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.

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.

Some train at the Rotterdam Station. I spent lots of time in these the past week.

… and here are four things, most of which happened last week:

• I was honoured to be invited by the International Research Training Group (IRTG) of the University of Kaiserslautern to visit their institute and give a presentation on medical visualisation (my field of research, for those of you joining very late). Unfortunately, I was only able to stay an evening and a morning, flanked by two 7 hour train rides. In spite of my short stay, the exceptionally friendly Kaiserslautern peeps managed to put together an enjoyable and especially very efficient program with dinner, a morning of research discussion  and of course my talk, which was only 45 minutes over time, and a delectable lunch outside. It was interspersed with questions and discussions, which I do like, and most of the audience managed to stay awake (!), but I still do have to take a more serious look into accurately timing interactive talks like this. Thank you very much IRTG, it was a perfect visit!
• The Delft – Kaiserslautern trip is just so that taking the train seems to make more sense than flying. The total trip time is greater, but the difference is small enough to be justified by the great deal of work one can do on these long train rides.
• I tried out T-Mobile’s new pre-paid Internet “abroad” option, called Travel & Surf. One pays EUR 4.95 for 50 MB over 24 hours, or EUR 14.95 for 100 MB (which they call “unlimited”, HAHA) over 7 days. Without this active, my mobile internet works abroad, but in the zone 1 countries (Germany, Norway, etc.) costs me EUR 2 / MB up to a maximum of EUR 60 per month, so it’s definitely nice being able to pre-pay and control the possibly nasty surprises. However, an Android telephone sucks down 50 MB of data without even thinking, unless you remember to deactivate syncing and background data, which does help to quite an extent. This is certainly a good development, but T-Mobile and all other mobile providers are probably still making an absolute killing by acting like it’s really complicated providing internet just over the Dutch border.
• On the really good news front, Francois Malan’s paper on measuring femoral lesions despite CT metal artifacts has been accepted for publication in Skeletal Radiology! The full citation (so far, it’s online first) is:  Malan DF, Botha CP, Kraaij G, Joemai RM, van der Heide HJ, Nelissen RG, Valstar ER., Measuring femoral lesions despite CT metal artefacts: a cadaveric study, Skeletal Radiology, 2011. Cite it sesame!

Here’s my final thing, a youtube clip that, to my surprise, I don’t think I’ve shown on this blog before. Pay attention, it’s full of braai-related culture and wisdom:

May your week be full of awesome!

Related posts:

1. Posting from the train, because I can
2. Cheap phone calls, yay!
3. Godzilla. [Weekly head voices #21]

• On Tuesday evening, we were welcomed by the very charismatic vice mayor of Bergen in the Tårnsalen of the Lysverket building of the Bergen Art Museum. It seems the photo I took of the inside of the art deco tower, built in 1938, is quite a popular shot. The food was divine, thank you very much.

Art Deco tower from the inside in the Tårnsalen, Lysverket.

• The next morning, during the conference opening, the following Bergen (rainiest city in Europe) joke was told: A visitor asks a local boy in exasperation “Does it rain like this all the time?” and the little boy answers “I don’t know, I’m only 12 years old!”.
• The conference keynote was given by Scott McCloud, American cartoonist and comic theorist, on aspects of visual communication. This was most probably the best presentation I’ve ever had the privilege of experiencing. Besides brilliant oratorship, his slides are somehow more a visual stream of consciousness affair than discrete quanta of information. When I grow up, I’m going to present like that.

As per usual, I get to award the Weekly Head Voices Best Paper awards, and they go to the following papers:

• A Shader Framework for Rapid Prototyping of GPU-Based Volume Rendering by Christian Rieder, Stephan Palmer, Florian Link and Horst K. Hahn. Rieder and his colleagues have constructed a full GPU-based volume rendering pipeline in MeVisLab of which the various shader based components are modifiable at runtime. This means that you can prototype your GPU-based volume rendering ideas in no time flat!
• Curve Density Estimates by Ove Daae Lampe and Helwig Hauser. Back to basics and really important work on the effective visualisation of complex curves at any resolution, with smooth scaling between levels.
• A Gradient-Based Comparison Measure for Visual Analysis of Multifield Data by Suthambhara Nagaraj, Vijay Natarajan and Ravi S. Nanjundiah. Another back-to-basics paper in which the authors show how to find the agreement between hundreds of scalar fields and visualise this agreement, thus enabling comparison.

