Watching this, my nostalgia flared up. You see, I’ve been addicted to science fiction ever since I can remember. It started with Buck Rogers, and the original Star Trek, and only got much worse when I discovered Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Douglas Hill. I find Kubrick’s 2001 and even the sequel movie 2010 beautiful.

For the longest time, I wanted to be an astronaut. I think I still do.

I believe I might have thought that my career plans would be seen as childish when I wrote this short piece for school detailing my life plans when I was 7 or 8 (late eighties, not saying anymore):

My life plans as a 7 or 8 year old. My brother found this somewhere and put it on facebook. I wonder what it would be like to go back in time and explain that concept to myself.

For those of you without the required Afrikaans background, here is a short translation, as true as possible to the original:

When I gow up, I’d like to work with computers, because then I’ll become really smart and I’ll know more about the outdoors and nature. As I grow older, I’ll become a professor, because perhaps I’ll find a cure for leprosy and after that I’m going to study to be a millionaire, because then I’ll go abroad or around the world.

Not a bad plan for a 7 or 8 year old, if you don’t mind me saying so myself. This note has in fact reminded me that there’s still more than enough decisions to be made and work to do, so I’ll have to postpone becoming an astronaut for a little while longer. At least by the end I’m going to end up a rich traveller, which is probably not a bad deal.

In other news this week:

• It seems like just the other day that I made my 400th connection on LinkedIn. I’m happy to report that I broke the 500 barrier two weeks ago, and now I have that fancy looking “500+” next to my name. I finetuned my headline to celebrate the occasion, after which I promptly got approached by a head hunter.
• Jonathan Dyer is the guru of facial hair. Check out all the beard types and accompanying facial expressions that he has mastered. Yes, that’s a hint of jealousy that you detect in my writing.
• More reasons to love the coffee: Giving rats the equivalent of what a human gets after two cups of coffee, the caffeine caused nerve cells in a certain region of the hippocampus to show a significantly bigger burst of activity. These strengthened synapses might have a role in learning and memory. Read this summary on boingboing and the article on Nature Neuroscience.
• In an exceptionally disappointing move, South African parliament has passed a new secrecy bill that gives members of government the power to declare information a state secret, thus deterring honest-keeping journalists and other whistle-blowers with a 25 year jail sentence. Desmond Tutu sums it up nicely when he says that this makes the State answerable only to the State.

No related posts.

Moustaches, guns, girls, cars and Hammond karate-chopping the porter at Playboy Club London for absolutely no reason whatsoever at 41 seconds can be nothing but 100% pure AWESOME.

It’s crazily busy at the moment, for a large part due to the extra load of having to teach and revamp, AT THE SAME TIME, the TU Delft’s postgraduate Data Visualization course. I’ve chucked out the written exam and the structured lab work, and exchanged it for paper reading, class discussion and four independent projects, inspired by positive experience with my Medical Visualization Ninja Training Course (third year in the running, Ninjas all over the place!), the postgraduate InfoVis course I gave at Stellenbosch and of course the teaching materials of esteemed colleagues at UBC, Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford. With a bit of luck, we will soon deliver a whole class of new-style DataVis Ninjas.

At a recent conference, I ran into an erudite half-British colleague from the far North, who in a few minutes almost managed to turn my world into rubble. You see, I’ve always proudly promoted the use of the -ise forms of certain words, such as visualise, realise, colonise and so forth, these being examples of British English. (Obviously, I adapt when American English is required.)

It turns out that, as is the case with life in general, it’s unfortunately not as simple as that.

It turns out that many of the -ise words are originally from the Greek or the Latin with “-ize” endings, and therefore the Oxford spelling prefers their use, although it accepts the “-ise” forms as well. On the other hand, the Cambridge University Press, as well as the mainstream media and most of the public in Britain and the former colonies, has a strong preference for the “-ise” forms. Certain other words like for example advertise, advise and surprise always take the “-ise” form in British English.

