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October 05 IndoctrinationRebecca sent me a picture of a stranger's baby. She most likely found it on one of her knitting blogs, who is in all likelihood married to a nerd. Or is a nerd herself. Clearly, there is some kind of correlation going on here. Well, anyways, here is the shirt:
 I needs me one of those for Pokey. Not that I'm a nerd. Nor is Pokey. It's just too funny to not want. October 03 Developmental trajectoryToday, Pokey and I are wearing the same outfit: an orange waffle-weave crewneck pullover and navy blue pants (his are fleece; mine are denim). You will submit to the cuteness.
I also wanted to post an update that I think is kind of interesting from a concept-development sort of perspective (which is what I do for a living). I noticed yesterday (or maybe it was the day before) that Pokey, who is turning 1 on Sunday, has learned that keys are things that are somehow used in locks, which are in turn found on doors. Carrying him past our keyholder, he points at the keys to tell me he wants to go over there. There, he grabs a key. He then points to the door and does the same thing. Standing at lock level beside the door, he touches the key to the deadbolt. One of the things that we never know in concept development is the trajectory for learning about things in the world. This anecdote will probably find its way into a talk sometime. October 02 Baby's first stepsToday Pokey made his (alleged) first steps. I say alleged because there's no telling what he does when we're not around. Like those fanciful stories of toys that come alive or animals that act like people when nobody is watching. He's a little daredevil, that Pokey. He's been running and jumping for awhile, I'm sure of it.
Speaking of running for awhile, I went in for the 3rd time to try and make the cut for an athsma study at the Robarts center. They were testing a medication and an MRI imaging technique on people with exercise induced athsma, with which I was first diagnosed in June '06. I'll skip the back story, and get right to the part where I showed up two Mondays ago to see if I was a candidate for the study. I followed the instructions they sent the previous Friday. I kept them, so I was able to refer back to it and confirm my non-idiocy when they had to halt the test because I had taken Benadryl 9 hours prior. According to their procedure (but not their email), I was not allowed to take Benadryl for 48 hours. So I had to rebook the test for Wednesday. It also meant that I had to play soccer that night without taking my puffer. I have moved to defense, so that was much easier than it would have been had I remained in midfield (sorry, defense players, I don't mean to insinuate that your position is easy).
I went in last Wednesday, and they put me on the treadmill. They had a heart monitor, and kept talking about staying in the target rate so I followed along with their speed suggestions. Turned out they were just being cautious with the speed suggestion because some people tend to exaggerate when describing their fitness levels. Well, I was unable to induce an athsma attack that day, nor again yesterday because I only reliably get them when I sprint (though I did run through an attack at the 5K Run for the Cure 2 years ago). I am not aware of a treadmill on which one can safely sprint. And as the treadmill challenge requires 4-6 minutes of exertion, it's also hard to cover 5K in that time without sprinting either. Stupid limbo lungs. Too crappy for sports, too healthy for their damn study. It's like the opposite of goldilocks. July 20 Morning PeopleToday we are pretending to be morning people. We were also middle of the night people, but that's neither here nor there. Two nights ago I figured out that a bottle of milk seems to solve alot of problems, so last night, when Jude was waking up frequently, I was throwing milk at the problem. It worked, as far as calming him down, though it created a problem of its own in that Jude's diaper was saturated to capacity by the time I changed it this morning. It was at that time that I realized that the sky was brightening, and a quick time check -- 5:20 am -- persuaded me to abandon any intentions I may have had for getting any more sleep. I can always try for a nap later on. Likely? No, not really. But I will be working with power tools this afternoon, so hopefully I will still have my fingers by the end of the day. So far, I don't feel too bad.
Oooh, what will happen to Harry Potter in the last book? July 03 Mini meI was just researching the Mini Cooper. You know, the car Mr. Bean drives. I used to think they were kind of silly. Everytime I saw one, I would think, 'oh, look, it's Mr. Bean'. Several years ago, I was visiting with my uncle Dave, who had an X-Box with a driving game. I have a theory about video games: when there are multiple characters to choose from, don't overlook the ones that look lame or wussy. In Street Fighter, for example, Chun-Li is actually pretty
Rebecca liked The Italian Job. I wonder if she'd be down with a Mini in the driveway. I know Brad would be all over the idea of me driving around in a Mini ... smoking a pipe ... with patches on the elbows of my jacket. Pip-pip, cheerio! April 19 I am not scaryYesterday, I was recruited to be a confederate in an experiment involving kids. A research assistant knocked on my door, and said they needed a man ... a real man. Okay, I'm sort of paraphrasing there, but the fact remains that I was selected because of my gender. I agreed, and she handed me a cue card with some dialogue and associated actions, and told me she also had a cap for me to wear. As we walked down the hall to the experimental room, I read the dialogue. By the time I got into the experimental room, I had deduced that my role in this little project was going to involve making some kid uncomfortable. You see, there was a 2-way mirror dividing two rooms. I was in the room with another experimenter who was operating a video camera, filming a young girl (maybe about 9-ish) interacting with a third female experimenter. The interaction involved playing with toys, then leaving the room, at which time the toys would be replaced (I don't know what other manipulations were going on). At some point, the previous toy gets replaced with a plastic golf set. I'm supposed to knock on the door and come in. Some random dude wearing a baseball cap that she's never seen before is going to start talking to her, moving closer with every utterance. I don't know if streetproofing factored into this experiment, but just reading the script creeped me out. So I knocked on the door and came in the room. I comment on the golf set. She nonchalantly agreed that it was cool. I wait the designated length of time and walk forward. She's completely unfazed. I ask about whether she's been playing with lots of toys. Again, she casually answers. Before I can even get to the next line, she asks me if I want to play golf with her. It was all ad lib from there, as we played plastic mini-putt for the next minute or so before the experimenter returned. The evidence from riding the bus suggested that maybe I looked creepy or something. Evidence from this 9 year old girl, however, has assuaged those fears. March 03 A sucky dayWhat 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. January 23 It worked!This afternoon I changed my MSN comment to It worked!, which prompted a number of people to message me while I was over at the in-laws for dinner. "What had worked?" they asked themselves. Was I working on a cure for cancer? An experimental clean renewable alternative fuel source? Teleportation?
