(This edition is about babies, textbook Ph.D. defences and mind-viruses in Snow Crash, all of which can mostly be filed under backyard-philosophy(ish).)

On the theme of striving for The Next Level, my not-quite-1-month-old bundle of joy laughed out loud today for the first time! I’m sure that it was not a false alarm, as I was being my usual comedic genius self (I target the 1 to 3 month-old crowd), and the pattern of stimulus and reaction was just too well-coordinated and sustained to be coincidental.

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In this short howto, I show you how to combine the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) with both Knoppix 6.2.1 and Ubuntu 10.04 onto a single USB stick to create An Even More Ultimate Boot Disk (EMUBD)!

UBCD is a bootable CD image that’s fantastic if you’re trying to save grandma’s PC from a certain death, as it contains a number of different bootable utilities for testing memory, testing and low-level repair of hard drives, partition repair, antivirus and so forth. It even contains Parted Magic, a compact linux distribution for fixing partitions, amongst others.

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You might want to skip this post if any of the following is true:

• You don’t know what LaTeX is.
• You don’t care about typesetting theses.
• You’re just generally low on Nerd midi-chlorians.

Recently, we (Mr Cricket and I) helped a good friend (argh, he might already have an acronym assigned,  I should make a glossary for this blog…) typeset his PhD thesis in LaTeX. Sounds straight-forward, were it not for the fact that most of the material was in MS Word to start off with. :)

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Due to the sleep- and concentration disrupting side-effects of a recent fantastic and life-changing event, I have skipped two editions of the Weekly Head Voices.  You’re going to have to bear with me, as it might happen again more than once in the coming months, whilst the ramification of aforementioned event matures some more and finally decides that those funny hairy creatures often occupying the same spaces that she does do deserve some rest.  Sometimes.

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Part of this post, looking back on week 16 of 2010, was produced in a (I wish I could say speeding) train with my aging Nokia E71 tethered (by bluetooth) to my netbook. The T-Mobile unlimited mobile internet package is unfortunately still limited to 384 Kbit/s (see my speedtest.net results), but I’m attached to it for its reasonable policy on internet use outside of NL.

In any case, during the past week I enjoyed 14 hours of meetings and completed 22 GTD tasks spread over 11 projects. I also tasted fresh lamp-post for the first time, and it was delicious:

Welcome all, to the 20th edition of the Weekly Head Voices, now with ever so slightly updated title style!  Let’s just call it Rotterdam-style for now. In any case, this edition looks back on weeks 14 and 15 of the year 2010, with news about a boat and the people on it, two more accepted student papers (I’m just SO proud at the moment), and the International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) 2010 that took place this past week in, you guessed it, Rotterdam.

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Welcome dear fellow-monkeys, to the 20th edition of the Weekly Head Voices, exceptionally vaguely associated with the 13th week of the year 2010. In this post, nothing much happens, except that I tell you about the bowline (the king of knots), present the usual GTD analysis, spiced up with some perspective gravy and conclude with a brief introduction to epigenetics, something that I’ve also very recently learned about for the first time.

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This one is dedicated to the memory of DB.

In this slightly introspective 19th edition of the Weekly Head Voices, looking in all directions in time simultaneously, but slightly ever so slightly more in the direction of week 12 of 2010, I do the usual week time break-down, win a fight with my ISP, go all out on Dropbox and Chrome, and smash through my yearly internet shopping quota, before arriving at the more extensive than usual backyard philosophy section, which today will dwell on the very much related themes of time-travel, perspective, stress and BBQs.

Welcome all, to this, the 18th edition of the Weekly Head Voices, in which I discuss a number of issues that mostly have nothing specific to do with the 11th week of 2010, but which might or might not have crossed my mind during that time! Issues include good news on the EuroVis 2010 front, a new edition of the Head Voices Review featuring my completely unexpected stay in a 7 Tesla MRI scanner (as a test subject, of course)  and finally some nerdy backyard philosophy dealing with the well-known itch to Rewrite Everything From Scratch, Because What’s There Now Sucks.

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In this edition, looking back on the 10th week of 2010, I report briefly on the lack of blog-worthy events in my life, noting that my life is undoubtedly extremely exciting, just not always in that special blog-worthy way, before concluding with some backyard psycho-philosophy on my perception of the greenness of grass as a function of its distance from the observer.  Skip to just after the YouTube clip if you want to get right to the backyard part of this blog.

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