So now I’m faced with this conundrum. It would otherwise not have been such an issue, but the words “visualise” and “visualisation” come up quite often during my work day. Sticking to “-ise” is easier and still correct when in British English mode, but “-ize” for those few words of Greek  and Latin origin could perhaps be considered more correct, and has the great advantage of allowing me to standardise on “visualize” as the canonical form of that important term. However, then I would run the risk of confusing the “-ize” and the true “-ise” words in Oxford English, potentially leading to painful embarrassment at the many cocktail parties that I frequent.

So you see, the Universe is just full of mysteries. Another mystery that has plagued humankind for decades, is what would happen if Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein got involved in a rap battle. Well humankind, wonder no more:

Ok kids, thank you for tuning in again. Have a great week, I hope to see you again soon!

Related posts:

1. 61 words
2. Weekly Head Voices #12: Ceci n’est pas une bibliothèque.
3. Weekly Head Voices #18: Refactor my dogfood.

Yes people, there are apparently some brilliant human beings, the pinnacle of our society you might say, who took the time to construct a giant slingshot with which they then proceeded to shoot each other through the blue summer sky. This is the sign that we, the human race, must be doing something right.

Because I need all the time that I can get to play may part in being a good human, I will now switch to Bullet Time(tm):

• IEEE VisWeek 2011, Mind-Blowingly Awesome Visualization Conference, took place in week 43. For the first time in years, I was NOT there. The TNR went and came back inspired. My fearless and revered ex-leader Frits Post received the IEEE VGTC Visualization Career Award, which is yet another official recognition of his awesomeness. I hope he still has some space on the mantelpiece next to the Eurographics Honorary Fellow award.
• Through the #visweek conference twitter stream and some of the blogging that was going on, I was able to follow the conference at a distance. There was a Blogging about Visualization BoF (birds of a feather, a kind of informal meeting to discuss some topic of interest; also read Dominikus Baur’s blog report), which motivated me to revive the MedVis.org webblog! We even have a twitter account now. If you have even a mild interest in medical visualisation or imaging, please subscribe via email, your RSS reader or the twitter account.
• This blog won one of Joe’s official SA Blog Awards! Buy me a beer when you see me.
• A real Italian explained to me that putting sugar in your espresso is entirely acceptable and even desirable. Herewith I’m going to stop feeling ashamed about my sugar-in-espresso habit. I’m not sure what I was thinking that combining two of the best substances known to humans was a sin.
• After spending some serious quality time with The Email Game, I wrestled both of my overgrown inboxes to the ground. Lessons learnt: 1) Even the thin layer of gamification offered by The Email Game was sufficient to motivate me to start and finish a task I’ve been dreading for weeks. 2) Inbox Zero actually is more important than I’ve recently come to think. The trick is deciding when exactly you’re going to empty it.
• Here’s a picture of a hedgehog after a bath:

It's a hedgehog. After a bath!

So recently I was having a conversation with someone in a bar. Soon the question came up: What are you striving for in your work?

Imagine my surprise when I didn’t have an answer ready. I was surprised, because I usually spend a significant amount of time on introspection, pondering the usual questions:

1. What makes me happy?
2. Why are we here?
3. What should I strive for?

I mostly have answers to all of these and more, often involving coffee drinking in some form, along with a healthy dose of perspective, and harmony. However, due to general work-related business the past few months, my moments of introspection have been few and far between. As is the case with these types of philosophical guidelines, one does need to spend time regularly pondering them, else they sink quickly deeper below the surface of everyday life.

So I spent some time trying to remember what it was that I was striving for in work. Fortunately, not that far below the surface, I found it again:

Create value.

That’s really all there is, but it works for me.

No related posts.

He’s fabulous, isn’t he? If you haven’t done so already, you should really read his book “Bad Science” too, and don’t forget to hand a copy to anyone in your neighbourhood that might be confused about homeopathy, accupuncture, any other forms of alternative medicine, or anything by Patrick Holford, vitamin-peddler of note.

