… with Vienna.

As mentioned elsewhere, I’m in Vienna at the moment for ECR 2008. Tonight started with a heavenly dinner at the Vital Images party in the Sky Bar. By 22:00, my night was already more or less perfect, mostly due to great company and beautiful food. However, we (an intrepid group of Medical Delta scientists from Delft, Rotterdam and Leiden) decided to go to Der Roter Engel in the Bermuda Triangle, mostly because I insisted that the night would only be complete after some cocktails. Their Long Island Tea was delectable. All of them, as a matter of fact.

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It’s really nice when it happens, it’s even nicer when you really don’t expect it.  Our DeVIDE paper won the SimVis 2008 best paper award!  Read all about it in the relevant DeVIDE News Blog posting.

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More or less every two years, I am overcome by uncontrollable lust.

Lust for some fresh computing hardware, that is.  YEAH!

1.5 years ago it was the HP NC8430 laptop, 2 years before that my beloved HP NC6000, and slightly short of two years before that the infinitely heavy stoeptegel-1 (I still think there’s a mini-blackhole in there somewhere).

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Last year I acquired this:

So I could go here:

… with some exceptionally cool individuals.

Thanks to one of these individuals who has developed the amazing ability to stop time in his close proximity and, as if that wasn’t enough, to possess a pair of the coolest spectacles this side of the equator, you should be able to find me on the photo to his left.

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My blood has cooled down enough for me to write this now, it was positively boiling an hour or two ago. Tonight Netwerk, a documentary on one of the Dutch national channels, reported on the AIDS vs sangoma situation back in South Africa.

Those of you who understand Dutch can read this compact summary.

In short, sangomas (witch doctors) have a huge amount of sway with the local population. So when someone is infected with HIV and it manifests as AIDS, they go to the sangoma, who then coolly explains that they’re sick due to the interference of the spirits of their forefathers and claims that they know exactly how to remedy the problem (usually with some typically ineffective mystical ritual, also involving giving the patient lots of laxatives, thereby exacerbating the symptoms). The sangomas often actively discourage AIDS sufferers from going to the clinics where they would be treated with proven AIDS retardant drugs such as AZT.

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I grew up on a healthy mix of Marvel, DC and other super-hero comics, but the Iron Man made a particularly deep impression on me. The idea of fabricating and donning an almost-invincible metal suit and then flying around and kicking idiot ass all over the show really appealed to my nerdish sensibilities.

If the trailer is anything to go by, the 2008 movie is going to rock so incredibly hard.  Robert Downey Junior is the male lead, which is already a good indication, but the fact that they’ve actually went and used Black Sabbath‘s Iron Man in the sound track is a sure sign that someone knows exactly what they’re doing.

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Dear readers, although you remain anonymous, I now know quite reliably that there are slightly more than two of you. This knowledge makes me insanely happy. Thank you very much for taking the time to glance at my posts every so often.

I’ve added three hopefully useful plugins to my WordPress (best blogging software EVAR) setup:

1. Almost at the bottom of the right sidebar, you’ll find the section “Friends’ latest blogs”. If you have a blog, it’s probably in my Google Reader (best aggregator EVAR, just try it, you’ll fall in love with it), in which case your latest posts will appear, via Google Reader, on my sidebar. I’ve modified the Google Reader plugin so that it can show an arbitrary feed, not just your Shared Items (see my comments on that post for more information).
2. Right below that, I’ve added an “RSS Feed” and an “Add to Google Reader” button. If you don’t subscribe to my blog yet, but would like to, simply click on the latter if you’d like to use Google Reader to keep up to date with my postings, or the former if you’d prefer to use some other aggregator. For those of you not using aggregators yet: if you regularly read two or more blogs, it’s definitely worth using a good aggregator. This help text explains what it means to subscribe to a feed. I’ve used the Subscribe Me plugin for this.
3. You can now also subscribe by email to the comments of a particular posting by clicking the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” checkbox when posting a comment. If anybody else adds new comments to that particular posting, you’ll get notified by email. You can easily unsubscribe at anytime. I’ve used the Subscribe to Comments plugin for this.

I have one more confession: It seems that I’m completely addicted to reading (especially personal) weblogs. At the moment, there are almost 60 that I track, but I’m always open to suggestions. Lemme know in the comments if there are any that I should subscribe to.

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Non-technical or non-interested people:

1. Good for you!
2. I’m posting this so that others with similar problems have more joy with google than I did.

Two days ago I made the mistake of even wanting to downgrade my laptop’s (HP NC8430) Windows XP SP2 video drivers from ATI Catalyst 7.10 to the latest HP-blessed version (8.391.3-070626a-050362C). My reason for wanting to downgrade was that all the ATI drivers suck (on all operating systems), but downgrading to the HP version at least gets me HP support, which I still have on this corporate grade laptop.

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This is my links page, mostly reserved for static things I think are interesting.  For dynamic stuff (such as blogs), check the right sidebar for my Google Reader exported items.

• De Wijn Recensent – my best friend (I have more than one. They are a small but very powerful group of shadowy individuals) is the only Dutch wine reviewer that you can trust. You have to subscribe to his weekly reviews on the site!
• Selecxyz – good friends of mine can link you up with a perfect little villa for your holiday in Italy.

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You know that it’s a great conference when time flies like this. Today (Thursday, November 1) is the fifth and final day, but I would really have liked more.

The morning is mostly occupied with end-of-conference formalities, such as the official announcement of next year’s conference in Columbus, Ohio, now dubbed “VisWeek” and the best paper awards. As mentioned previously, VisTrails won best paper. Another one of my favourites (also from one of my favourite groups, hi there VRVis in Vienna!) won the best application paper award: High-Quality Multimodal Volume Rendering for Preoperative Planning of Neurosurgical Interventions by Johanna Beyer, Markus Hadwiger, Stefan Wolfsberger and Katja Bühler.

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