Here’s a photo: Some train at the Rotterdam Station. I spent lots of time in these the past week. … and here are four things, most of which happened last week: I was honoured to be invited by the International Research Training Group (IRTG) of the University of Kaiserslautern to visit their institute and give a presentation on medical visualisation (my field of research, for those of you joining very late).
The Monthly [Weekly Head Voices #50]
HEY! I’m still here, and it seems I really have to catch up on my backlog of WHVs, all the more as I was starting to notice the beginnings of BPP (Backlogged Posting Paralysis, of course). So I’ve spent a few minutes gathering a selection of life snippets of the past six weeks (week 21 through week 26) and will now proceed blasting them out this old Web 1.0 exhaust. I wasn’t completely idle blog-wise, however.
EuroVis 2011
I’ve written before about EuroVis, the most important European scientific conference on visualisation. In 2009, it took place in Berlin, in 2010 it was in Bordeaux, and, an a surprise non-twist of alliteration, the 2011 edition was held in Bergen, Norway. With 216 attendees and a practically perfect organization, this year’s edition has been described as the biggest and the best EuroVis ever. In a bid to save some time (I still owe you a mega-edition of the Weekly (actually Monthly) Head Voices), I’m going to give my biased account in bullet-list form:
Schloss Dagstuhl: Computer Scientist Heaven
Somewhere in a remote but picturesque location in southern Germany, there’s a special castle called Schloss Dagstuhl. Every week, the castle fills up with a smallish group of Exceptionally Privileged Computer Scientists, who can only go there Because They Have Been Invited. Every week hosts a different field; In my case this was the Scientific Visualization seminar, one of the oldest participating groups. Everything has been setup just so to guarantee a perfect computer sciencey week for all guests.
Just One Thing. [weekly head voices #49]
(post summary: linkedin news, the week in bullets, backyard philosophy!) Dearest readers, Yesterday I made my 400th LinkedIn connection. Yes, I know there are people with zillions of LinkedIn connections, but mine are special. I’ve actually had contact, outside of LinkedIn, with each and everyone of them. In most cases the contact has been in person, in some cases even involving beer, and in the others the contact has been sufficiently significant, by my metrics of course, to warrant a real connection.
Great Success! [weekly head voices #48]
Seven years ago, a wise man gave the following advice on this blog: There are two rules to success in life: Rule 1: Don’t tell people everything you know. At that stage, twitter did not exist yet (the first tweet would only be made on March 21, 2006), so the clearly visionary post author had the habit of writing short, tweet-like blog posts. Because times have changed (my posts are slightly longer than 140 characters these days), but the advice is still sound, I’m repeating it here.
GOUMEs [weekly head voices #47]
As you all would have guessed by now (ALL my readers are insanely astute, of course), GOUMEs stands for Genetic Offspring Unit Maturation Events. You see, the first week of May has the fantastic privilege of hosting the birth dates of both of my Genetic Offspring Units. One of them is too young to appreciate the significance of this event, the other is now at the stage where one tends to over-estimate said significance.
More cowbell! [weekly head voices #46]
There’s a really big dude with a cowbell dancing around in my head: More Cowbell From Saturday Night Live from Gethin Jones on Vimeo (ed: Video embed updated on 2021-09-12, previous dailymotion link had disappeared.). My life seems to be just full of cowbell at the moment. During the coming months, more will be revealed. During the past weeks, the following things seemed mention-worthy at the time: On Sunday, April 17, I went with a posse consisting exclusively of spectacularly hip people, who prefer to remain anonymous on this blog but who might pop up in the comments now and then, to the Coldcut Energy Union gig in Amsterdam.
Have a cow, man! [weekly head voices #45]
Week 14 was awesome, thank you very much for asking! There are many reasons for this. The photo below is a memento of one of them, and was taken from my bicycle on Sunday, at that moment gliding gracefully through Schipluiden, genetic offspring #1 chattering away from the back: Photo taken with telephone, loosely held in one hand, finger curling around to try and touch the little iris thingy on the touch screen, other fingers attempting to prevent said telephone from accelerating towards and coming to a sudden stop on planet earth.
HappinessException [Weekly Head Voices #44]
Just slightly before this week is over, here’s a super quick WHV looking back on last week, #13 of the year 2011. Let’s start the show with this delightful body-motion-art music video, brought to my attention by the intriguing TNR: The most noteworthy items of my week were the following: The VisWeek 2011 deadline, together with EuroVis our most important yearly paper deadline, smashed through our lives on Thursday. I had the distinct privilege of participating in two excellent submissions, and once again came to the realisation that I absolutely love writing papers, even when chasing deadlines as serious as this.