games in particular. Since my wife and I are of the opinion that not all games are suitable for kids their age, we've been very conscious about what games they play. This has been the case ever since the oldest turned 4, this is when we started allowing him play games. Nature helped us until then as the controller was too big for his hands, so he couldn't play even if he wanted.
One of the main feats of the Xbox over the competition is the notion of Microsoft that the Xbox will most likely be used in the living room where it will be accessible by all members of the family, including the (young) kids. This means that the Xbox has a set of very comprehensive controls accessible for parents if they want to do so. This ranges from limiting the amount of time the Xbox can be used (on daily or weekly basis) as well as limiting what games can be played. This is based on the age rating of the game. In addition, you can lock the online experience, meaning that you can close down those features of the Xbox that are related to the online functionality, like creating Xbox Live accounts. Related to accounts, you can also nominate an account to be a child account, this is related to the date of birth of the gamer as set in her Microsoft Live account. You're not 18 yet? You're a child and that means you can't just play the games you want... that is if your parents are like that. And both my wife and I are like that.

So what have we set up?
Well the boys can only play for 2 hours a day. We stick with the weekends only, which starts on Friday. And they can play those games that are rated 12 or below. That is, there might be games rated for an older audience that we think suitable for them as well, like Monday Night Combat, which is rated 16. After playing it myself, I added it to the list of games that don't need a code to be entered prior to playing it. Our sons know that if a game requires a code, daddy needs to play it first before they're allowed to play it.
I've also locked down with whom they can friend, meaning that when they're accepting a friend-request, either my wife or myself need to log into our own account and allow the request. The limitation is as far as that they are only allowed to play games online with friends. And they can only accept content from friends. Their profiles are only accessible to friends as well. Are we paranoid? I don't think so. My wife and I feel that kids their age are not fully appreciating the risks of the internet and online communities so some guidance of mom and dad is needed.

Now what would I like to see in the Xbox NG?

1) The single one thing I would like to see is the ability to differentiate between games and media. Currently the time limits are for using the Xbox, so when set to 2 hours as we have, I'm facing this limit even when listening to Xbox Music, watching a DVD, watching a movie on Xbox Video. And it is also imposed when using the Xbox as a Media Center Extender. I want to limit the Xbox' use to games only.

2) Have the parental controls be completely account based, again, especially for the time limits this is important. Like I stated, the limit is for using the Xbox, it doesn't discriminate between accounts. So when I do a workout in the morning playing Nike+ which takes an hour, the time available on the Xbox for the rest of the family (my sons) is only one hour for that day. Same goes for when only one of my sons is playing, he consumes the 'play time' for both of them.
I know you can extend the time once you run out, but that then means that everybody can play more on the Xbox.
Having this ability would also allow my wife and myself to award good (school) performance with Xbox time.

3) Be notified when an account is logged in and keep track of which games the account is playing. We have 3 Xbox's in our home, my sons accounts are stored in the Cloud, so they can play on any of the three consoles and if wanted, they can play at a friend's home with their own account. But I would like to be able to know that they're playing, when they're playing and what they're playing. An email notification would be nice to receive when they log in and an once they log out, an overview of the games they played.

4) Include age ratings to what you can buy on Xbox Marketplace. Currently you can buy anything on the marketplace once you have access and points or access to a credit card. I blocked purchases because of this. I would like to be able to give my sons some MS points that they can spend in the market place on content that is based on the age rating suitable for them. Or in case that I put a game on the list of games not needing the passcode, on content related to that game.

5) Well, see 4. That implies that limitations to game ratings shouldn't be limited to the Xbox but to the account in general. And the white list of games of a older age rating should also be with an account.

6) Add the option to never store an account's password unless a parent approves. This would allow my kids to download their profile on a friend's Xbox and play. But as soon as they log out, the account is no longer usable unless they log in again. In addition, it would be nice if the log in could be handled by the parent remotely. Send an email to the parent with a link, you open the link and the account is unlocked on a remote system. On our own consoles I would be setting it up that the password is stored.

