Weekly Head Voices for Week 36

Dear readers, The time has come for the second installment of the exciting new Weekly Head Voices feature! My PR people tell me that this is a roaring success and that I am rapidly on my way to becoming an A-List blogger. My therapist tells me that I should find a good psychiatrist. Before starting, I’d like to show the following photo (will get back to it later): In order to facilitate your reading experience, I have bolded in each paragraph some words that represent, with differing levels of effectiveness, the theme of that paragraph.

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Starting today: Head voices, every week!

(Badly) inspired by some dude’s weekly I’m-finishing-my-PhD-blog, sent to me by the infamous francoism, I have decided that you, dear reader(s) (hey mom!), have the right to be exposed more regularly to the voices in my head. So, in order to supplement my recent posting frequency of once per month (my global frequency seems to be higher: 349 posts over 98 months in total), I’m going to post every single week with an exceptionally entertaining summary of the week’s highlights.

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Python 2.6 enabled VTK 5.4 Windows binaries

You can always check my Latest VTK Windows binaries page to make sure you have the latest blog posting and hence the latest binaries. It also links to the “old” Python 2.5 VTK 5.4.1 binaries. I’ve made available my home-baked VTK 5.4.2 Windows binaries. These have the new-and-improved version of my python-exception-patches integrated (more about this in a future post; a serious dead-lock has been fixed and as a side-effect, you can now run multiple VTK pipelines in different threads!

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Bill Buxton at CARS 2009

Courtesy of an invitation by Prof. Bernhard Preim and the CARS (Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery) organization to give the Visualization and Virtual Reality in Medicine tutorial together with the good professor, I got to go to CARS 2009 in (you guessed it) Berlin. It was an honour and a pleasure to present this tutorial together with the author of The Book currently defining my research field. What was completely unexpected though, was being completely blown away by Bill Buxton’s keynote.

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Eurovis 2009

On Friday I returned, by jet-powered flying device, from Yet Another Visit To Berlin. :) Berlin still exudes cool like nothing else, and I got to spend my time there in the company of more than 190 other Visualisation people, many of whom have become friends over the past years. The three days were filled with presentations, but more importantly (sorry presenters!) good conversations, new friends (contacts?) and not too much sleep.

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Python 2.5 enabled VTK 5.4 Windows binaries

You can always check my Latest VTK Windows binaries page to make sure you have the latest blog posting and hence the latest binaries. I’ve made available my home-baked VTK 5.4 (actually build from a CVS VTK-5-4-1 tag checkout) Windows binaries. These have the new-and-improved version of my python-exception-patches integrated (more about this in a future post; a serious dead-lock has been fixed and as a side-effect, you can now run multiple VTK pipelines in different threads!

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You must vaccinate

Image courtesy of dbtechno.com. I was mistakenly under the impression that, at least in my social circles, the whole vaccination issue had been put completely to rest, but based on the number of serious questions that I’ve been asked recently, this unfortunately does not seem to be the case. For those of you who don’t have time, I’ll cut to the chase immediately: Yes, you simply must vaccinate your children.

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My First Sabbatical

As mentioned in the previous episode of this Exciting and Inspiring series, I was on my way to Magdeburg (that’s in Germany) for a one-month micro-sabbatical. It seems that almost everyone has a different idea of what a sabbatical actually entails. Some seem to think that it’s a different kind of vacation, others think that it’s a strange kind of very long Sunday. In an academic’s case, a sabbatical usually refers to a period of time spent away from the usual place of work to acquire some new skill, to perform some serious thinking or to try one’s hand at coming up with and performing some “own” research, whatever that may mean.

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When the going gets tough…

The past months have been hectic. Since the start of 2009 I have initiated, developed and run the brand new TU Delft Medical Visualisation M.Sc. course (cutting-edge learning methods with integrated lectures and hands-on exercises, more on this in a future post), released DeVIDE 9.1, worked on bunches of research proposals, co-authored articles and setup new research projects. This happened in parallel with my normal work duties. The lecture/workshop part of the course is now done, proposals and articles were all submitted last week and newly setup projects are coming along nicely.

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I know what I want for my birthday

I thought I had everything any human could ever desire. Turns out I was completely wrong. Please please please get me one of these for my birthday: This will work especially well here in the canals of Delft. I’ll be able to arrive at work or just go about town in ultimate style. YEAH!

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