Um, so yeah. If you've read the comments on my blog or on my facebook profile, you will have noticed that we did find Vivian, though it was the result of Vivian looking for Rebecca on Facebook, rather than my ingenious honeypot ploy using google. It could have worked, however, because my last entry on Vivian was #10 if you google her name. So now Rebecca and Vivian are reunited at last, sending emails, talkig about boys and giggling -- all the usual stuff you would expect. Aside from the coincidental reverse lookup on Vivian's part, she coincidentally had a baby boy at about the same time that Pokey was born. I guess it brings up to 3 4 6 the number of people to visit when we go to Ottawa (I keep thinking of more people I should visit).

 

Wednesday was a bittersweet kind of day because, aside from finding Vivian, Rebecca's uncle Franco passed away due to bone cancer. Franco was a great Italian guy (generally the only other non-filipino at these family functions I would attend in the Burlington area) who used to play soccer professionally in Italy back in the day. Fortunately, Pokey met him back in February on the way back from the Niagara Falls conference, and we have a little bit of video of Franco speaking to Pokey in Italian. We last saw him on St. Patrick's day. They got on really well. I'll miss him.

One thing that Pat is good for is collecting links. He used to kill quite a bit of time on the internet. I think it's contageous. That you are reading this suggests that I am right. Anyways, I just noticed a link in Pat's link page (I'd link to it, but won't in case he doesn't want his links made public). The link is for a website called flashearth.com. One problem with google earth is that unless you live in a seriously large city, the resolution for the satellite images is pretty low. Flashearth.com integrates several map providers that you can select from on the fly. I found that when I use the Yahoo map, I can find my street with enough detail to see that the photo was taken when I still had my black car, and before the house across the street was built (so I put it at March, 2005). There's no street labels so you have to be able to navigate by landmarks pretty well. I am awesome enough to be able to do this.

 

By the way, if you want to call in an airstrike on my house, I am at N43° 1' 23.0", W81 ° 13' 50.1". But I'll be ready, just you wait and see...

So Pat got himself married a few weeks ago in California. I believe it was supposed to have been a small immediate family only type event. He may or may not be finished his mini-honeymoon by now (I don't know his schedule) and ought to be back at the daily grind again either by now or sometime soon (Rebecca and I delayed our honeymoon trip to Ireland for two years, I believe). At the beginning of June, I'll try and make it to the informal reception in Wisconsin if I can make my way out there. While this may have been like one of those half-hearted invitations to your great aunt from Nebraska - you send the invitation but have already calculated the seating arrangements under the assumption that she and the hand-painted porcelain dalmation wedding gift won't be making the trip - I like to think that the invite was genuine. While I'm in the area, I'm going to try to visit with Martin. That is, if he ever reads his damn email. He still hasn't gotten back to me about looking up Vivian Cheng. She went to grade school with Rebecca and I, to highschool with Martin and I, and to the University of Guelph in the same prorgam as Martin. I was hoping Martin could make use of the U of Guelph Alumni resources or something. I hope Vivian googles her name, because Rebecca and I are looking for her.

 

This just in: Martin reads his damn email. Or at least the most recent one, to which he replied. I think he uses the subject line as a filter. Next time I want to reach him, I'll be sure to title it something like "I was poisoned by the KGB and have 3 days to live". As for the other issue of finding Vivian Cheng:

 

Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng Vivian Cheng. Hopefully google will pick this up, and one day she'll feel the inevitable pull to google her own name. When she does, this should be right up at the top of the list.

I stayed home today to work on a computer program that will sort through all of Ken McRae's features and group them together. Unfortunately, the network was a bit messed up, so I was unable to use the internet for most of the day, and I think the mess-up was affecting my router because even internally my network was having some problems (that is, until I disconnected the modem from the router). The upshot of all this was that, even though I've been at my computer for probably 8 of the last 11 hours, I wasn't able to get as much done as I would have liked -- although the internet being unavailable prevented me from wasting lots of time on Fark.com or facebook, it also prevented me from figuring out how to make a tree structure in Java.

 

So for most of the day I've been sitting at this here windows computer, the one that was in the shop for 3 weeks with a mystery problem for which the only solution the guy could come up with was to reformat, reinstall and hand me the bill (annoying, because I could have done that myself). So I was lead to suppose that it was misconfigured software. Maybe something weird I installed. Well, just 5 minutes ago, I got on gold old Mozilla Firefox and did a search on a website. Then *poof*. Screen went black and nothing else seemed to be going on. So I hit the hard reset button. Log in again, start up firefox again, which offers to restore the browser to the pages it was on before. I took it up on its offer. Again click the form button to submit the form that I was using and again: *poof*.

