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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In the period from Monday June 12 to Sunday June 25 we were mostly trying to get through the winter, fighting off a virus or three (the kind that invades biological organisms you nerd) and generally nerding out.

One more of my org2blog pull requests was merged in: You can now configure the thumbnail sizes your blog will automatically show of your uploaded images. Getting my own itch scratches merged merged into open source projects never fails to makes me happy, even although in this case there can’t be more than 5 other people who will ever use this particular functionality.

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Welcome back everyone!

During a brilliant breakfast chat with friends who are visiting from afar, friend S (now 16.67% name-dropped) admitted that the WHV, strange unfocused mishmash of thoughts that it is, contributed positively to his information diet.

In spite of this admission adding to my already considerable posting anxiety, I am enormously grateful for the encouragement. I often worry about this mishmash, as I also aspire to enter the fabled halls of A-list bloggers one day.

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This post right here is Monday April 3 to Sunday May 7, according to at least one of the homunculi in my head!

The first stop on our East Coast autumn break road trip was Storms River Mouth Rest Camp. With the Indian Ocean smashing the rugged rocky shores, one would have to be forgiven if one were to describe the surroundings as epic, because this really is.

After a FOMO run in the rest camp itself (PRIMAL INDIAN OCEAN SEA WIND IN THE FACE YEAH) we family-walked the first few kilometres of the Otter trail, me with GOU#3 on my back. Here’s one impression of the view we were treated with:

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(Warning: Due to the momentous events of the past week, this post is 80% South African politics. If this is not your thing, eject right before the large warning further down! Maybe next week we’ll be back to our usual programming, all depending on how above-mentioned momentous events play out.)

Between all of the retinal excitement of the (gorgeous) new Justice League trailer and the release of the new Ghost in the Shell movie (pretty but soulless the reviews seem to be saying), you might have missed the new Valerian trailer.

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This edition of the not-quite-Weekly Head Voices covers the period of time from Monday March 6 to Sunday March 26, 2017.

As is becoming sort of a tradition around these parts, I get to show you a photo or two of our over-nerding antidote trips into the wild.

This is the path to the Koppie Alleen beach in the De Hoop Nature Reserve. Paths and photos of paths make me all pensive:

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Intrigued by the trailers of the movie The Arrival, which I have not seen yet, I read the short story compilation Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang.

The short story Story of your life, on which the movie is based, has a fascinating premise. However, I do hear that the film does not spend that much time on her discovery of and assimilation by the alien writing system “Heptapod B”, which to me was one of the more interesting threads.

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Too much nerdery took place from Monday February 20 to Sunday March 5. Fortunately, be the end of that period, we found ourselves here:

bibtex references in orgmode

For a technical report, I thought it would be handy going from Emacs orgmode (where all my lab notes live in any case) to PDF via LaTeX.

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