On a completely different note, I’ve fallen in love with a piece of software again. This time it’s Zotero, open source reference manager. For those of you not into writing (scientific) articles, a reference manager is an indispensable tool that keeps track of all the other articles that you’ve studied and helps you to cite them correctly whilst writing your latest attempt. I tried Zotero in 2009 but wasn’t that impressed. It seems that much has happened since, as I’ve been completely blown away this time. Killer feature #1 is the extreme ease with which I can import new references, by clicking on the little icon in my Firefox 7.0 url bar (Zotero 2.1 is a Firefox plugin). If the PDF is available, it’ll add that as well. I can also just drop a PDF directly in there and tell it to extract metadata to make a bibliographic entry. It does this surprisingly well.  Killer feature #2 is the explicit support for storing one’s reference database anywhere else, for example in one’s Dropbox, another piece of software with which I have a long-term romantic involvement and which in this case ensures that I have transparent access to my whole reference database, via Zotero, from any computer I care to use.

(NB: If you’re going to do this, make sure you don’t run Zotero concurrently on multiple machines. A better solution, which I’m now using, is to have only the zotero “storage” folder in your dropbox, and then symlink that into the default zotero firefox profile directory. Please let me know in the comments if you need more detail on this.)

Just in time for our regular coffee-themed blog post interlude, there’s been yet another study on coffee-related health benefits, and now it looks like coffee drinking may also protect against depression in women. As you will recall, I recently blogged about the coffee-related prostate-cancer protection. Seems coffee is perfect in one more regard: It’s an equal opportunity health benefit!

For my birthday, TNR bought me Anything You Want by Derek Sivers, and beamed it directly to my Kindle (go 21st century!). Derek Sivers is the guy who started CD Baby almost by accident, a company that became the largest seller of independent music on the interwebs. I say by accident, because his goal in the beginning was purely to sell his own CDs online (which was quite a feat in 1997, as there was no PayPal and not that much WWW yet), and then friends asked if he could sell their CDs too, and before he knew it, he had 85 employees, 150000 musicians and 100 million dollars in revenue. It’s a fabulous story, all the more because he really just wanted to keep his company as small as possible and do what he loved.

The book is chock-full of philosophical nuggets, for example the one that inspired the title of this blog. Sivers explains that when you have to decide whether to commit to a new project or not, there are only two choices: It’s either HELL YEAH! or NO. Your time is too limited to take on just yes or even maybe. Makes sense, no?

What really resonated with me however, was the following thought on how people grade themselves:

For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites or anything else. If I create something that’s not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input.

I think that I’ll leave it at that. Now go have an epic week kids!

Related posts:

1. Coffee addiction potpourri. [Weekly Head Voices #57]
2. Astropsychonaut. [Weekly Head Voices #63]
3. infinite espressos!

The insane asylum soundtrack accompanying this artwork belongs to the music genre called Dubstep, music that is notoriously hard to dance well to. However, the following gentleman seems to have mastered the art just perfectly (if you’re really pressed for time, start watching at 1:13):

At this junction, as they say, you might be wondering why I’m showing you dubstep videos. Well, I have only the following to offer: Alliteration!

You see, this week I flew to Vienna (unfortunately not under my own power yet) for a meeting with some old and some new friends (Graz, my man in Vienna, Rostock, Bergen, Delft) to set up a new EU research project. It’s just grand when you sit around the table discussing the ins and outs of a research project and realise that the convenors have managed to put together a perfect team in terms of skill set but more importantly also in terms of social interaction. Cross your fingers that the thing gets granted, then I’ll be able to tell you more.

On the topic of flying, you will not have missed that CERN LHC scientists measured an ever-so-small discrepancy in the arrival time of neutrinos travelling over 732 km through the Earth (I wish I could do that) to Gran Sasso.  The neutrinos seemed to have arrived 60.7 nanoseconds earlier than they should have, had they been traveling at the speed of light.

Oops.

The scientists really did their best to explain that the devastating impact of this result, were it to be true, necessitates further study to find for example hitherto unknown systematic errors that could be the cause. The media of course had great difficulty not sensationalising the whole business. Personally, my money is naturally not on faster than light travel. Whatever the case may be, this world event has resulted in the prerequisite physics jokes. My favourite is this one, via @flyosity on twitter:

“We don’t allow faster than light neutrinos in here”, said the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.

