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. Armed with the Django Rest Framework and plenty of battle scars, it took about 17 hours from idea to fully deployed REST API, a large part of which was debugging the paper’s math and spreadsheets.

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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.

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. I have decided to name this edition #130-2 so that eventually (well, in about a week), we will be back to uninflated post numbers. Nobody likes inflation. Except perhaps tyres. And balloons.

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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.

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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.

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• 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. Making screencasts is an obscure but longstanding hobby of mine, but I needed to level up slightly, so the business bought me ScreenFlow 7.2. For the first time ever, I recorded the screencast in multiple segments and did the voice-over later. Soon these new skillz will trickle down to my publically available screencasts.
• On that topic, having a good microphone is crucial, not only for screen recordings but also for video meetings. I recently acquired the Samson Go Mic to complement my larger Samson C01U. The Go is brilliant: Recorded voice quality comes close to the C01U in spite of the Go’s compact form factor, and it has a hardware switch to select either of the the built-in omni-directional, for meetings, or cardioid, for more dedicated voice recording, microphone elements.
• Ironically, an ex-colleague posted “How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us” on Facebook, a long and worthwhile read on how FB is used to spread fake news that effectively manipulates public opinion, and what should be done to remedy this. Here is a choice quote to get you started:

We still don’t know the exact degree of collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. But the debate over collusion, while important, risks missing what should be an obvious point: Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.

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• Happy new year everyone, and welcome to the first Weekly (truly?! will this be the year?) Head Voices of 2018!
• I ended 2017 with a longish (by my standards) run in the morning, followed by a laid-back mini-party and finally by struggling really hard to stay awake until midnight.
• In contrast, returning to the office on January 2 was a pretty good way to ease gradually into work in 2018. Many colleagues were still on vacation, so the week felt a bit like work with training wheels.
• Pro-tip #1 for the new year: In the last few weeks of 2017 I started (again…) explicitly making quiet time at the start of the day to think about what I want to take care of. These take the form of a small number of Org mode “- [ ] Do this thing” checklist items that are usually related to but separate from my main tasks. I find it amazing to which extent these few minutes are able to shape my day. (In my org mode monthly journal, I also usually start by listing out manually the tasks I want to complete during that month, as well as the ideas / thoughts / principles I want to keep in my sights.)
• Pro-tip #2 for the new year: After years of resisting these types of software tools due to my belief that I should simply apply more grit and will power to squeeze out more focus hours, I finally broke down and purchased the macOS app called Focus. You click its pretty icon, and then your computer goes into focus mode: The Mail application and a bunch of other non-focus-related apps all get killed, and a bunch of websites (reddit, youtube, work chat, etc) are blocked for a user-configurable block of time. I rationalised this purchase with the following reasoning: It usually takes a single moment of weakness for a distraction to terminate a valuable block of focus. It takes a single moment of strength for this tool to start a valuable block of focus.
• Although I’m having fun, I really don’t think I’m supposed to use bullets like this.
• Thank you very much for spending time here with me. I wish you a week of value and focus, followed by a visit to the next WHV!

  

Does anything still work around here?

So much dust…

Is this thing on?

Testing… 123… tesssting… sound check sound check.

OH HI MARK.

(HELLO ALL MY OTHER FRIENDS WHO ARE NOT MARK!)

It’s been 4 months since the previous post (a Weekly Head Voices), due to reasons involving work (fortunately challenging and fun), genetic offspring units but especially the youngest one who is currently developing at a frightening speed, the South African climate, and my brain suddenly starting to refuse work any later than about 19:00 every day.

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Monday, July 30 to Sunday, September 3, 2017.

(This post has turned into a huge ramble. It starts with parking, makes a quick visit to Yurp, buys a new laptop, compulsively measures time to try and increase quality of life, and then bounces like a hyperactive pinball between a book, a video and a blog post, all three about either not being special, not being happy or both. ENJOY!)

Parking

Because I would prefer that you perceive the time that you invest in reading these posts as time also usefully spent, allow me to start with a visual exposition of the pleasantly straight-forward geometry of parallel parking.

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This edition of the Weekly Head Voices is a retrospective of the period from Monday June 26 to Sunday July 30, where with weekly I mean regular(ish), which is still better than absent. :)

We spent the first week of July about 100km to the south of Durban.

It was an epic winter break-away with the conditions so summery that we forgot that it’s technically speaking the middle of winter. Down to the beach every day, balmy evenings spent outside, brilliant runs through the KwaZulu-Natal hills and a holiday destination that has mastered the arts of happy-children-happy-parental-units all contributed to a brilliant week.

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