Unsurprisingly, no. And why are you people asking such retarded questions? Teleportation. Puh-leez.
I was merely ecstatic that my localizer runs, which had fallen completely out of synch on participants 1 - 6, finally worked out. Sorry, I'll count them as participants 1 - 5 because one participant was completely unusable. As a result, there was no localizer run for the first half of my participants. I'm starting the second half out on the right foot though. For those of you (which is likely most of you) who do not know what a localizer run is all about, here's the lowdown:
When you do an fMRI experiment, the scanner records how much blood is being used by different parts of the brain at any given time. The idea is that the more active that part of the brain is, the more blood it needs. We use this to infer what parts of the brain are used in different situations. In order to make these inferences, we have to do some statistics. The thing about these statistics is that just like it's hard to find Waldo in those damn Where's Waldo pictures, it's also hard to find subtle changes in recorded brain activity when you've got a bunch of extra crap in the picture. Now suppose you already have some idea where Waldo is supposed to be on the page. Maybe you read the book already. Or someone told you. Or you broke down and found the answers on the internet, I don't know. A localizer run is basically like taking a black marker and colouring over the rest of the page. Now you can look for Waldo in the lower right hand corner of the page without your eyes constantly being distracted by other crap. It basically just masks out those parts of the brain that you expect to be interesting to you so that your stats aren't messed up by the irrelevant crap.
And that ends the science class for the day. My smartass friends may now leave comments to correct me. January 09 Awesome averageCheck this out. Two posts in one night. Within 10 minutes even! I was just rereading my penultimate post, wherein I mention that I had been intending to write a computer program (but not in Java) and that I had put Good Eats on my cellphone. Well, today I took the bus to and from school. I watched an episode about roasting chickens on the way there, and an episode about salads on the way home. It was as excellent as I expected. This is the coolest thing ever.
As for the computer program, it took me a few days (about 3), but I did, in fact, write the program in Java. For those who may care, I used a neat shareware Java IDE called JCreator LE (LE stands for Limited Edition, which is the full version minus a couple features, like integrated debugger). If my recommendation means anything to you at all, then if you're interested in a free Java programming environment and (like me) can't follow these instructions for using Java with XEmacs on windows, then try this program out.
Hey everyone! Check out my remarkable (35) use of hyperlinks in the above text! If you want to know more about being so awesome, please leave a comment, and I will get back to you at my earliest convenience. January 02 False startI cannot read. Or else I'm an idiot. One or t'other. I mistakenly turned "2 hours, Jan 3" into "3 hours, Jan 2" and went in one day early to do an fMRI run. Oh well.
New year's updates: I have made no resolutions, other than to AVOID the gym until all the other resolvers have petered out. I'm going to have to find some other way to work off my gained weight; I noticed my jeans have been fitting a little snug as I approached the end of the holidays. Ken has given me till the end of this month to finish my dissertation proposal. I hope I can recycle a sufficient amount of material from my Kohler paper. I also agreed to take on a programming task for one of the I/O grad students. The actual problem is well-defined; the hard part currently seems to be getting started. I had wanted to write the damn thing in Java because: 1) I'm out of practice with it and wanted to write some Java apps for the phone anyways, and 2) I didn't want to have to install a really old version of Microsoft's programming environment. Unfortunately, I've been stymied. I don't think I have the time to goof about with Java, and so will be writing a simple command line application. It's what Git'rdone is all about.
Over the holidays I figured out how to convert DVD video into DivX files (there's a program called FairUse Wizard, and the free limited version creates files up to 700MB, which is conveniently the size of a CD). I also found some software that converts video files to a format playable on my cellphone (or on an iPod or Sony PSP if you prefer). I converted some episodes of Good Eats so that they fit on my phone, you know, just in case I ever take the bus to school again. That would be a killer way to pass time on the 20 minute bus ride that actually takes 40 minutes. |
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