For the past five months I’ve been in the luxurious position(s) of having the option to do my work while standing when I feel like it. This is all thanks to the pleasant people at my work that arranged a special standing desk for me. I think it’s a good time for a review of my standing desk experiences. In this post I will describe the benefits I’ve personally experienced as well as the disadvantages and some tips and tricks.
Author: Noeska Smit
Gamification in your PhD? Gamify Your Life with HabitRPG!
Is gamification a suitable technique for maintaining motivation and momentum in your PhD? While I dislike buzzwords like these a lot, I think gamification has great potential in many applications. I guess most people are familiar with the success of Stack Overflow, a well-known example of gamification done right, but can techniques like these be successfully applied to everyday activities as well?
Welcome to my new blog!
This blog used to be hosted as a TU Delft weblog, but today I successfully moved out of there! I imported the posts and comments from the old location and relocated here, so nothing is lost. There were a couple of major issues I had with the TU Delft weblog service that were really starting to get on my nerves:
Procrastinate much? Become more productive: one Pomodoro at a time!
Do you know that feeling when you’re staring at the screen needing to get some work done and then you find yourself subconsciously opening a new tab to check what’s going on on Facebook, another tab for Twitter, maybe even one more tab for Google+ in case anyone actually decides to posts something there 😉 Suddenly you realize: ‘I really need to start working on this!’. So there you are again, closed all the distracting websites, ready to get started again. But wait, wasn’t there something else you needed to do before starting? Wasn’t there an e-mail that needed answering?
My Medical Visualization Software Development Setup and Tech Stack
Right, I’ll be the first to admit I’m kind of a lazy software developer. Sure, if I really need to, I’ll build something myself, but I’ll take no pleasure in it. At all! I use Windows and am no longer ashamed to admit it. I’m always a happy camper when other people decide to make binaries available (thank you other people!). In this post I’ll summarize my current setup including the links to the binaries. This is mainly a reference for future me, in case I need to re-install somewhere, but hopefully other people will find it helpful as well. So here is a list of the things I can’t develop without:
New Publication: ”Toward a highly-detailed 3D pelvic model” and Google Scholar Citations
I love the smell of new publications in the morning! This particular morning I woke up to a nice little e-mail from Google Scholar entitled ‘Review updates to your Google Scholar profile’. It featured a brand new publication for me to approve and to add to my Google Scholar profile:
- Toward a highly-detailed 3D pelvic model: Approaching an ultra-specific level for surgical simulation and anatomical education. A.C. Kraima, N.N. Smit, D. Jansma, C. Wallner, R.L.A.W. Bleys, C.J.H. v.d. Velde, C.P. Botha, M.C. Deruiter, Clinical Anatomy, December 2012
A look back on 2012
As is traditional in this time of year, I thought it would be nice to summarize some of the highlights in my professional life of 2012. The year started well enough, I was working on my master thesis (The Unified Anatomical Human) and finally graduated in March obtaining my degree in Computer Science – Media and Knowledge Engineering.
First!
Another day, another new blog! Recently, I’ve read this post by Eva Lantsoght entitled ‘Why Blogging is for Every Single Academic’ and also a series of posts on the Scientific American blog. These inspired me to start a blog of my own. I’ve only started doing my PhD about 9 months ago, so I guess now’s as good a time as any (if not a better) to do this! I already have a mildly successful blog for my hobby (baking GameCakes) and contribute to the community website for all things medical visualization medvis.org, but now I have this blog to really call my own. I’ll be posting about my research, conferences, publications, productivity, and maybe even some programming stuff.