Weekly Head Voices #7: The Answer, a STAR is born, post-human YouTube

I know that I said that I’d excuse myself from writing one or two editions of the Weekly Head Voices due to the upcoming VisWeek 2009 (and 2010, yes I will be blogging from the future) and the live-blogging explosion it will most likely lead to, but I somehow couldn’t stay away from my beloved WordPress installation. Oh well, so be it! Welcome to the Weekly Head Voices #7, a lucky number for a blog post dealing with week #42, a week that could potentially have something to do with the answer to life, the universe and everything.

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Weekly Head Voices #6: Heroic Wave, Brainy Mice, Don’t shoot the Messenger.

Week 40 of 2009 brought with it the following noteworthy tidbits: Gadgets: Public opinion concerning the HTC Hero is generally quite positive, although the extent to which the most recent firmware update has remedied the often-reported laggy touch-screen response leaves me suspicious: It does have a capacitative touch screen (the best kind), but is apparently still not as responsive as the iphone. It’s almost as if the finger swiping is seen as a suggestion instead of an actual command.

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Weekly Head Voices #5: Google Docs, Bad Netbook Karma, Cold does not cause cold.

It’s been a terribly quiet week blog-wise, but I did make that promise four weeks ago, and, seeing that I want to be a columnist when I grow up (hint hint employers of columnists) and those guys and girls simply HAVE to think up something interesting every single week, I too am going to do my best to add sweetness to the shortness that you see before you. Speaking of shortness, I did get some off-blog (yes, face-to-face!

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Weekly Head Voices #4: The New Roomie, MedVis at MeVis, Fairy Tale Beach.

Howwwwdy-hoooo! "Haringeter" by Tom Otterness. Depending on the particular reality that you find yourself in, which itself could be a function of how hard you’ve been partying, we have now left week #38 of 2009 behind us. I took a significant part of this week off to spend some quality time with visiting family. On Tuesday, I popped by my work (that’s the TU Delft for the uninitiated) to pick up some stuff for my planned official visit to MeVis in Bremen on Wednesday.

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Weekly Head Voices #3: Powerless meat Zen, Xi leaves, NFBI, Motek

HI KIDS!! You thought I’d forgotten all about you, dintcha? Nope, not that easily. Because this edition of the Weekly Head Voices is the most unorganised ever, the trick of bolding the most representative words in each paragraph simply won’t fly. So instead I’ll just highlight some random words, and you can pretend that they actually mean something. Think of it as a post-modernistic exercise in missing the point. I’ll try and be more organised next week.

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Weekly Head Voices for Week 36

Dear readers, The time has come for the second installment of the exciting new Weekly Head Voices feature! My PR people tell me that this is a roaring success and that I am rapidly on my way to becoming an A-List blogger. My therapist tells me that I should find a good psychiatrist. Before starting, I’d like to show the following photo (will get back to it later): In order to facilitate your reading experience, I have bolded in each paragraph some words that represent, with differing levels of effectiveness, the theme of that paragraph.

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Starting today: Head voices, every week!

(Badly) inspired by some dude’s weekly I’m-finishing-my-PhD-blog, sent to me by the infamous francoism, I have decided that you, dear reader(s) (hey mom!), have the right to be exposed more regularly to the voices in my head. So, in order to supplement my recent posting frequency of once per month (my global frequency seems to be higher: 349 posts over 98 months in total), I’m going to post every single week with an exceptionally entertaining summary of the week’s highlights.

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Python 2.6 enabled VTK 5.4 Windows binaries

You can always check my Latest VTK Windows binaries page to make sure you have the latest blog posting and hence the latest binaries. It also links to the “old” Python 2.5 VTK 5.4.1 binaries. I’ve made available my home-baked VTK 5.4.2 Windows binaries. These have the new-and-improved version of my python-exception-patches integrated (more about this in a future post; a serious dead-lock has been fixed and as a side-effect, you can now run multiple VTK pipelines in different threads!

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Bill Buxton at CARS 2009

Courtesy of an invitation by Prof. Bernhard Preim and the CARS (Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery) organization to give the Visualization and Virtual Reality in Medicine tutorial together with the good professor, I got to go to CARS 2009 in (you guessed it) Berlin. It was an honour and a pleasure to present this tutorial together with the author of The Book currently defining my research field. What was completely unexpected though, was being completely blown away by Bill Buxton’s keynote.

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Eurovis 2009

On Friday I returned, by jet-powered flying device, from Yet Another Visit To Berlin. :) Berlin still exudes cool like nothing else, and I got to spend my time there in the company of more than 190 other Visualisation people, many of whom have become friends over the past years. The three days were filled with presentations, but more importantly (sorry presenters!) good conversations, new friends (contacts?) and not too much sleep.

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