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:

(Post summary: TPN makes me a blog jingle, restaurant micro-review, the making of Dr. Zhao, a question for YOU about your weekend habits.)

Allow me to start with two bits of good news:

1. 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.
2. 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. See this camera-phone impression:

   

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.

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[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. Error info and stack trace look something like the following (edited for brevity):

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This past week I was away from work, doing a nano-sabbatical in my secret lair.

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. Please do watch out.

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. Frustrating, to say the least.

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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:

Post summary: Conference, VXLabs, SIP, boots, backyard philosophy on you the consumer, dramatic reading. Read on for more!

Just before the weekend I spent two days at the Dutch Bio-Medical Engineering Conference in Egmond aan Zee, in a ginormous seaside hotel. Probably because I attempted to keep up with the young ones during their nightly escapades, I’m currently dealing quite badly with a serious cold, which is why this is the first sick blog post of 2011.  Besides all those germs, I also brought you this photo of said seaside right after sunset: