Weekly Status Update #17: Space Dress

Hmm, a weekly status update again, what to do, what to wear? I mean write of course. I have the feeling it was quite the uneventful week again but let’s see what we’ve got: coding conundrums, conference travel planning, sharing and caring, wardrobe acquisitions and the pleinbioscoop of Rotterdam. Now to the untrained eye, it looks like there is no relation between these items at all, but then, well, the untrained eye would be right. Bad writing time!

• I’ve been programming for most of the week, which is a good thing in my book. I typically find programming harder than the other typical compsci PhD tasks, so I really have to motivate myself into going for that instead of doing other things that also need doing and postponing the crap out of the programming. Programming on my current research topic definitely falls into the important and urgent task quadrant, with the PacificVis deadline late september, so it feels good to get things done. One thing that doesn’t feel so good though is that there is one weird problem related to embedding an interactive force-directed vtkGraphItem into a Qt frame that is driving me crazy. Earlier, after many days spent, I threw my hands in the air and basically said ‘Fuck it! Separate VTK renderwindows and no GUI embedding for the graphs!’, but I can’t seem to let go of it and am currently trying to fix it again. It is really not a healthy benefits vs. time spent problem and still I can’t seem to let it go.
• In lighter work, I’ve been planning my conference trip to Vienna for VCBM. Oh the joys of filling out a travel request, registering for the conference, booking the hotel and booking the flights. I am not even kidding, I really enjoy this type of thing and look forward to attending VCBM again this year and for the first time VIS (the biggest we have). I can’t wait to see awesome work, people and cities again. Hmm, I feel a conference planning tips post coming up soon 😉
• And in even more work-related news, it’s like a veritable fountain of writing material here ;), I was speaking to a dear and close co-worker about getting good work done and focusing on what’s important. For different reasons, both of us can get caught up working very hard, but on less important things. We’ve found a solution though! Since we apparently have a weird bias regarding what needs doing currently in our work, we will share our focus for the day.  For him this also involves adopting my three important tasks for the day routine (it since then had an upgrade with cute star post-its). After we both pick three tasks, first thing in the morning, we discuss them with each other. This helps in a couple of ways. First of all, we have a double less-biased check to see if we’re working on value-adding important  work. Secondly, sharing these tasks creates accountability. Typically we check in with each other later in the day to see how it’s going and we follow-up the next morning to see how it went. It feels good and I can really recommend it!
• Right, on to the non-work-related matters (or is it?). I bought an awesome dress and I’ll immediately give you three reasons why it is awesome. 1) It has a space print. that’s ‘Space, the final frontier!’, people! 2) The top part has a print that looks like a polygon mesh. Highly relevant to the work I’m doing I would say. It’s supposed to be a constellation, but shh! 3) Pretty. Colors… I bet you’re dying to see what it looks like and through the magic of the Internet, I can show you! Since I decided to better my image crafting ways, there will be no picture of me in it, but this is the dress!

  

  Pretty no? It’s available at romwe.com if you’re interested too!

• Yesterday evening we went to see Her at the pleinbioscoop. The pleinbioscoop is a yearly event in Rotterdam where you can enjoy a movie outside projected on a huge wall in a square in the middle of the city. Theoretically, this involves romantically sitting outside on a warm summer’s night cuddling under a star-lit night sky and enjoying a movie with like-minded individuals. Yesterday’s particular instance though, featured heavy rain, trying to see over people’s annoyingly huge umbrella’s, a crying baby, freezing our asses off  and ultimately getting hideous plastic ponchos to cover our already soaked summer clothes in the hopes of maintaining some sort of body heat while sitting still for a couple of hours on a hard seat in the wind. Was it what I was hoping for? No. But it still was kind of cool. Would I do it again? Hell no!

That’s all I have for this week. I hope you have a nice weekend and don’t forget to order the space dress of your dreams 😉