The slightly less prestigious EuroVis 2011 Best Paper awards went to:

1. Uncertainty-Aware Exploration of Continuous Parameter Spaces Using Multivariate Prediction  by Wolfgang Berger, Harald Piringer, Peter Filzmoser, Eduard Gröller. I was unfortunately in the other session, but was told by numerous colleagues that this was indeed an award-winning presentation as well.
2. A User Study of Visualization Effectiveness Using EEG and Cognitive Load by Erik Anderson, Kristin Potter, Laura Matzen, Jason Shepherd, Gilbert Preston, Claudio Silva. This was presented in the Evaluation session which I had the privilege of chairing. It is indeed a very compelling idea to measure the effectiveness of a visualisation through cognitive load and this paper documents the first very important steps in this direction.
3. A Gradient-Based Comparison Measure for Visual Analysis of Multifield Data by Suthambhara Nagaraj, Vijay Natarajan and Ravi S. Nanjundiah. This was also amongst the more prestigious WHV best paper award winners, see above!

The rest of the conference featured the following bullets:

• During the social event on Thursday evening, Frits Post (my boss), was elevated to the rank of Eurographics Honorary Fellow, recognizing his service to and standing in the visualisation community. Including this newest addition, there are only five (5!) EG Honorary Fellows in the world today. I am very proud!
• During the first session of the morning after the social event, I had the exquisite privilege of presenting the work of my Brazilian colleagues: Piecewise Laplacian-based Projection for Interactive Data Exploration and Organization by Fernando V. Paulovich, Danilo M. Eler, Jorge Poco, Charl P. Botha, Rosane Minghim, Luis G. Nonato. I really do like presenting at events like these, and it’s been a while. Do read and cite the paper, it documents a practical way of reducing any set of high-dimensional data points to the visual space, and enabling interaction with those points on the visual space!
• The capstone of the conference was presented by the legendary Prof. E. Gröller, also known by the whole community as Meister. In typical style, the title of his talk was only announced during the talk itself. The title was The Haunted Swamps of Heuristics. In this philosophical and visionary contribution, it was argued that algorithms and parameters are too deeply intertwined to focus only on the former, but that it was more important to study, in detail, the exact behaviour of the latter. More broadly speaking, we need to accept the fact that there is a great deal of uncertainty also in the parameter spaces of our algorithms, but that this uncertainty can and should be dealt with correctly.

That thought-provoking capstone and this blog post will share the same concluding quote:

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. — Voltaire / Gröller

I hope to see you in the comments below! You could also opt to click on my shiny new +1 button, or my slightly older but no less shiny retweet or facebook share buttons.

Related posts:

1. Eurovis 2009
2. EuroVis 2010 [Weekly Head Voices #24]
3. Teaching InfoVis in Stellenbosch

Schloss Dagstuhl, picture courtesy of Wikipedia.

To begin with, the meals are exquisite, three times a day, every day. As we all know, the path to a computer scientist’s heart is through buying them new gadgets, but feeding them well is a great backup plan. Another very nice touch is the fact that seating is deliberately randomised, meaning that your introvert self is forced to sit at the table with a different group of guests during each lunch and dinner, in turn meaning that even if you try otherwise, you will probably get to have a good conversation with every one of the fifty attendees.

In the case of our seminar, the working day consists of presentations in blocks of three or four, followed by a longer block of discussion on all the preceding presentations, panel style. Attendees were all asked not just to give a standard scientific presentation, but to discuss open problems and future challenges in their respective sub-fields. I (and many others, judging by the aggregated post-meeting feedback) really enjoyed this format. The presentations made one think, and the discussion blocks were long enough to really get into the details. You can check out abstracts and slides on the seminar website.

After a full day of quite intensive discussion, there were breakout sessions during which four subgroups started working on the various chapters of a new Springer book that should appear sometime early in next year. The book will deal with multi-field, uncertainty, biomedical and scalable visualization, and it has the makings of being a keeper.

The other extremely important magic bit about this castle is the abundance of real coffee machines (ones that grind coffee beans for every cup), snack corners and, uhm, beer fridges. You can’t really go anywhere, as you’re in the middle of nowhere, so after dinner the conversations tend to continue till late in the night, conversant stamina enhanced by said coffee and beer facilities. Evil science plans were made, good old-fashioned deep conversations were had and the early next morning consequences were flatly ignored. I haven’t laughed quite so much in a long time, but that part of the programme prefers, and has the right, to remain completely silent.