On the topic of world events, Saturday September 24 was the South African national Braai Day. BRAAI DAY PEOPLE! As is the duty and pleasure of every red-blooded Saff Efrican I fired up my BBQ on Saturday. On Sunday, I did so again, this time with some of them lovely rib-eye steaks (yes, after years of practice I make a perfect medium-rare pink-in-the-middle steak on the barbie) and, even more importantly, joined by a full complement of my super-social neighbours. Perfect weather, scorched animal parts, zillions of kids running around (not scorched), beer and friends: Life is exceptionally good.

For this week’s backyard philosophy, I wanted to bring under your attention Steven Pinker’s new book, to be released on October 4 and titled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker is a well-known experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author with a penchant for evolutionary psychology. In this book, Pinker argues that we humans currently find ourselves  in the most peaceful time of our species’ existence. Looking back through history, it becomes apparent that we’ve been becoming persistently less violent over the past hundreds of years. I find that an absolutely marvelous observation!

Let me conclude with suitable Pinker quote, found on this Pharyngula post (emphasis mine):

I think the final and perhaps the most profound pacifying force is an “escalator of reason.” As literacy, education, and the intensity of public discourse increase, people are encouraged to think more abstractly and more universally, and that will inevitably push in the direction of a reduction of violence. People will be tempted to rise above their parochial vantage point, making it harder to privilege their own interests over others. Reason leads to the replacement of a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules. And it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles of violence, and to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be won.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #19: The time-traveller’s BBQ.
2. Time does wait for electronic true love [Weekly Head Voices #30]

Let’s get today’s life lessons started with Mitch Hedberg, Comic Genius (note the captital C, and the capital G):

Hedberg’s genius unfortunately could not save him from drug addiction and his overdose-related death in 2005.

On the topic of addiction, fpixel forwarded these new findings that coffee drinking is genetic, both in terms of capacity and perhaps also in terms of addiction. Even my atoms are addicted to coffee, so that feels about right. What’s really interesting however, is that the documented study found that the genes involved in the metabolism of coffee (CYPIA1 and NRCAM, if I understand correctly) are also related to the onset of Parkinson’s disease. You see, coffee drinkers are less prone to Parkinson’s disease (as well as a whole list of other diseases including prostate cancer, type 2 diabetes and liver cancer). However, past studies of course show correlation and not causation, i.e. coffee drinking and low risk of disease X appear together, but that does not tell us anything about what causes what. This new study has made the first steps towards understanding the mechanism that actually links Parkinson’s disease and coffee drinking.

On the topic of coffee and addiction, TNR and I spent the Monday morning working (like animals) on our new parallel startup (there, I said it) at the Coffee Company in Delft. Two things:

1. The Coffee Company makes a killer cappuccino. The milk is steamed to perfection, but it’s got the perfect espresso bomb exploding through all that milky goodness at just the right moment. BAM! HELLO THERE! Highly recommended. With every purchase, you get WiFi access for one hour, so no surprises or misunderstandings.
2. It’s amazing what such a change of working environment does for one’s creativity.

On the topic of startups, Dr Jorik Blaas, ex PhDer, full-time genius and friend, is now the director of research and development at Synerscope (probably no relation with sinister, but my subconscious is just not behaving today), a high-potential startup that makes visualisation-based tools for fraud detection in big data (big money, IOW). Synerscope has brought together some of the top visualisation brains in the country. Personally, I can’t help but imagine it like this:

Are you in there somewhere?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we made a quick train trip (*cough* 9 hours there due to delay thank you NS, 7+ hours back) to Magdeburg for the bi-annual German MedVis meeting. You’ll recall that I spent my first micro-sabbatical there. The city almost feels like home, and it was really great seeing many of the Magdeburg peeps again. The meeting itself was of high quality, with a number of VisWeek contributions being presented. Thomas Kroes (should I start using fictitious names and acronyms again?) presented his interactive photo-realistic volume renderer too! By the way, download it, use it (it makes fantastically beautiful renderings), spread it, and do cite the soon-to-appear article.

