Weekly Head Voices #132: Potato deadline.

Fragment of potato skin, taken with phone camera through GOU#2’s microscope at 100x. We have a serious deadline coming up on Tuesday, so I’m going to make these few WHV minutes count. BULLET LIST TO THE RESCUE! Day zero has again been postponed, this time to June 4. We continue with our water saving efforts. That unexpected side-project I mentioned in last week’s post did end up going live that very night.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #131: Function over form.

Do you know what time it is? It’s Sunday, which means it’s time for a new edition of the WHV! GOU #2 has made what will probably be the most significant contribution to this week’s edition. I am happy that it’s in the form of an art piece, although I am slowly also growing quite excited at the prospect of one of my GOUs popping up here one day with an acerbic comment.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #130-2: Direct experience dopamine.

Photogenic and non-camera-shy dragonfly I met in Paarl over the weekend. As I went through my notes to extract material for this week’s post, I noticed a small discrepancy between the task description for the previous post and the published version: #129 in my notes versus #130 in the published post! It’s too late now to rename #130, so in this reality I’m just going to have to deal with the fact that WHV #129 will never exist.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #130: TTAGGG.

Lovely summer’s day. Not much rain. Water On the water front (I see what I did there): Day Zero, that is the day on which the whole of Cape Town’s municipal water will be cut off, has been brought further forward to to April 12. Citizens will be able to fetch drinking water every day from 200 collection points. Judging by how quickly shelves of bottled water are currently disappearing from the shops and by panicky facebook posts, people are stocking up in advance.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #128: Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

Hey friends, welcome back! We have to talk about the water situation, seeing that Cape Town is now in the international news as being on track to be the first major city EVAR to run out of water. In short, if it doesn’t rain in substantial amounts during the coming three months (which history and projections say it won’t), the municipal water supply will be shut off on April 21, a date festively referred to as Day Zero.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #127: Readers are leaders.

Betty’s Bay Beach impression by Genetic Offspring Unit #1, age 11. This week I worked on automated email analysis and storage for side-project #38465 (more on this in future editions) and on bits of UI for a wxPython desktop app (yes desktop app! some of us fortunately still get to make them!) for my current main work project. Had to make screencast to demonstrate milestone deliverable of above-mentioned main project.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #126: Fleur-de-lis.

Betty’s Bay’s Crepuscular Rays. An apostrophe in time saves rhyme. Happy new year everyone, and welcome to the first Weekly (truly?! will this be the year?) Head Voices of 2018! I ended 2017 with a longish (by my standards) run in the morning, followed by a laid-back mini-party and finally by struggling really hard to stay awake until midnight. In contrast, returning to the office on January 2 was a pretty good way to ease gradually into work in 2018.

Read More

The 2017 to 2018 transition post.

My innermost circle of humans, on an exceptionally windy hill in St Francis. Does anything still work around here? So much dust… Is this thing on? Testing… 123… tesssting… sound check sound check. OH HI MARK. (HELLO ALL MY OTHER FRIENDS WHO ARE NOT MARK!) It’s been 4 months since the previous post (a Weekly Head Voices), due to reasons involving work (fortunately challenging and fun), genetic offspring units but especially the youngest one who is currently developing at a frightening speed, the South African climate, and my brain suddenly starting to refuse work any later than about 19:00 every day.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #125: Buddy.

Monday, July 30 to Sunday, September 3, 2017. (This post has turned into a huge ramble. It starts with parking, makes a quick visit to Yurp, buys a new laptop, compulsively measures time to try and increase quality of life, and then bounces like a hyperactive pinball between a book, a video and a blog post, all three about either not being special, not being happy or both. ENJOY!) Parking Because I would prefer that you perceive the time that you invest in reading these posts as time also usefully spent, allow me to start with a visual exposition of the pleasantly straight-forward geometry of parallel parking.

Read More

Weekly Head Voices #124: Ceci n’est pas d’ennui.

This edition of the Weekly Head Voices is a retrospective of the period from Monday June 26 to Sunday July 30, where with weekly I mean regular(ish), which is still better than absent. :) We spent the first week of July about 100km to the south of Durban. It was an epic winter break-away with the conditions so summery that we forgot that it’s technically speaking the middle of winter. Down to the beach every day, balmy evenings spent outside, brilliant runs through the KwaZulu-Natal hills and a holiday destination that has mastered the arts of happy-children-happy-parental-units all contributed to a brilliant week.

Read More