Weekly Head Voices #91: They’re back.

So after exactly no-one asked me when the Weekly Head Voices would be back, or why they stopped, I decided to reverse my almost-decision of quitting. This hiatus made me realise that the WHV are one of the few tenuous connecting lines between me and a tiny group of readers, people I am quite fond of, dotted around the world.

Sunset at AfrikaBurn 2015.

Sunset at AfrikaBurn 2015.

Again inspired by the information-and-entertainment-dense way that Swimgeek manages to do it, I’m going to try this in bullet form.

  • We, that’s me with friends DWR, PK, TvD, CvdB, MJ and a Very Flat Cat, spent the whole week (Monday April 25 to Sunday May 1) at AfrikaBurn 2015. We built (the desert truly is rock hard – try ramming a metre of rebar down into it, then repeat) and ran Pompen en Pimpen, bicycle repair and pimping theme camp extraordinaire, on the corner of 9ish and Binnekring. The experience unfortunately is exactly one of those things that is more or less impossible to explain in words. I’ll try a few keywords nonetheless: Hard labour at the Best Party Ever; music never stops (sleep never really comes); engineered herd humanity; so many people, so much space; gifting really is great. We’re going to have to go again.
  • Damnit. I’m not very good at bullets.
  • As if fate were a thing that could taunt me, a super interesting project at work has resulted in me:
    • Buying an early 2015 13″ Retina MacBook Pro. It’s super portable and the battery lasts more than 6 hours, but I still like working on my klunky Linux-running Acer laptop more.
    • Learning Objective C and X Code (AppCode is miles better).
    • Working on an experimental iOS app.
    • Learning to program Apple Metal on iOS and on the OSX desktop (way before most other people).
  • In another project I got my hands dirty with three.js. What a lovely library for doing WebGL! We’ll soon be shipping a product feature based on this.
  • Shortly afer having resigned myself to never ever finding a new house that we all liked, we found a house we all liked! If all goes according to plan, and the various mafia bosses we’re borrowing money from cooperate, we will soon be moving in to a place of our own. I guess this means we are sort of settling down again.

Have a beautiful week tiny group of readers!