On Saturday, it rained (again, or still, I forget), so I decided to flip Mother Nature the bird by BBQing four juicy rib-eye steaks outside. Take that Mother Nature! The steaks were delicious, thank you. Mother Nature is not all bad though… Check this out: The Southern Lights. FROM SPACE!

Aurora Australis (thanks Bart!) FROM SPACE, taken by Ron Garan. Click on the photo to go to the original.

I’m going to wind down this post with two backyard philosophy-themed bits. The first is a quote by mathematician Alfred North Whitehead from this article on “The Skill that Matters Most” (found via Joe Botha, serial entrepreneur, currently changing the world with Trust Fabric):

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

I haven’t thought about it that way before, but it does make complete sense. The more things we humans do well in a routine fashion, the better.  Otherwise, our inconsistency is prone to lead to problems. By the way, the mentioned skill is self-control.

Finally, AJ forwarded this video called Disconnect to Connect. I’ll just let you watch and think about it for a while:

I’ll be off now. Please do have an epic week, and think of me when your level of enjoyment is at a local maximum. At these points, you might also consider jumping around randomly.

Related posts:

1. Astropsychonaut. [Weekly Head Voices #63]
2. Hell Yeah! [Weekly Head Voices #59]
3. Happiness slingshot. [Weekly Head Voices #61]

In any case, I was convinced that Rebecca Black was a portent of the end of the world as we know it, probably due to an unstoppable tsunami of vacuous stupidity crashing through the whole of civilization (you have to admit, there are signs. what signs? well mostly politicians and managers). However, due to a recent instance of such blinding brilliance that I had to don my mental steampunk goggles of total darkness (yes, the ones I’ll be wearing to Burning Man when I go there), I have to revise my opinion of Rebecca. You see, her musical atrocity has acted as a catalyst for the creation of the musical masterpiece that is Braaiday! Seat yourself comfortably, and experience it:

Yes? Yes. Hang on while I listen to it one more time. No I don’t need YouTube anymore, the whole thing is engraved in my brain. By the way, September 24 is National Braai day in South Africa. You know what to do…

As if Braaiday wasn’t enough to make my year, TNR, friend and business partner, underwent two significant life events:

1. He turned a year older.
2. The day after his birthday (doh), TNR was offered an assistant professorship in our section!

We’ll leave the consequences of life event #1 for a later, more philosophical, occasion. The consequence of #2, together with the fact that we’ve somehow managed to attract a handful of Truly Kickass people (you know who you are, kickass people!), is that there’s now an absolutely fabulous vibe in our research group. I’ve had the privilege of experiencing this specific vibe in other places before. You can’t engineer it, it simply has to happen. The best you can do, is to put the right people together and cross your fingers. When it does decide to appear, it’s epic!

On a different topic: The reason why I’ve been ignoring all of your email the past weeks, and why I generally haven’t even been able to pay attention to the beautiful wooshing sound all of my passing deadlines made as they flew by, is because I was first preparing for and then running, together with a whole team of ninjas, the TU Delft CS first year introductory project. I designed this brand-new module last year, and severely honed it this year. 130+ first years worked together in 26 small groups designing and implementing augmented reality music instruments with real-time video analysis, 3D graphics and sound loop mixing. CACOPHONY with a capital C!

I’ve uploaded to YouTube some video impressions of the top teams demonstrating their projects in the concluding session. Click here to view these and any other clips that other peeps have tagged with “ti100a” (the course code).

OK people. That was it for weeks 35 and 36 (this post was 100% produced within moving trains!), the week 37 blog post will hopefully appear this weekend sometime. I’m still Way Too Busy (do you hear that wooshing sound in the distance too?), but managing to keep myself quite happy by:

1. ensuring that most of the time I spend, I spend creating value;
2. ensuring that the people I interact with are primarily of the ass-kicking variety;
3. making many bullet lists like this one.

See you on the other side!