If you ever get the invitation, don’t hesitate for a second to accept: You shall return an exhausted but terribly happy computer nerd.

Related posts:

1. I’m an engineer in the body of a computer scientist.
2. Scum of the Earth
3. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply

Example of some random evil lair. Mine is exactly the same, except that it's not in a hollowed-out volcano, doesn't have my face on the outside and is not near the sea.

I thought I was being original by dubbing my week-long self-imposed working isolation a nano-sabbatical, but google knows better. It turns out other people call their week-long sabbaticals nano too.  Durn. In any case, as you will recall I also went away on a month-long micro-sabbatical in 2009, but this time I wanted to experiment with spending almost a whole work-week focusing on a single task, trying to finish a survey article I’ve been working on for almost two years. The week is now over and the article is not ready for submission yet, but it has become a completely different and much improved animal during the past week. I’m a happier person too!

I would like to share with you some of the high-level conclusions I’ve drawn from this experiment:

• Over the past years, I’ve had to get used to multi-tasking. Switching to focus mode was quite a challenge, as my reflex is to switch, switch and switch. Judicious application of pomodori, killing of browser windows and general self talkings-to mostly helped. I have it mostly under control, but I’m sure I could push up my effectivity further with more practice.
• I did manage to work quite efficiently from day one, but only by the end of the second day did I find myself in the right frame of mind for writing this kind of paper. It’s one of those cases where you can work really hard, but if you’re not in the right frame of mind, you’re not being effective.
• At the beginning of the week, I had configured a vacation email auto-reply, keeping the exact reason for my absence vague. The idea is that I would act as if I were on vacation, that is not responding to email and not taking care of any other work-related issues. Still, I couldn’t help taking care of the bare minimum of important matters, which acted as an extra distraction. I think for any sabbatical, nano to mega, it’s important where exactly you draw the line. During my 2009 sabbatical, I had the strict rule that I could only do normal work-related things during the evenings, which worked quite well.
• By the end of the week I was completely embroiled in interesting article-related issues, with very little else interrupting my concentration. It was refreshing having almost all thought-processes dealing with one topic, instead of bouncing between too many concurrent projects.
• I truly love the process of writing, even if it is scientific writing, which requires a different attitude regarding the structuring of one’s text and the willingness to rewrite a piece of text as many times as it’s required to get it exactly right. There’s nothing like looking at a single short sentence that concisely communicates the thought just so.

On the nerd front (skip to the next paragraph if you’re feeling non-nerdy): eclipse, texlipse, mercurial, jabref and dropbox make for a beautiful LaTeX editing workflow, on Linux and Windows machines. There’s nothing like continuous LaTeX builds for the gainful utilisation of the idle and overpowered CPUs in your workstation or laptop.

There will definitely be more weeks like this one just past, and perhaps even a real sabbatical in the not-too-distant future. It is unfortunate that multi-tasking has become so de rigueur in modern life. There is a whole lot to be said for the zen of pouring oneself into just that one important thing.

Related posts:

1. Eurovis 2009
2. Coffee addiction potpourri. [Weekly Head Voices #57]

One

On Thursday, February 10, 2011, my dear friend Mister Krekel graduated from Evil School after years of hard work and evil-doing, and will henceforth go through life as the formidable Doctor Krekel. Please do watch out.

Evil School. (Photo by the talented fpixel.wordpress.com.)

The joyous transition took place in the Evil School’s Academiegebouw in Leiden, and this time yours truly (I’m referring to me in a round-about fashion) even had the great honour of playing a part in the formal proceedings. If you’re curious as to what exactly this ritual constitutes, see this previous edition of the WHV on the graduation of another terribly evil colleague. I believe that the bunch of us now constitute a bona fide Axis of Evil. No, the evil jokes can unfortunately not stop yet.

The Party was held in a secret cafe nearby. You will notice that I’ve capitalised Party, as it was not your average run of the mill Evil School graduation affair, but a social event of note. Here in Holland, the PhD defence and graduation are a combined affair, and so the whole day is dedicated to just one person. It is actually very special: People take time off from work, sometimes even temporarily put aside their differences, and travel from all over to attend the festivities. It’s like a wedding, except that there’s only one of you. I can only recommend it very highly. At the Party, everyone had clearly read the memo, and they were there with that singular goal in mind: Celebrate the freshly minted Evil Doctor. Presents were given, speeches were held, photos were shown, beer was imbibed and, flying in the face of all advice concerning the mixing of alcohol, cameras and social networking, the best evil photographer in town, who’s coincidentally also in Evil School, took the most amazing photos that you should be able to see on Facebook if you’re one of the privileged few to belong to The Network, also known as The Friends of the Axis of Evil.

