Neues Update Januar 2011 (auf Deutsch)
Greetings, dear visitor, wherever you may come from.
Or whenever, in case of a time machine.
(Seems a few are arriving directly from the early 90s ;) and I am just the K in "KPT"
A whole wave of blogs and such have popped up again in recent weeks, asking the perfectly
reasonable question "Dang, what is that Kai guy up to...? "
But I didn't disappear - I am right here :)
It is the public that disappeared from my rear view mirror.
Over the course of some 25 years I spent a great deal of time in that public spotlight and only in the last few years quietly morphed away, to what in my eyes is more of the essence of thinking, designing, writing - not for audiences, not for profit, but purely for its own sake.
Indeed, I cherish 'a clean and empty day', to follow a train of thought, to allow a Geistesblitz to happen and develop it further, for hours, or days... Having "to be somewhere next Thursday" is like a drop of red paint on a pristine clean canvas: it ruins it!
Then I feel as if I can no longer paint anything, but have to accommodate that red spot...
It took me years, literally, to simmer down the endless commitments, interviews, tradeshows, visitors, luncheons...... and try to regain control over my day. When I moved here to Europe, based in a lovely old "Burg" on the Rhein in Germany and crisscrossing from London to Vienna, Paris to Venice, I found myself deep down where I had left off at age 18 and rediscovered my passions for art, literature, history, science... Real life, not just my L.A. 'lite version' of later years.
Soon I began travelling in slow motion rather than just getting there, really reading my old obscure arcane books, really seeing the original master paintings, up close, in dozens of museums, having tea at 3 am over a great classic movie, researching tiny details for days in the biographies of some of the seriously great humans through the last few centuries, and... of course I couldn't help it: brainstorming furiously over ideas ...but completely devoid of considering any "product" potential, and often too far ahead and sadly entirely useless for today ;)
And while everyone expected me to do KPT9, Soap5, SuperBryce X, AmaZone2, IdeaProcessor3,.... I desperately tried to avoid and managed to escape that disease of "Sequelitis", "low hanging fruit".
There is a little tear once in a while, that some of the really intriguing ideas have not come out in a general publically usable sense and thus I am in the process of licensing away a few of the really serious ones very soon. Check back in a while and surprises might have popped up.
In other words: I am not a hermit - on the contrary. And not retired - couldn't be farther from it.
But also not just working on one mysterious product X...
The website here was trying to be the opposite of Hype - quietly asking for time, no big hoopla.
I left a lot of the early stuff up there, more out of innocent 'archaelogical interest', but after ten years it is simply too out of step.
The pages here also contained a couple hundred pages of "something not entirely unlike a blog" written in German, since there was a great deal of interest locally and much to say.
In general I had a problem seeing myself writing a blog...: It felt a little bit like "why should I ramble on my little bit of wisdom out there, does anyone care ?", like those crotchety old men mumbling to random strangers in the street, or worse, the kind who stand on orange crates to shout their messages around. Evangelizing egocentric look-at-me-me-me-ism, a Groucho club.
But I also realized how sad it would be if my favorite writers had actually agreed with that so deeply that they might have ceased to publish their most important works - and how much it meant to me that they did come out with it after all.
So I took the compromise path to soothe some inquisitive souls, as well as my own.
Hence dozens of pages in German, kept very narrow to a tiny audience, my throttling maneuver.
But noticing many thousands of hits via GoogleTranslate made me change the layout here a bit:
I understand the motive, and would probably use the same tools to go farther and find information.
But please realize that in this case, it is not just "a little bit strange" but totally counterproductive...
It is a bit like reading Woody Allen in Southern Mongolian: without the context, the inside jokes, the references, the kvetchy neurotic NYC microcosm---it becomes meaningless ghibberish.
Similarly here: the texts are robbed of all subtle humor, puns and nuns, but also the deeper meanings tied to subtle constructs and local idioms. A mere shadow or a shadow of itself.
As a simple example it starts with my name, which babelized becomes "Dock Ruffle" ;)
Kai = quay = 'dock'
krauses Haar = 'ruffled hair'
True enough..... and still .... "Dock Ruffle's Energy Utensils for Photoshop" is not quite right, is it.
So anyone who cares enough to want to read more, there are a dozen essays in English:
This is not easy speed reading, no light hearted novel...
I was trying to squeeze as much content into a short given space.
But anyone who knows me a little better can read between the lines:
This one is explains a lot about my recent years:
About the fleeting and ephemeral nature of Software
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_16.html#krause
This one is really close to my heart:
We have already SO much - why can't we be content ??
http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_6.html#krause
This one is subtle, a lot written here ( and much was edited out )
A really different vision of differently real danger
http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html#krause
This one is important and so rarely discussed
Serious about the missed potential of The Net
http://www.edge.org/q2010/q10_3.html#krause
A little lyrical piece, charming at the time
A bit of serious philosophy, but not really about ZEN
http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_7.html#krause
Dürer, Holbein, Humboldt... initially a comment on a Burda essay
An example of the biographical research I love to get lost in
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/burda06/burda06_index.html#krause
This was a hugely important decade, totally underrated still. Good and bad.
What will change everything ? Everything changed already!
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_print.html#krause
Fun: a few formulas
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/serpentine07/Krause.html
Fun: a few "laws" ( the percent thing was from TED 1993, seen it a lot since ;)
http://www.edge.org/q2004/page3.html#krause
A comment about Danny Hilllis and thoughts about education
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis10/hillis10_index.html#krause
An early brief comment on "vanishing questions"
http://www.edge.org/documents/questions/q2001.4.html#krause
Some thoughts about the pros and cons of Europe vs US
http://www.edge.org/discourse/schirrmacher_eurotech.html#krause
My deep disappointment in Homo Sapiens' inability to extrapolate the future
http://www.edge.org/discourse/beyond_2001.html
A general overview of all Edge.org bits
http://is.gd/eES6h
