Welcome to the latest edition of the Weekly Head Voices, in which I briefly touch upon the, to my mind, mention-worthy events that took place within my field of observation during week 5 of the year 2010, and with which I too finally have an excuse to (ab)use the famous words of Magritte for my dubious ends. :) WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAMME FOR THE FOLLOWING IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: I’m officially not supposed to talk about this until the next edition of the Weekly Head Voices, but it’s too big and too cool to keep quiet about until then.
Weekly Head Voices #11: iCalmDown.
My Tall Philosophical Neighbour (henceforth TPN) blogged today about the iCalmDown, which, as you know, is the latest Apple product released with perhaps a tad too much fanfare this past week. Yes, I do realise that I’m most privileged to have a tall neighbour who’s both philosophical and manages to blog with more regularity than many. In any case, in a cut-and-dried case of keepin’ up with the Joneses, or the TBN in this case, you are now holding in your hands the eleventh edition of the Weekly Head Voices, documenting a selection of events taking place in week 4 of 2010.
Weekly Head Voices #10: Loose bits sink chips.
HI THERE KIDS! You might have thought that my Weekly Head Voices were a thing of the past, but I unfortunately have to disappoint you yet again. The weekly head voices will continue in 2010, in spite of slip-ups like this one, where I’m going to have to stuff three weeks of inconsequentialities into the room usually reserved for a single week of inconsequentialities. Whatever the case may be, welcome to this edition, covering weeks 1, 2 and 3 of 2010!
The 2009 to 2010 transition post.
Holiday feeling. Yes, that up there is my foot. Next to my beer. On my balcony. Overlooking my ocean and my clouds… It was a ridiculously lovely holiday, with the only drawback that I wasn’t able to take more people along on it. Fear not, soon my Master Plan will come to fruition, in which my significant other will become famously rich and I’ll be able to charter a Family and Friends Boeing (or an Airbus, depending on the rules that govern such things at that time), and you’ll all be able to tag along on my Ridiculously Lovely holiday.
Three rules of stress-free email productivity
Hey kids, this would have been the Weekly Head Voices #10, but since the past week can be really compactly summarised (4 hours of lecturing, 8 hours of lab supervision, 1 M.Sc. defense, 15 hours of meetings, 1 brilliant going-away party), I’ve decided to dedicate this week’s post to something completely different, something that one or two of you might even find useful! Image copyright Grant Neufeld. I get to process quite an amount of email every day, and the amount seems to be increasing year after year.
Weekly Head Voices #9: Windows 7 Geek-o-Rama.
I’ve unfortunately not been involved in any quantum entanglement accidents recently — teaching duties are mostly to be blamed for my two-week silence. Besides spending at least a whole work-day every week on our Data Visualisation practical, I’ve been lecturing and also been preparing a new lecture block on information visualisation with a dash of visual data analysis. Due to my not secretly being an infovis expert, this latter activity has taken up quite a chunk of my time and effort.
Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply
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.
Your GMail account CAN be hacked over insecure WiFi
Today The Next Web posted an episode of BBC Watchdog where it was demonstrated how a GMail account was hacked through insecure (WEP) WiFi. For those of you still wondering, I’d like to confirm that it is indeed possible to hack a GMail account over insecure WiFi: GMail does indeed always send your password through secure HTTP (SSL) so that this can’t be directly hacked, BUT, by default, the rest of your session happens through normal clear-text HTTP.
Two PowerPoint 2007 tricks that could save your life
On Wednesday evening I was putting the finishing touches on probably the most important presentation I’ve given in the past few years. As I was testing everything on my trusty little netbook just before bed-time, two scary problems reared their ugly heads: 1) An embedded MS-MPEG4 encoded AVI simply showed a black box when played and, perhaps even more disheartening, 2) the last and most important slide took between 4 and 6 seconds to appear.
Futuristic Betting at VisWeek 2009.
So I went to IEEE VisWeek 2009, and it was far more awesome and enjoyable than even my most optimistic expectations. Besides contributing to the tweetstorm (see #visweek) but not being able to liveblog due to higher priority activities, attending paper presentations and chatting with as many cool people as possible (much higher priority activities), this year I’ve also made a number of elaborate bets with a subset of said cool people concerning the future of our technology.