Two

On the good news front, you’ll see (or not) on the list of EuroVis 2011 conditional accepts, that a paper by cool colleagues from far away, to which I contributed a small part, has been conditionally accepted, and hence has a significant chance of being presented at said event in Bergen, Norway (May 31 to June 3). We also have plans to submit a poster (or two), so there’s an even more significant chance that I will make an appearance at this fantastic conference! We’re also cooking up various odds and ends that will hopefully crystallise sufficiently by the end of March to be submissible for VisWeek 2011. Cross yer fingers.

Three

Today’s backyard time management section is in fact more about planning than it is about notes. However, my Pro-Tips involve combining them in an easy to implement productivity booster. When people start out in research, one of the first bits of advice they get is keeping some kind of lab journal. I think this advice applies to more than just research: If you do any kind of independent or project work, jotting down your activities, thoughts and results during the day is useful in helping to structure your thought processes, and also very helpful when you have to backtrack a complex multi-day procedure. During my Ph.D., I filled a number of real cardboard-and-paper books with notes. More recently, I’ve started using Google Documents for the same purpose. Besides all the other advantages, having to document explicitly your work output keeps you productive and on your toes.

Pro Tip #1: Keep a lab journal, even if you don’t work in a lab.

I’ve mentioned before that my resolutions for 2011 included more concrete planning. This has manifested in a work-in-progress planning for the whole year, including milestones, awards won, and so forth, but much more practically, it has manifested in a little lab-journal-compatible trick. Every morning when I sit down to begin the day, I spend a few minutes thinking and then start the day’s journal entry by writing down, as concretely as possible, the tasks that I plan to complete by the end of the day. This also ensures that I spend effort on the important things, and not only on the urgent things. So, that brings us to:

Pro Tip #2: At the start of each day, write down in your lab journal exactly and concretely what you plan to accomplish by the end of that day.

These pro tips appear to be quite straight-forward, but together they help one to focus, and to keep tabs on one’s effective productivity. In other words, just being terribly busy the whole day gets you nothing; the trick is being terribly busy in all the right directions.

P.S.

Somebody is clearly pushing the boundaries of awesomeness… cowboys AND aliens!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. ASCI and stuff…
2. AAARRGGHHHH!
3. EuroVis 2010 [Weekly Head Voices #24]

Just before the weekend I spent two days at the Dutch Bio-Medical Engineering Conference in Egmond aan Zee, in a ginormous seaside hotel. Probably because I attempted to keep up with the young ones during their nightly escapades, I’m currently dealing quite badly with a serious cold, which is why this is the first sick blog post of 2011.  Besides all those germs, I also brought you this photo of said seaside right after sunset:

Sunset on the Egmond aan Zee beach. Gorgeous, innit? There's even a dude walking on the beach so that you can wax all pensive.

The conference was an energetic and motivating affair, at which yours truly even got to chair a session, during which I tried, in spite of not getting to bed all that early the night before, to Keep Things Extremely Punctual As Well As Mildly Entertaining. I succeeded in the former, you’ll have to ask the audience about the latter.

The absolute highlight, for me at least, was the capstone on Friday by Professor Richard Satava, a surgeon with an amazing vision of the future. Bordering on science fiction but for a large part backed by his own and other groups’ research, his superbly delivered presentation touched on surgical operating rooms completely staffed by robots (some elements remotely controlled by a surgeon), cell engineering, surgery robots that heal troops at the scene of the crime (hehe), genetic engineering, cloning and a healthy dash of trans-humanism. By the end the whole room was collectively straining at the leash to go and genetically upgrade anything and anyone they could find. With a room full of BME researchers, that’s more dangerous than it sounds. :)

Other note-worthy items of the past two weeks can be summarised in the following neat bullet list:

