In this post, I talk about our latest EuroVis news, give a quick break-down of my activities of the past week whilst turning my productivity glut into a game, sing an ode to DropBox, get threatened with a lawsuit (again) and impart, as per usual, some applied backyard philosophy. All hail the beautiful EuroVis 2010 logo!
To kick start this blog post, allow me to get this off my chest: BOTH Stef Busking’s paper on the
During the past week, the 6th of 2010, I did 2 hours of lecture preparation, 3 hours of straight lecturing, 4 hours of demonstrations and 11 hours of scheduled meetings, most of them quite energising. According to my GTD system, I also completed 19 tasks spread over 11 projects. I’m mentioning this here, as I want to increase my weekly task completion count, and posting this on my blog turns it into a weird kind of game. Once again, you are allowed, no you’re encouraged, to boo and hiss at the appropriate moments.
I also finally got around to updating our research group’s publications listing scripts to generate per-paper pages, so that we’ll henceforth have a (hopefully) attractive webpage to go with each published paper. See this for an example of the per-year listing, and this for an example of such a paper page.
Screenshot of example per-paper page, click to go there!
On Wednesday, three of us got together at my house to convert a complete PhD thesis (a good one, if I might add, and I’m allowed to, since it’s not my own) from Word to LaTeX, to get it ready for print production. Besides having lots of fun (besides bubbling personalities, beer was also involved), we got to stress-test DropBox by concurrently working on a shared folder filled with .tex files, and often doing full LaTeX builds involving latex, dvips, ps2pdf and bunches of image conversions. In spite of this dangerous concoction of a PhD thesis, concurrent editing, beer, laughter and the cloud, Murphy never arrived at the party and we ended up with 170 pages quite handsomely typeset in LaTeX. Kudos to Dropbox! (and us of course. duh.)
On a slightly less excited note, I’ve just been threatened with a lawsuit for the second time due to activities on my blog. This time, it’s a very angry and foul-mouthed homeopath. If you’re interested, search the latest few comments on my Werner post for the ones made by a certain DJ. Currently I’m hoping he’ll take the reasonable (for both of us) option and stay away. (DJ, if you’re reading this, no this is not THAT promised post. I’m keeping to my end of the deal: You stay away, your identity is safe.)
Continuing a short but promising tradition in backyard philosophy, I’d like to conclude with something I seem to remember a Very Flat Cat telling me years ago, and something that recently came up again in yet another interesting discussion with the same extremely interesting guy from last week’s visualisation science discussion:
> Under-promise, then over-deliver.
I’ve seen some pretty good mottos, but this one’s an absolute keeper. Thank you very much Very Flat Cat, also for this.