P.S. Have you heard about batmanning? Apparently it’s the new planking:

Related posts:

1. The 2009 to 2010 transition post.

Pretty spring photo of the back of the New Church in Delft, taken whilst I was waiting for my guest (Our Man in Vienna, temporarily in Delft!) to exit his hotel.

• I’ve tried to give you a more snappy blog loading experience by installing the WP Super Cache (with a 24 hour site preload), DB Cache Reloaded Fix and Use Google Libraries plugins. In many cases, you’ll get served a static HTML page, which is much faster than the on-demand SQL-spewing PHP-generated complexity WordPress usually does. In the great big quagmire that is WordPress caching plugins, this combination seems to be working best in my case. Measuring with tools.pingdom.org (awesome resource!), most of the pages on this site should now fully render in around 2 seconds.
• The TNR and I souped up the work website, it’s looking really spiffy now, with embedded RSS feeds and all!
• I’ve finally installed JuiceDefender on my laptop with built-in telephone (my HTC Desire Z smartphone, in other words), the battery almost lasts the whole day now! If you have an Android telephone and your not happy with your battery life (err, is that even a question?), get this app. Now.
• I opposed an M.Sc. defence on Tuesday on the ultrasound measurement of tendon displacement in vivo and subsequent derivation of moment arms. Great fun diving into new work like that! The student did a great job.
• Our Man in Vienna came to visit us in Delft. Huge fun was had by me and Our Man in Vienna (I hope), and serious work was done. It’s a great combination, we will attempt to apply it more often.
• On Friday evening I slipped and did our yearly tax return by accident. BAM!

This is the end my friend. Here’s some more church (a different one, at least), taken after a scrumptious dinner in the city:

The Old Church in Delft, with pretty lighting. This is not a simulation.

Have a great week everyone! Over here, we’ll be chasing deadlines, and many of ‘em. WATCH OUT YOU DEADLINES!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply
2. Drinking in Delft
3. The Visualisation and Image Processing Platform Formerly Known as DSCAS3

Carrying the portentous number 42, this edition of the Weekly Head Voices owes it to the sometimes nerdy expectations of its readers to offer at least a small part of the answer to life, the universe and everything. In other words, #42 is 100% backyard philosophy.

Water, and bridges, and paths, taken this morning especially for you. You should start feeling all pensive now.

I’ve had a really brilliant week. When it started, one of the slightly more zen voices in my head proposed a little experiment: What would happen if, at the start of every episode or moment that I found myself in, I would consciously and explicitly remind myself to be fully and exclusively in that moment, to focus on the now. I could only agree that this was an intriguing question, and one worth attempting to answer.

The hardest part was remembering to do this every time. However, once I managed to get past that hurdle, the seemingly simple and low-level act of sub-vocally reminding myself to dedicate my undivided attention to the moment currently at hand resulted in more and more sustained periods of focus, which gave each situation, even the seemingly straightforward ones and especially those involving social contact, significantly more depth. It was almost like flipping a big bass boost button on my daily experiences, with all primary and secondary senses arriving in glorious multi-dimensional technicolour.

If your brain is like mine, constantly shooting off in five different tangents at the smallest instigation, I can only recommend this self-reminder trick. There are other times when such tangents are useful and should be stimulated, for example during planning or creative sessions, but more often being fully in the now is what you should go for. This goes diametrically against the grain of our evolved information foraging compulsion and the associated multi-tasking (that we turn out to be really bad at), but is worth the mental effort many times over.

I’ll end this short post with a musical conclusion:

Drown in the now… A beautiful and apt title for a song with some of the most spacy lyrics you’ll come across, at least until the next time you do some Crystal Method.

Kids, have an awesome week, filled with pure Now.

p.s. Jorik, in an uncontrollable attack of the WABs, just pointed out a spelling mistake in this post. It’s portentous, and not portentious. :)

Related posts:

1. Focus. [Weekly Head Voices #34]
2. An indecent proposal. [Weekly Head Voices #31]
3. I know what I want for my birthday

1. You have arrived at the 40th edition of the Weekly Head Voices! This blog will soon buy a black leather jacket, start riding around on a motorcycle that is far too big for it and see its therapist concerning its little “Is this all there is?” existential crisis.
2. Spring has arrived in suburbia! Today was glorious, with zillions of little kids running around outside in the sun, and parents chatting contentedly about the barbecue potential of the coming season. See this camera-phone impression:

Scenes of spring, straight from the hood.

