Weekly Status Update #15: Acceptance

Alright, so technically I still have a holiday, but I just couldn’t resist sneaking in a weekly status update near the end of aforementioned holiday. For I bring good tidings of time off, Pomotodo, VIS, VCBM and medvis.org. And it’s not even Saturday yet… Sue me 😉

• So I’ve had (still have actually) a whole two weeks off without actually leaving the country for a holiday abroad. Having this free time available, I really got to recharge my energy again. I just love being on the couch, gaming, the occasional walk in the park and just the lovely concept of not having to get dressed and travel to Delft everyday 🙂 It turns out I really don’t need to spend money on exotic trips to enjoy myself. All I need is right here. We did enjoy a day trip to Amsterdam for some shopping and went to a free festival in Rotterdam where we got to see Kool and the Gang (those guys still got the moves!) and my personal highlight of the day Omar Souleyman. Please enjoy this awesome video and I dare you to sit (or stand) still while listening to this: 
• Via Lifehacker, I recently found out about Pomotodo. As I mentioned before, I typically use Strict Workflow (as it’s called these days) in my browser and Pomodoro Timer Lite on my phone for my pomodoros. A serious drawback of these two tools is that they do not store any type of history or statistics (I had to spell this word three times before I managed not to include ‘tit’ in there, make of that what you will ;)) on your achieved pomodoros. But no longer! With Pomotodo I can be proud of what I have accomplished after each pomodoro by registering what I spent it on cross-platform. This allows me to have simple visualizations of my productivity (alongside my Todoist records) and triggers my reward circuits more than just finishing a timer and not registering it anywhere. I’m beginning to sound like an infomercial… Good times!
• In other good times, our poster submission to VIS on The Online Anatomical Human got accepted for presentation! I am really excited to go to the biggest visualization conference we have, especially since for the first time ever, it is held in Europe instead of the US. So in November, I get to give a demo and proudly stand next to the poster of the Online Anatomical Human in exotic Paris! I hope to see you there too, imaginary blog readers! In other closely related great news, Cees-Willem wrote a great article on his thesis for the Leap Motion blog!
• Yet more good times, as today I found out that our submission to VCBM, a full paper on RegistrationShop, also was accepted for presentation in Vienna in September. RegistrationShop is a 3D medical volume registration tool that allows users to perform registrations (the process of aligning two volumes together via transformations) interactively with real-time visual feedback. The tool was developed by Berend Klein Haneveld during his master thesis and is freely available on Github. If you want to check it out or even contribute (fork it! fork it good!), go forth and enjoy! I hope to make some videos and tutorials available soon as well 🙂
• And speaking of all these great conferences, did you know I contribute to a medical visualization blog? It’s called medvis.org and features all things medical visualization, but also a conference calendar, conference reports (still looking for a EuroVis 2014 guest conference report writer btw ;), job openings as well as software and datasets. If you prefer to discuss all things medical visualization instead of just reading about them, check out our lively google+ community. We also have a Twitter account for live conference updates and other assorted tweets.

That’s it for the special edition sneaky weekly status update! Have an amazing weekend!