Figure 1: Het Stadhuis, Delft, taken in August from a quick bicycle trip with my good friend the TPN. Mood: Enchanted. Part of me still lives there.
There is a nerd joke I could make about using a single byte to store the WHV post number, which would explain the long stretch of time between this edition and the previous one in March, itself also lamenting the growing interval between posts, but I’m not going to.
Instead, I would like to welcome you to this, the 255th edition of the Weekly Head Voices, a mere 6.5 months after the previous one.
On a more serious note, my reasons for almost never posting anymore, relative to years of averaging about one WHV every two weeks, are a mix of just being really busy with family, friends and work, and of realising that suddenly I have become quite old in terms of wall clock time.
Whist I feel young, and apart from a cancer or two I am in pretty good health, in my head the WHV used to originate from the head of a much younger human.
This gave these posts a certain flavour of youthful optimism, perhaps blamelessness, or maybe we should just keep it at youthful je ne sais quoi. These thoughts subsequently graduated summa cum laude from the University of Analysis Paralysis, and so months of no blogging ensued.
As my thoughts did not stop thoughting, fortunately, but more probably because with advancing age some of us acquire the super power of realising how few f***s we have left to give, I’m feeling increasingly less awkward about posting my Weekly Head Voices here again.
Write drunk, edit sober.
Because I’ve always liked for the WHVs to have full calendar coverage of my life, the rest of this post is a collection of noteworthy happenings and observations from my perspective, covering the period from April 1 to Sunday, November 17, 2024.
I turned 50
In August, I completed my 50th ride around the sun.
I am truly an old guy now.
Somehow I still managed to convince myself otherwise during the whole of my 40s, but now there is no escaping.
22:00 is really late to go to bed. In the mornings, I am unable to see my phone screen without my spectacles. I am now at the age where I have to start being really careful about not falling. You just don’t heal like you used to.
On the other hand, thanks to my family and to my friends, I am deeply and blissfully content.
The first of my kids is finishing with high school and going to university. Conversations about life partners and careers and families and grand kids are not uncommon. On that topic, many conversations with my children are epic. They are growing up to be such beautiful humans, and we are happy to be here to help them in their journeys.
P.S. It is no accident that my personal values include more than one entry focusing on children, family and friends.
P.P.S. The South African edition of my birthday party took the form of an outdoorsy weekend with some of my favourite people. The Cinque Terre-themed party on Saturday ended at 2 or 3 AM with Tool on the dance floor. Weekend parties are the best parties.
Brilliant Dutchie reunion in August
As part of my birthday celebration, I travelled for a weekend party with some of my Dutch family in August.
The weekend started with a fabulous visit to my friend and mentor FP and his partner AW right after landing on Thursday, by the end of which my long travels were in fact already worth it.
My subsequent short visit to Delft (my other home) was nostalgic and a bit magical (see photo above), and then, as per tradition, we were off to spend the rest of the weekend at Lowlands.
Musically I was utterly satisfied with Soulwax, Skrillex (guest appearance Noisia!), Fred Again… and many more, but the vibe with my friends was the uncontested headliner. It does also need to be said that we were somehow able to keep the intensity up until the very last act, until the fat lady sang.
For those of you who were there with me, I would like to apologise, but I was applying the following advice at 120%:
You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watchin’
P.S. When you’re at a music festival, having more than one (or two…) mimosas with breakfast is not just allowed, but strongly encouraged!
GOU#1 turned 18
Throughout the years, Genetic Offspring Unit #1 aka GOU#1 has made a number of implicit appearances on this blog.
Some of you have known her since she was just a baby.
A few months ago, she completed another ride around the sun and all of a sudden we have an 18 year old young adult!
GOU#1 has a sharp intellect, she loves people, and she has a preternatural talent for being in the moment, a state she cognitively understands.
I really love our discussions. A bit surprisingly, she is a dad joke connoisseur.
I have often told her that she will overtake me, both mentally and physically, which will mean that I have done my job.
My wish is that she will continue on her great trajectory. I have told her that I think she has figured a lot out about life, but that I will be there to remind her, if and when it’s necessary.
GOU#1, maybe one day you will read this. I am a huge fan of your work. ❤️
BLoM: Bullet List of Miscellany
Omnivore is no more
In WHV #254 (you know, all the way back in March of this year), I recommended the read-it-later app Omnivore to you.
It was such a great app, but I should have known better and I’m sorry.
They were bought by elevenlabs, and all users had two weeks to export their data.
This was (yet) another lesson to me that I should never deviate from characteristic (requirement) #2 of my note-taking systems:
As far as possible, the canonical source of everything should be plain old files on local drives, and be synchronized with a tool like Dropbox or OneDrive. In this way, the system is robust to the whims of a note-taking SaaS. The litmus test for this is that you are able to change out sync services and still remain with a working system. (True story)
After drying off my tears, I dusted off my trusty old Zotero config, noticed that the girls and boys of Zotero had been really busy making the software even better, and now I’m using this for web page archiving and highlighting in addition to the academic article database duties I was already using it for.
It turns out there are fantastic tools with which you can import Zotero highlights from web-pages and academic articles into your Obsidian notes. See my vxlabs post on the topic.
There is a TiL section on my other website
On the topic of Obsidian, and as part of my quest to reduce any friction preventing me from posting technical documentation, my profile website now has a Today I Learned aka TIL section.
Thanks to the magic of Obsidian and the Quartz publishing tool, I can now publish a random technical note in minutes.
I would have to say that it’s not just a technical friction reducer, it’s also the idea of having a space where you encourage yourself to post work that is not worthy of blog post quality, but could be valuable to someone regardless.
All of that being said, in the WHV-break I did manage to publish nine (9) technical posts on vxlabs.com. Underlining my point above, some of the vxlabs posts sucked up more preparation time than their content deserved, and conversely there were probably a few short tidbits that never saw the light of day.
Bluesky is my new micro-blogging thing of choice
In the past few days (from November 12), the micro-blogging service Bluesky has grown from 14 million to 18 million users, with about 10 million monthly active users at the time of writing.
Although Bluesky and its underlying AT Protocol (aka atproto) have been designed to be distributed (users can for example already set up a PDS server to host their own data), that is not the reason I am preferring this micro-blogging service over all others.
My main reason is that it seems that many users on Bluesky, maybe even most, currently prefer a more supportive and positive environment in which one can connect with other humans and perhaps even have fun together.
Conversely, people who prefer being unkind can go do so elsewhere. Bluesky’s nuclear block and other tools enable users to control exactly what sorts of interactions they have, and many are choosing for friendly interactions.
In short, it almost looks like people there are preferring kindness.
I might write more about this in future, but this is absolutely what I would prefer spending my dwindling time on: Contributing to an environment where humans are kind to other kind humans. I really hope that Bluesky can stay true to this ideal.
Databricks and Spark
This section almost did not make it in, but I feel like I should at least mention it here, because it took up a substantial share of my work time the past months.
We are upgrading our data engineering infrastructure at work. As part of this, I have really been enjoying learning about and applying Databricks and the underlying Apache Spark and Delta Lake tech to our data architecture.
You can AMA, but for now I think Databricks is a fantastic product that is not too expensive, and gives you plenty of ways to work with your data even when you don’t want to switch on that sweet Databricks compute.
The end my friend
Friends, thank you for joining me here again!
I really hope that I can come back here to share more of my old person life tips, because, you know:
On a more serious note, I wish you all the best until we see each other again, and I would like to leave you with the following.
Zen pretty much comes down to three things – everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.
– Jane Hirshfield