Weekly Head Voices #102: High on life.

The week of Monday January 11 to Sunday January 17, 2016 got off to a brilliant start with a business lunch at Bodega, a restaurant that finds itself on the Dornier Wine Estate. The view looked something like this:

… and the company was suitably awesome. (This is not the first time that Bodega makes its appearance on this blog, or in the blog-free suburbs of my social calendar. The company might be different every time, but so far its level of awesomeness has been quite consistent.)

The rest of the (work) week was consumed by extreme nerdery, which is of course the way I love it. Besides more GPU shader fine-tuning (at least once I exclaimed on the Stone Three HipChat, hopefully soon the Stone Three Mattermost,  WITNESS THE POWER OF MATH!, before showing a rendering that was marginally better than the one where the POWER OF MATH had not yet been invoked a sufficient number of times), there was Javascript, d3.js (d3 is another fantastic example of what you can do with vectorised thinking and computation) and Python.

In break time I finally took a closer look at C++14 and beyond and came away super impressed. There’s a blog post in the pipeline on generic lambda expressions, because I think they’re brilliant. I don’t know why I love different programming languages so much, but I do.

On Saturday,  I got really high with one of my besties, a superb gentleman who also goes by the name of A Very Flat Cat. We reached this altered state by the old-fashioned but extremely reliable (and cheap!) method of physically increasing our altitude via ambulation up the west peak of the Helderberg. The walk (a few hours in 35 degrees Celsius…) was exhilarating, and the view from the top awe-inspiring. Check it (click for high-res):

I’ve often wondered about the effect of one’s surroundings on one’s mindfulness. This was one of those cases where mother nature, without asking for permission or anything like that, simply brute-forced the being switch with her astonishing beauty. Very grateful I was.

Have a great week friends, see you on the other side!