At AfrikaBurn 2018, the South African / Dutch theme camp Burniversity (that’s us!) was again present and active with a range of workshops and other learning experiences. (Strangely, although I wrote vaguely about our AB 2018 experience on this blog shortly after the event, I did not even mention this electronics project, and now it’s only taken 6 years to get around to the nerdy bits.) That year, we had perhaps a bit too much energy and decided to design an electronic artwork, inspired by the fun we had in 2017 with a giant bottle of helium, a bag of CR2032 button cell batteries and leds, and another bag full of helium-grade balloons.
Weekly Head Voices #254: Ratio
Hello there WHV enjoyers, and welcome back! …ish. The last official WHV, by name, was WHV #253, published on September 2, 2023, although the 2023 to 2024 transition post certainly deserves its honorary WHV title. In the meantime, I have been experimenting with the Daily Head Voices / lifelogs, which was fun, but ultimately not sufficiently meaty to fill the WHV vacuum. We are clearly going through a pretty significant WHV-hiatus.
Daily Head Voices for week 9 of 2024
Monday 2024-02-26 started the morning (and the work week!) with stupid indecision: Had all my work gear in the car, but chose to drive back home after dropping of GOU#3 for a logistical task which one of my other clan members would gladly have taken care of. Indecision irrelevant against the backdrop: We had such a good time in the car first being on time (GOU#3 loves that), then listening to Skrillex together, then talking, and then performing our morning ritual of verbally attesting our super-infinite love for each other as I drop her off at school.
Daily Head Voices for week 8 of 2024: India Venster
Monday 2024-02-19 to Wednesday 2024-02-21 Prepared for and did business trip to Johannesburg with longest time friend FS. Highlight was tripping with FS, and trip was successful to boot. Only one night away, really missed the famjam. Dealing with stomach issues this week, relatively mild but distracting nonetheless. Thursday 2024-02-22 Short run this morning in school district. Not feeling 100%, but good enough for run and conditions perfect. Did run into G-J on Reservoir road and had quick chat, serendipity!
Daily Head Voices for week 7 of 2024: Rest For Success
Most people in high-stress, decision-making industries are always operating at this kind of simmering six, as opposed to the undulation between just deep relaxation and being at a 10. Being at a 10 is millions of times better than being at a 6. It’s just in a different universe. – Josh Waitzkin (see Sunday below) Monday 2024-02-12 I really enjoyed this Rolling Stone article about Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like a Hole Yes, that’s also a subtle jab at those of you who read last week’s title and did not get the reference.
Daily Head Voices for week 6 of 2024: Head Like a Hole
Why do I lifelog? One of the reasons to publish these lifelogs is to make available a peek into the minutiae of another life (mine) that could help someone else get out of a rut, or just supply some alternative input that’s not form their own mind. Put differently, I think that when I see what other people are doing and thinking day to day, it feels like a small, external disturbance (i.
On the two world problem and personal knowledge management
Figure 1: Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash In this recent Mojo community blog post, I came across the term “two-world problem”, describing the disconnect in bio-informatics between the high-performance, low-level (often C++) and the more expressive, high-level (often Python) software layers. As someone who has experienced this first-hand in scientific visualization and image processing, also between C++ and Python (quite acutely with VTK and ITK, less so but still relevant with SciPy), I really like this term.
Daily Head Voices for week 5 of 2024
Monday 2024-01-29 Took a bit of a deep dive today figuring out if and how we could implement our homegrown SciPy-heavy data ecosystem on Azure and Power BI. Ignoring the daunting (but predictable) costs, was quite impressed by MS Fabric. Read the following two blog posts for a good introduction, cast as a comparison between Fabric and the “old” Azure Synapse. https://medium.com/version-1/does-fabric-offer-anything-more-than-synapse-workspace-d5240e4a30fe https://endjin.com/blog/2023/05/azure-synapse-analytics-versus-microsoft-fabric-a-side-by-side-comparison Because I wanted to store and sometimes highlight bunches of web pages on above-mentioned topic, decided to use the OneNote webclipper to push to work’s cloud article extraction works quite well, and you can highlight, but there’s no nice way to attach a note / comment to that highlight omnivore sometimes struggles with extracting the article from a busy webpage, but attaching comments to highlights is a first class feature Tuesday 2024-01-30 Started with trying to write up Fabric notes in word doc, but did not get far.
Daily Head Voices for week 4 of 2024
Monday 2024-01-22 As GOU#1 and GOU#2 were busy leaving for school, #3 came in to #2 for a hug but #2 was a bit too focused on getting all of her things ready to go in the car. Good Charl, in his only appearance of the day, spontaneously interjected with: “When you’re in a hug, for that moment, you put your full attention into that hug. For that moment, nothing else exists but the hug.
Daily Head Voices for week 3 of 2024
Monday 2024-01-15 Discovered that we (at work) now have access to GPT-4 Turbo via Azure OpenAI: 128K context and much cheaper than the old GPT-4. Will have to upgrade our private internal assistant, code name StoneGPT. Inspired by stefanv, carefully trying out weekly planning, but in a slight deviation I’m doing this in addition to my daily planning, which I only get around to a fraction of the time in any case.