 

So I thought I'd write and bitch about it again before I try out that website again. Using IE this time, and then again using firefox. I need to get to the bottom of this, because this computer is nowhere near the end of its expected lifespan.

I'm on my lunch break; I just finished my slides for the lecture I am supposed to give tomorrow on Learning Theories in the History of Psychology class for which I am also the TA. So I first checked Facebook to see if anyone did anything notable, and then thought this would be a good opportunity to update my blog.

 

There's a commercial for Febreeze I wanted to mention. I tried in vain to find it on youtube, so I'll have to rely on my ability to describe it, or else your familiarity with television. In this commercial, there is a woman standing in the kitchen with the windows shut, twirling around and misting the air with the aerosol Febreeze spray. Her kids are standing at the window, and one of them says, "she's at it again". I think the message they are trying to convey is that their product smells blissfully good, however when I see this commercial, I see something more sinister. The commercial ends before the next logical event in the sequence: the children's aid society comes and takes her kids away to a foster home because the mother is addicted to inhalants.

 

Did I mention before that I was thinking of moving out of here? I can't remember. In any case, I am, because I can't write any blog entries here on my linux computer, which I am now using more and more at home. The only thing I haven't been able to do yet is watch DivX encoded avi files on that computer. Other than that, it seems to do everything I need it to. So yeah, we'll see if I actually decide to appear on blogspot. That would be funny because as I said right off the hop, I'm only blogging by accident because of Karen.

What sucks about today? Our new vacuum, that's what! I dropped alot more cash on a vacuum cleaner than I ever thought I would, but I'm pretty sure it was a Jedi master who sold it to me. There's a vacuum cleaner store on Dundas, right by the fairgrounds. Funny things happen in there. So like this guy who works there asked if he could help me, and I told him I was looking at those cyclonic vacuums, like the Dyson ones. I think I got pulled in by their marketing. But I was dead set against buying a Dyson because they're like $700, which is way too much for a vacuum. He asked if I had dust allergies (I do), and then proceeded to demonstrate one reason why the cyclonic models weren't good for allergy people: he took the dustcatcher out of the vacuum and opened the bottom hatch, sending a pile of what appeared to be kitty litter on the floor to show how much dust goes back in the air when you empty it. I guess in any other store, that would be really strange. But I figured, hey, it's a vacuum store. I'm surrounded by vacuum cleaners. I guess this is appropriate behaviour.

 

And after telling him about the layout of the house, he said a cannister vacuum was the way to go. He showed me their entry-level Meile vacuum with all it's good fun features and gave it to me to play with for a second, you know to see how light it was, etc. As I was fiddling with the on-off switch on the handle, he comes back with yet more kitty litter and dumps it on the floor in front of me. For me to vacuum. No wonder he was so cavalier about dumping crap on the floor earlier -- they get the customers to clean the damn floors in that place.

 

Incidentally, if you don't 'get' why getting a new vacuum cleaner is kind of thrilling, then clearly you are at a different place in your life.

Holy crap, it's a good thing I set my outlook reminder to go off 7 days in advance, because today I discovered that I have to present the neuroscience seminar next wednesday. The good news is that it's only supposed to be 20 minutes in length (as opposed to the 50 minute cognition ones us hardcore word nerds do), and that it's based largely on a brownbag that I presented last year. The bad news is that I only have data for 5 participants (which isn't much), and even worse, analyzing fMRI data isn't exactly straightforward, especially with the unconventional design we used. All this is to say that I will basically be gutting my brownbag from last year, and if I can make heads or tails out of the preliminary data, then perhaps I will have something concrete to talk about; otherwise I'm just presenting my design and predictions, and hopefully alerting the neuroscience people that people outside their area are also interested in some of the same things that they are (I'm sure they all must think the rest of the department conducts research based entirely on the WAIS and self-esteem inventories).

 

So even though I braved the crappy weather and came in to school (I had to help Ken with a grant proposal), I went home early because that's the only place I have to analyze the fMRI data. I did notice something funny with one of the subjects though. Participant OJ's saggital profile shows a rather peculiar anomoly. Take a look at the scan at the bottom of the entry and see what you think.

 

In other news, the recent snafus with my scheduling and my windows computer lead me to discover a fantastic resource out there. For Mac users who use iCal, and others who use Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning to manage their schedules, there's a website out there called iCal Exchange who will host your calendars. This lets you make calendars that the general public can see, and more importantly for me, centrally locate a calendar so that you can update the same calendar from different locations.