It’s been a really busy week, so let’s get started. In a surprising and innovative move, I’ll be using headings instead of bullets to indicate each new item in this week’s Weekly Head Voices!

Internet Video Conferencing

I had to organize a mini internet-video-conference, i.e. more than two people at different locations chatting with voice and video over internet. Skype you say? No sir, Skype wants more money for this functionality. I’m already paying them for Skype Access and for the odd VOIP call to a PSTN line, but I find this extra surprise inexcusable. Therefore, without any further ado, I bring you this week’s WHV Review:

• Skype for video conferencing: SUCKS.
• TokBox for video conferencing: RULES! I was able to set this up in 2 minutes, and it required no software besides flash-enabled browsers at all nodes. All conference participants get a link and can join immediately, without logging in. Unfortunately, TokBox is stopping their service in April, as they’ve changed their business model and are  selling their tech (OpenTok) to OEMs. After April, I will probably look at PalTalk for my free video-conferencing needs.

Powerline networking

Because one of my favourite WAB (Work Avoidance Behaviour) routines is to further optimise my home network (1 cable modem, 3 router / access points, 2 servers, 3 laptops, 1 media centre and 1 networked game console), I bought PowerlineAV adapters to bridge one of the wireless sections (pulling cables between the floors involved is a schlep). Hey, that brings us to this week’s second WHV Review:

• Powerline / HomePlug powerline network adapters: SUCKS! Read all about it in this detailed blog post on my nerd blog.

Hacking

(NERD ALERT! NERD ALERT! skip this paragraph if you’re not an uber nerd.) I’m old school, so when I say hacking, I mostly mean doing hardcore programming. I fixed a nasty and long-standing bug in the GSVideo video acquisition stack for processing and wrote about in another nerdy blog post, and then I updated my multiple-marker modification to NyARToolkit for processing to support the P3D renderer. Huh?! You should’ve skipped this paragraph!

Fetishes

As is undoubtedly the case with all of you, I possess quite a number of fetishes, two of which I’m going to share with you today. Don’t worry, they’re relatively safe.

I used to be one of those die-hard Norton Commander users in the DOS days. Norton Commander was what is called an Orthodox File Manager, or OFM. My OFM-fetish has been dormant for years, but has come back with a vengeance due to my rather late discovery of Far Manager. What a crazy and wonderful piece of software! (To you Loonix-fetishists: MC doesn’t even come close. Unfortunately, Far is Windows only.) Check out the special effects:

Far Manager version 2. This thing has more hot-keys than you have keys on your keyboard. It can do ANYTHING.

My long-time musical fetish, the brilliant Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails ring a bell?) won an Oscar for his work, together with Attacus Ross, on the Social Network soundtrack. By the way, the movie also pleasantly surprised me, and would have done so even without Reznor’s brilliant work.

Conclusion

My brain has served up very little backyard philosophy this week, probably because I’ve been too busy acting like a little code-monkey, so I’ll limit my philosophising to the following:

1. Thou shalt not link facebook and twitter status updates. These are two different forms of media, and you’re possibly alienating (that’s a big word for “ticking off”) your most loyal followers, i.e. the fantastic people following you on both networks, with duplicate status messages. See it as a challenge to drive each of your social networks in a way which most suits its nature, or see it as double the opportunity to express yourself!
2. I’ve quoted this once before on this blog, but there are new readers, and it’s good to be reminded every so often: Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. — Plato.

That’s it for this week kids. Have a beautiful and springy week!

Related posts:

1. Great Success! [weekly head voices #48]
2. An Inside Job. [Weekly Head Voices #33]
3. Rebecca Black is OK! [Weekly Head Voices #56]