Dear readers,
Due to a small accident with a friend’s quantum entanglement device, I briefly got stuck in a high pressure reality vortex. The headaches have subsided, but I do still seem to be suffering from slight time compression artifacts. In any case, that’s why there’s only this one edition of the Weekly Head Voices to cover weeks 43 to 45. As is always the case, please make use of the bolded phrases to guide you through this post. In other words, the fat words tell you what you you might find interesting so that you can skip the rest.
Week 43 was for a large part about re-learning a lesson that I’ve learned and forgotten more times than I care to count, but it was mostly about joining Superbly Cool Extraordinarily Lovely People (hi there y’all!) and going here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sOxfcWlGr0 HEAD ASPLODE!
Now how about that lesson? Let’s go:
On the Importance of Not Getting Interrupted.
During these past weeks I’ve been hard at work completing a mini-thesis (some call it a teaching portfolio) documenting my teaching activities, meaning that I had to spend a significant amount of Contiguous Time(tm) producing a significant body of text. In order to supplement the scarce supply of said Contiguous Time, I spent two mornings working at home. Furthermore, I for some or other vague reason decided not to check email before I started early in the morning and of course also not to keep my e-mail client running whilst working.
My word, what a difference!
Who woulda thunk it, it turns out that that habitual and reflexive email checking really breaks one’s speed and, in my case, causes unnecessary stress as each time the inbox piles up with even more remotely injected work. Bottom line: I’m going back (for the umpteenth time) to 3 fixed email checks and inbox emptying sessions per day: one before the early morning daily review, one just after lunch when my brain is too busy coping with digestion anyway and one in the late afternoon.
Operating Systems all-you-can-eat Buffet
During wind-down time in these past three weeks, I installed and tried out the following operating systems:
- Moblin 2.1 preview on my netbook: Oh my it boots really fast and is very pretty. It would take some getting used to, my experience was too much mobile internet device and too little computer.
- OSX 10.5.7 on my Q9450 quad-core: First: No, I have no idea how that got there! Second: Meh. Looks nice, not my thing though. Third: Eventually I’m going to port DeVIDE to OSX, when either wxCocoa or pySide is ready. I’m only doing this for my goateed, turtle-necked and beret-wearing apologist friends and definitely not for the OS or the company behind it.
- Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on my, err, netbook: My jotted down thoughts at the time: Very slick, clutter interface (including maximus) is great for netbooks. It seems the ath9k wlan adapter still has minor problems connecting / staying connected at full speed.
- Windows 7 on my netbook: Yes, the TU does in fact give us all licenses for this type of stuff, it’s a cool perk. Wow, it went on there quite easily, I simply ran “setup.exe” from the unpacked ISO and installed it to an extra 70G partition. After installing the usual suspects (truecrypt, 7zip, avira, vim, asus stuff [Super Hybrid Engine, Hotkey, Asus Update, Touchpad driver], fastcopy, chrome), I was up and running. Looooong battery life seems to be intact.
The End, My Friend
In week 44 a number of us went to defend the whole TU Delft Computer Science research programme at an international research evaluation. Besides leading to my recent PowerPoint post, this occasion surprisingly turned out to be great fun (probably thanks to the 5-star evaluation committee and their interviewing style) and we seem to have done quite well in the evaluation.
Preparing for the evaluation and finishing my teaching portfolio took up much of my time, so much so that I have not been giving the people around me all the time and attention that they deserve. People around me, I am acutely aware of this and I will make it up to you!