• I’ve started a new blog, called VXLabs, for matters that are too nerdy even for this blog. If you’re interested, you can start by reading the HTC Desire Z (my lovely new smartphone) review I’ve recently gotten around to writing. If you’re nerdy enough, you might consider subscribing VXLabs as well!
• There are far cheaper ways than Skype to call telephones around the world. With SIP software, such as SIPDroid on Android, you can use cheap SIP servers that even offer free calls to many destinations. See this page for a list of just the betamax (German VOIP company) providers and the free countries that they support.
• I was approached by a company producing Ugg-like boots to review their boots, get a free pair in the process, and get a good deal for my readers. This is probably because I went on about those BEAUTIFUL Timberland boots in one of my previous posts. Although I was flattered that the gentleman in question thought my widely-read (haha) opinion would be good for his brand and he called this a fashion blog (!!), I declined, stating that my readership probably is more into Timberlands than Uggs. That’s true, readership? Right?!
• Micro Backyard Philosophy: After one of those late nights refreshing my Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and GMail for the Nth time, I got to thinking about how the internet sometimes turns us into 100% consumers, leaving no room for creativity. It’s insidious, because we believe that the internet will give us exactly what we crave if we just know how to search for it, and that it should do so with that next press on the refresh button, when in fact this is hardly ever the case, especially when that which you crave is in fact to create. Remember this the next time it’s getting late and you think Just One More Refresh. Don’t push that button. Sit back and think about what you really want to do.

That’s it boys and girls, thank you very much for reading this far! You go and have yourselves a fabulous and especially creative week. If you get lonely waiting for the next edition of the Weekly Head Voices, marvel at this dramatic reading of a bad user game review, creativity at its finest:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. An Inside Job. [Weekly Head Voices #33]

My sleeping patterns are not quite what they used to be, mostly due to the latest manifestation of our little gene pool over here. Added to that, I’ve been really busy. Added to that, work has been throwing unnecessary curve-balls that have done their part in keeping me (pre)-occupied. In the end, a dash of perspective, several extremely wise friends and a generally sunny predisposition go a really long way, so here I am. :)

In this post, I’m going to touch upon the highlights of the past seven weeks (40 to 46) and I’m going to do so with bullets, seeing as I’m in a bullety-kind of mood.

• I spent a week in Stellenbosch teaching Information Visualisation! Read all about it in this special blog post.
• The week after that my mom came to visit us. She really has the best genes.
• I met my new work laptop: A Dell Latitude E6410 with Core i5 M540 2.53GHz CPU, 4G ram, 500G HDD, NVidia NVS 3100m GPU with 512 MB video mem. It’s a 14″ latop (15.4″ is a completely useless format, flame me in the comments), but due to the materials used quite heavy. I like it!
• Another one of our STW NIG research proposals has been granted. I conceived and developed this one together with colleagues from the LUMC Departments of Anatomy, of Surgery and of Orthopaedics. The title is High-definition Atlas-based surgical planning for Pelvic Surgery and we get to combine high-resolution human histology, mega-volume rendering, , biomechanical modelling and surgical simulation. With this grant we can appoint two more Ph.D. students (one in my group, one at the LUMC) for four years to work on this!!
• The week after that I went to Salt Lake City (Utah, US and A) to attend the conference previously known as IEEE Visualization. It was AWESOME! (blog post half-written, will soon publish).
• The week after that I had a really cool dream: I was playing high-speed catch with a bunch of people outside. The ball was randomly changing shape between rock, papers and scissors. If you wanted to catch it, you didn’t only have to be at the right place at the right time, but your hand also had to be in the right complementary configuration to catch the shape-shifting ball.
• Now that we’re talking about dreams: I finally saw Inception and was completely blown away. It’s not about being complicated, it’s about being a well-told story and a fantastically filmed movie. What I positively adored, is the fact that Nolan doesn’t require much: He only needs you to believe that dreams can be shared, without giving away too many of the details of the mechanism, and then builds a marvellous story on that canvas. My absolute favourite scene was the waking up on the plane, just before the landing, almost at the end of the film. I loved the way in which the characters looked at each other, and the possible interpretations of their expressions.
• On the topic of the Underworld gig in the Heineken Music Hall: I hope I have my voice back before my morning lecture tomorrow morning. Thank you Fantastic Friends!

That’s it kids. If you’ve come this far, you’re now mostly up to date. Please leave me a comment, it’s good for my serotonin! I hope you have a great week. To get you off to a  good start, here’s a music video showing what an infectious idea could look like…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #14: My Week Was A Wormhole.
2. Sometimes, being in academia rules. [Weekly Head Voices #25]
3. Weekly Head Voices #9: Windows 7 Geek-o-Rama.