CEO for a week

Now that I am one of the two managing partners of User Intelligence and my fellow partner goes on holiday, I am the boss. That will be the case this week, when Tjeerd is away, probably in Copenhagen but, if the weather is bad enough, somewhere in the South of France.

So, this week I am in control. MWHUHAHAHAA!! Well, actually, there's not that much to control. User Intelligence isn't that big, yet. I'll manage our employee Martijn (Dutch only, but the picture shows his determination!) and our freelancers Yvonne, Eelco, and Arjen.
I'll also chase after our prospective clients, visit one of them at the next IA Meetup in Belgium, and work on the expansion of our website.

Oh, and of course, I'll be a t-shaped user experience designer and shoulder IA. Mwuhahahaa!!

Back-in-office message

The vacation was great! Here's a picture of Marijke and me on the beach of St. Tropez.


It's always good to see from the web traffic logs that people visit my site for a reason that I hope they do. There's been searches on "beep", "ezgov" (my former employer), "human computer interaction", "definition of design management", as well as professional colleagues who've been mentioned or have commented, like "eric reiss" and "joshua".

But as always during holiday periods, my September 2004 posting Out-of-office message attracts the most attention simply because people seem to be looking for a standard text for that type of message. Maybe I should add a proper example to help the poor souls...

Anyway, I am back!

Request to burglars: Please water the plants

Tomorow my summer holiday starts: I'll be flying to Genoa (Italy) and 2 weeks later back to Amsterdam from Nice (France), thanks to Transavia's cheap one-way tickets.
In the meantime Marijke and I will be spending 10 days on the campgrounds and beaches of the Italian version of the Riviera (Liguria).

After that we'll embark on the easyCruise, the latest branch of Stelios' imperium. It's not a cruise-cruise but more like a floating low-cost motel that arrives at a new French city every morning. We'll see San Remo, Nice, Cannes, St. Tropez, and Monaco!

I've already explored some of these destinations from the sky with Google Earth and can only hope it's as sunny as the satellite pictures make it look :-)

When we return, my friend Matti (never mind the warning) will be in town: a guarantee that the holiday feeling will be there for a few days longer!