The majestic view from Bodega onto the Dornier cellar and the Hottentots-Holland mountain behind it. Welcome back peeps! Make yourselves at home. It seemed that nothing much happened during most of the week, but I started writing anyway. It turns out there was slightly more than nothing much. Writing stuff down does have its perks. vimium Pro-tip of the week: Install vimium. It’s a chrome extension which enables you to SURF THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY with just a bunch of keyboard shortcuts.
Weekly Head Voices #135: It’s all rainbows and unicorns, no really!
This rainbow unicorn, floating serenely on a cloudy background, is winking right at you. Down below, we are celebrating GOU #3’s second birthday. Photo taken with the expert assistance of GOU#1, age 11 going on 32. Hi there friends, welcome back to the weekly (!!!) head voices! I missed you. Software Release Frazzle Releasing desktop software, even for a small group of people, can get tricky quickly yo! Yes, people still write desktop software, and we do love doing it.
Weekly Head Voices #134: SCARF.
Untitled artwork by GOU#2 (age 7), who is also known as My Most Favourite Middle Child. I somehow forgot to take photos this past week. At the very last moment, GOU#2 delivered, as if commissioned, the piece shown above. The WHV visual element lives to fight another day! The rest of this post is divided into three parts: One for the programming nerds, one for the running nerds and one for the arm-chair psychologists.
Weekly Head Voices #133: Onder in my Whiskeyglas.
The legendary Koos Kombuis (aka André Letoit) performing with Schalk Joubert on bass and Vernon Swart on percussion in the Helderberg Nature reserve, eponymous mountain visible through the trees on the right. This was a surprisingly amazing end to the week. What a week. It was beautiful to see the whole team step up to the plate and engineer at about 110% throughput (software gets complicated quickly, and there’s always one more thing you need to get done before the deliverable is ready), all the while remaining calm and, most importantly, kind.
Weekly Head Voices #132: Potato deadline.
Fragment of potato skin, taken with phone camera through GOU#2’s microscope at 100x. We have a serious deadline coming up on Tuesday, so I’m going to make these few WHV minutes count. BULLET LIST TO THE RESCUE! Day zero has again been postponed, this time to June 4. We continue with our water saving efforts. That unexpected side-project I mentioned in last week’s post did end up going live that very night.
Weekly Head Voices #131: Function over form.
Do you know what time it is? It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for a new edition of the WHV! GOU #2 has made what will probably be the most significant contribution to this week’s edition. I am happy that it’s in the form of an art piece, although I am slowly also growing quite excited at the prospect of one of my GOUs popping up here one day with an acerbic comment.
Weekly Head Voices #130-2: Direct experience dopamine.
Photogenic and non-camera-shy dragonfly I met in Paarl over the weekend. As I went through my notes to extract material for this week’s post, I noticed a small discrepancy between the task description for the previous post and the published version: #129 in my notes versus #130 in the published post! It’s too late now to rename #130, so in this reality I’m just going to have to deal with the fact that WHV #129 will never exist.
Weekly Head Voices #130: TTAGGG.
Lovely summer’s day. Not much rain. Water On the water front (I see what I did there): Day Zero, that is the day on which the whole of Cape Town’s municipal water will be cut off, has been brought further forward to to April 12. Citizens will be able to fetch drinking water every day from 200 collection points. Judging by how quickly shelves of bottled water are currently disappearing from the shops and by panicky facebook posts, people are stocking up in advance.
Weekly Head Voices #128: Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
Hey friends, welcome back! We have to talk about the water situation, seeing that Cape Town is now in the international news as being on track to be the first major city EVAR to run out of water. In short, if it doesn’t rain in substantial amounts during the coming three months (which history and projections say it won’t), the municipal water supply will be shut off on April 21, a date festively referred to as Day Zero.
Weekly Head Voices #127: Readers are leaders.
Betty’s Bay Beach impression by Genetic Offspring Unit #1, age 11. This week I worked on automated email analysis and storage for side-project #38465 (more on this in future editions) and on bits of UI for a wxPython desktop app (yes desktop app! some of us fortunately still get to make them!) for my current main work project. Had to make screencast to demonstrate milestone deliverable of above-mentioned main project.