Weekly Status Update #12: Emacsochism

It’s weekly status update time! And what an eventful week it was, this was the week in which I quit Facebook with mixed results. In other news, this weekly status update features: the  Meez, performance night, The Online Anatomical Human, emacs and deadline chasing (again):

  • I came across an insightful article on the best way to start your day.  It extolls the virtues of starting your day with a bit of planning, not unlike how chef’s have a mise-en-place (the Meez) before starting to cook. I believe this is exactly how your work day should start and also found a nice Chrome extension that prompts you for five tasks you want to get done today and presents these to you every time you open a new tab. Much better than having Chrome tempt you with your most visited website in my book. Typically I enter only three tasks, because I’m weird that way.
  • On Wednesday we attended the performance night of the TU Delft’s cultural center. It was really amazing to see what kind of creative hobbies our university students have. Beautiful dance performances and there may or may not have been a nice beer or two as well 🙂
  • Cees-Willem Hofstede‘s master thesis project The Online Anatomical Human shot to fame this week. First, Leap Motion featured a nice blog post on his work. And he also wrote an article for our Computer Science and Mathematics students faculty magazine Machazine on page 26. Working it!

    oah
    The Online Anatomical Human with a 3D model of the pelvis and linked orthogonal planes containing cryosectional data and label information.
  • As recommended to me by a very inspirational and smart person and probably my only regular blog reader ;), I tried out Emacs this week with Prelude. I will do my best to describe my first experiences. After installing Prelude, for which I even needed a tutorial, because I didn’t even understand how to do that, my thoughts were subsequently: ‘Pretty colors!’, *tries to do normal things*, ‘Wow, what is this?’, ‘I don’t even… What?’, ‘WTF!’, ‘F5U12!!!’, *shuts down the computer, runs to a corner to cry, curled up in fetal position’. This learning curve is like assymptotically approaching infinity or something right at the start. Now that I can talk about it without crying again: Emacs seems to be exclusively made for either only highly intelligent max level Linux wizards or a very special breed of masochists. Since I am apparently neither of these, I’ll put this on hold for a bit. I don’t want to run the risk of contracting Emacs pinky either…
  • Yesterday was mainly spent on a deadline chase for the 2am VIS poster deadline. I submitted at 01:50 am so fingers crossed! I have to say, deadline chasing is much more enjoyable when you’re doing it together, so thank you, you know who you are! Still, a 10 Mb limit for a video, poster draft and additional materials, not cool, VIS, not cool!

That’s about all for the week. Quite eventful, but fun! Have a great weekend and see you next week for a fresh installment in the ‘The Boring Life of…’-series!

3 comments

  1. hehehehehe don’t worry, your brain-waves have now been irrevocably touched by the Emacs. It will wait patiently. (BTW, this is the reason that many Emacs users swap Caps Lock and Left Ctrl, now you can start all of your C- moves by moving your pinky 1cm to the left. just be careful of unlocking the joint…)

    1. Touched by the Emacs as in traumatized? I’m sure it’s really really cool when you get the hang of it, but it doesn’t seem very welcoming to new users. Hahaha, before attempting that I would first need to acquire all those C-moves 🙂 I’ll take a look at Sublime and if that doesn’t work, I’ll use the zenburn theme in Notepad++ and pretend I’m cool.

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