7) Remove the passcode when logging in using Kinect. Okay, this is an odd one. I've set up a passcode for my own account as well as my wife's account after one of my son's friends logged in using my account and later on they ordered Rango and watched it, partially. Although it's a fun movie, this wasn't my idea of having friends over to play games. But now when I log into the Xbox using Kinect's abilty to recognize me, I'm still asked to put in my passcode (note Kinect was already positive that it's me). And using the Kinect to enter the passcode makes the code very obvious. My opinion is that when Kinect recognizes me, it should be good enough.

8) Add age rating limitations to movies played on the Xbox. When I put in a DVD into the console to watch it, it would be nice if the Xbox would go to an online service to retrieve the age rating and if set to something beyond the level of the limit defined on one of the signed in accounts a passcode is needed. This would prevent our kids from "by accident watching The Exorcist". Or at least make it harder for them to watch it.

9) Be able to share my Xbox Music pass with the rest of my family. I don't think it makes any sense to have a full-blown Music pass paid for to just allow my sons to listen to music through the Xbox. But if it would be just my account that has the pass, I need to log on and that means that my account becomes active and therefore accessible to the kids and they can do whatever they want... more or less. The Xbox NG should allow for a more explicit parent-child relationship that makes it easier to share between the services the parent is entitled to towards their kids without compromising the parental controls in place.

10) Actually I couldn't think of a 10th change I hope will be implemented when the Xbox NG is released.

So these are my 10, uhhh 9, things I would like to see with the new Xbox NG. Basically it's all about the way child accounts are managed. Less console centric, more on account level.

Tonight's the revelation of the new Xbox, then we know what we'll be calling the new console and how it fits in the rest of our eco system. I for one look forward to it.

Iwan

Preparing for my dive trip in November - A review of Dive Locator.

So it's coming closer now. My dive trip with Lorenz and Marc to South Africa.

With our vacation to Hurghada, Egypt, now being a mere memory (more on this in a future post), I'm looking forward to what the near future has in store. Apart from a trip to Cairo tomorrow and some days with my wife to celebrate our anniversary, the big trip will be November 19th to South Africa. And I've decided that I want a new camera and a new watch.

New Gear
The camera will probably be a Canon Powershot G10 as I read great reviews on it and it's affordable. The watch is probably going to be a Suunto X10, which sports a GPS (which is useless underwater, but great to track my travels). Since I already have a Suunto Vyper2 as dive computer I'm all set. Although I'm tempted to get me the new Vyper AIR, which integrated the air pressure into the dive computer. Maybe next trip as I'm already overspending a bit... But that's only good for the economy, isn't it.

New Apps
On a slightly different node, I've been looking into applications to track my dive log and stumbled upon a few that also have some sort of counterpart on my Touch. I bought Dive Log from moremobilesoftware as it integrates, supposedly, nice with a log application for Windows that can read from my Suunto.

Dive Locator
While browsing in the Apple AppStore I stumbled upon Dive Locator, an application that lists dive sites around the world, which currently is limited to 4 regions (Mexico, Netherlands Antilles, USA and Western Carribean, but nothing in the Red Sea or Asia). Although there are 900 sites according to the documentation, it doesn't feel that much. But there are means to update the database by email and through the web. Adding new locations in the application itself is not possible, so you need one way or another internet access.
The tool is very simple, which is excellent by the way, as its purpose is simple: List a multitude of dive sites and provide relevant information on your selected site. That information by the way is very limited, any thing else than a simple address and longitude and latitude coordinates. Something I'm missing is information regarding the site itself. Is there a wreck, at what depth, how long is the transfer to the site when it is in open sea. Is the site a regular for live-aboard trips etc. And very important, what kind of dive can you do at that location and what is there to see, like special marine life.
It doesn't tell you that. On the other hand, there is an interface with Google Maps, so you can see the site and its surroundings on GoogleMaps, but the sites in its vicinity are not shown. Which is unfortunate because in most cases I know where I've been, but don't know the name. Or I know where I want to go, but don't know the name. Also very handy is the possibility to show current weather conditions.
Considering the price this is an application that you should consider. It works well, has interesting and handy information regarding geographic location (Google Maps) and weather conditions, but insufficient information regarding the dive site itself. I'm looking for updated information on the sites, and hopefully there will be a way to add these additional information as well in a future release.
Find iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ

Iwan