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.

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Taxing but fun. [Weekly Head Voices #43]

With every edition I claim that I have no time to post, but this time, I have even less time than usual. However, here I am to bring you a super-duper compact time-saving edition of the Weekly Head Voices, filled with the highlights of week 12 of 2011. I’ll start this edition with some church: Pretty spring photo of the back of the New Church in Delft, taken whilst I was waiting for my guest (Our Man in Vienna, temporarily in Delft!

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Drown in the now. [Weekly Head Voices #42]

Carrying the portentous number 42, this edition of the Weekly Head Voices owes it to the sometimes nerdy expectations of its readers to offer at least a small part of the answer to life, the universe and everything. In other words, #42 is 100% backyard philosophy. Water, and bridges, and paths, taken this morning especially for you. You should start feeling all pensive now. I’ve had a really brilliant week.

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On my way to the A-List! [Weekly Head Voices #41]

(Post summary: TPN makes me a blog jingle, restaurant micro-review, the making of Dr. Zhao, a question for YOU about your weekend habits.) In spite of severe lack of time, I have to write this blog, because the therapist in my head said so. Well, there’s also the matter of having really important things to talk about, but I could just have kept it all bottled up as well, so that doesn’t really count.

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Spring has arrived in suburbia! [Weekly Head Voices #40]

Allow me to start with two bits of good news: You have arrived at the 40th edition of the Weekly Head Voices! This blog will soon buy a black leather jacket, start riding around on a motorcycle that is far too big for it and see its therapist concerning its little “Is this all there is?” existential crisis. Spring has arrived in suburbia! Today was glorious, with zillions of little kids running around outside in the sun, and parents chatting contentedly about the barbecue potential of the coming season.

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I crushed the GSVideo problematic frame error!

Nerd warning: This post really belongs on my nerd blog VXLabs.com, but as this blog has a rich tradition of popular [processing posts][2], I’m posting it here. [][3] [GSVideo][4] is a brilliant library that you can use in [processing][5] to capture live video, on Windows, Linux and OSX, and it’s a huge improvement over the built-in capturing support. Unfortunately, a number of us (including some of the 123 students we got to build augmented reality music instruments this September) have been running into a problematic frame error crash that meant captures didn’t last for very long before unceremoniously crashing the application.

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I like nano-sabbaticals. [Weekly Head Voices #39]

This past week I was away from work, doing a nano-sabbatical in my secret lair. Example of some random evil lair. Mine is exactly the same, except that it's not in a hollowed-out volcano, doesn't have my face on the outside and is not near the sea. I thought I was being original by dubbing my week-long self-imposed working isolation a nano-sabbatical, but [google knows better][1]. It turns out other people call their week-long sabbaticals nano too.

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On the importance of taking notes. [Weekly Head Voices #38]

Post summary: Part one is about friends graduating from Evil School, part two is rather short mentioning vague bits of good news and part three is 100% time management and productivity boosting goodness! Feel free to skip, skim or reorder! One On Thursday, February 10, 2011, my dear friend Mister Krekel graduated from Evil School after years of hard work and evil-doing, and will henceforth go through life as the formidable Doctor Krekel.

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Moar internets!

I hope to have time this weekend to report on significant and wonderful recent events, but until then, I wanted to share some less important but nonetheless good news with you. My house is more than 3km from the telephone exchange, so my ADSL connection could manage 5.4 Mbit/s down and 0.8 Mbit/s up on a good day, but during the evenings and on weekends, it would go completely wonky and generally unstable.

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Postmodern creativity. [Weekly Head Voices #37]

Post summary: Review humour, WhatsApp, SPA3102 gadget, hiking boots, happiness in the blue zones. So there are people on the internets who have chosen as their creative outlet the writing of superbly entertaining fictitious reviews of real products on real e-commerce sites. See for example this customer review of a tub of uranium ore that was once available on Amazon: You used to be able to buy uranium ore on amazon.

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