Almost 2017 – about time for a 2016 review

The last day of the year is upon us, so it’s just about time for a review of 2016 and to look forward to 2017! I really enjoyed writing a similar post last year, looking back at last year and looking forward to next year, so this means you get to suffer through another one of them :). Again, first of all, my best wishes to all of you for 2017! I hope you have an amazing year with lot of awesomeness all around.

Let’s get down to review business, starting with the looking back part:

  • Again, I didn’t blog so much, and I really hope to do more next year. I have a long to-do list especially for medvis.org, so I really want to get back into it soon. For personal reasons (still the same ones as last year), I am making this personal blog a bit less personal, and a bit more work-related. I am especially inspired currently by Veronika’s awesome (and frequent) blogposts to start writing more again myself 🙂
  • I guess one of the major events last year for me personally was my PhD defense. I wrote about it before, so won’t go into too much detail here. I am looking back still on a really cool day with a lot of cool people, and still very thankful to all those people that made this possible for me.
  • The other major event was moving to a new job and a new country. While last year, at the time of writing my review post, I had no idea this would actually be happening, I accepted a position as a researcher here in the Bergen, Norway, at the visualization group in the department of informatics from the 1st of August. A nice contrast from last year’s review: “I could definitely see that becoming sort of just a thing to do on the weekends while living there” vs. now: “Walking up mountains in the weekend, waddup!”:

    View from Fløyen on a nice Søndagstur
    View from Fløyen on a nice Søndagstur
  • I really enjoyed last year ‘academically’, as I got to enjoy a lot of my favorite activties: cool collaborations, paper writing, and attending conferences. I presented papers at Eurographics, EuroVis, VIS, and attended VCBM, co-authoring a paper there too and winning a MedViz image award. I still also have two journal papers under revision, and I find I enjoy these less than conference papers, mainly because they have been dragging on over longer periods of time. Besides, the papers in our field in top conferences end up in journals anyway, and then you get to meet cool people at conferences as an added bonus. This could lead to new collaborations, which in turn could lead to new conference papers, and more conference attending 🙂 Yea, more of my favorite things!

As for looking forward, all three wishes I made last year for this year (more collaborations, wrapping up papers, getting doctorified + starting something new) came true, so fingers crossed for 2017’s plans as well:

  • First some news: from the 1st of January 2017, I’ll be working as an associate professor (tenure-track) in medical visualization at the Bergen visualization group. I am far beyond excited about this: the research environment and opportunities for true interdisciplinairy medvis collaborations here are incredible, so I am thankful for this amazing opportunity. Therefore, in 2017 and the coming years, I hope to further develop and establish my research agenda, perhaps moving away a bit from the pelvic area, and into new and exciting challenges.
  • In March, I am visiting Magdeburg again for the VCBM fachgruppe meeting. I visited Magdeburg last year to finalize a STAR, and look forward to returning next year.
  • In May, I am giving an invited talk together with Annelot Kraima at the annual national symposium for surgical assistants. Really excited to present our joint work including PelVis there for a new audience.
  • In 2017, I’ll also be co-chairing the EuroRVÂł workshop, which is co-located with EuroVis 2017 in Barcelona (so much co- going on there! I also hope it will be co-ol ;)). The theme of this international EuroVis Workshop on Reproducibility, Verification, and Validation in Visualization will be “Perception in Visualization”, and we will be releasing a call for contributions soon :).
  • Finally, for 2017 besides continuing the things I’m already enjoying, I’m looking forward to new experiences and learning new skills. For instance, I am working on a project proposal currently, and will be teaching as well. I am also learning the Norwegian language, both via Duolingo as via a ‘real course’. Exciting times ahead!

That about wraps it up! I noticed compared to last year’s plans for next year, I now have more concrete plans lined up for next year already, and I consider this a good thing :). I hope this will help with focus and productivity in 2017. Again, all the best to all my (lol) dear blog readers: gott nytt ĂĽr!

Todoist!

By far the most popular post ever to grace this blog is the Comparison of Task Managers: Remember the Milk vs. Astrid vs. Wunderlist. Since I sneakily switched to Todoist three months ago, I now updated the blogpost to include that in the comparison. That post shallt henceforth be  known as: ‘Comparison of Task Managers: Remember the Milk vs. Astrid vs. Wunderlist vs. Todoist! To make this current post not entirely devoid of content, here’s a screenshot of my Todoist set-up:

todoist
Note the pretty project colors, my busy day, Karma stats in the top right and overall awesome design of Todoist ^^

Using Evernote to organize your PhD

Ideas, meeting minutes, lab journal notes, paper summaries, travel information, graduate school homework and project notes. During your life as a PhD you generate, process and receive so much information that organizing all of this can be a daunting task. Luckily there is great software that can help you get organized by making it easy to collect and find information across your devices. For me personally, Evernote is the best fit, so in this post I’ll show you how I use Evernote to organize my PhD.

The Leap Motion: First Leap!

This is just a quick and dirty post about my first leaps with the Leap Motion. For those of you unfamiliar with this device, it’s a tiny device that provides ‘motion sensing technology for human–computer interaction’ and promises to be World’s Most Accurate 3-D Motion Control. Today I got to play around with a Leap Motion, because the lovely Computer Graphics and Visualization group is awesome that way.

First up: some low-quality phone pictures!

Comparison of Task Managers: Remember the Milk vs. Astrid vs. Wunderlist vs. Todoist

A blog post topic that has been ironically lingering on my To-do list for some time is a comparison of task managers I’ve been using over the years: Remember the Milk (RTM), Astrid, Wunderlist and Todoist. If there’s anything I love doing, it’s making To-do lists and if there’s another thing I really love it’s finding cool apps that help me get stuff done. I’m by no means a GTD-fan, but I do enjoy a good AutoFocus FV session (I’ll write a blog on that technique next) and lists in general. So let’s get started with the list comparison (lol). I’ll summarize my love, feelings of meh and other assorted ramblings for Remember the Milk, Astrid and Wunderlist and Todoist below.

HabitRPG Review – Achievement Unlocked: Gamification Done Right!

I’ve been playing around with HabitRPG for a little over a month now, so as promised: my HabitRPG review! My initial impressions and description can be found in my previous post, but this post is a more in-depth review after a month of use. I backed the Kickstarter shortly after trying it out for a while and there have been a lot of updates since (not only due to my contribution, I’m sure 😉 ). The creator, Tyler Renelle, is obviously very passionate about HabitRPG and it really shows. Here’s my rundown of the things I love and the things I’m not too happy with. Let’s start with a short visual tour and after that I’ll get on with the review:

The Standing Desk Review

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.