Thesis

Ahhh! My thesis is taking shape. I have a CD with all my stimuli on it now. It's my thesis in CD form. How crazy is that?! And I still don't know if it's been approved by IRB. But it better be, because now I have songs. And they're awesome. And Arathi is fabulous for singing them beautifully for me. :) But wow, it's insane! Scary!

The Computer Gods Hate Me

So, I installed McAfee antivirus the other day. Everything seemed to be working fine. Until that night when I went to shut down my computer. It just sat there, and didn't do anything after it hit the "Windows is shutting down...." screen. I thought that was a little strange, but I just forced it to shut down and didn't worry too much about it. Until it kept happening for a week.

So, I e-mailed Donna, our resident Dorm IT person. She said to bring it on in and she'd take a look at it. I was expecting a couple hours, but she had 7 before I could even think about picking it up again, so I wasn't worried.

I went back 7 hours later, and she hadn't been able to find anything wrong with it. There were no viruses, trojans, worms, adware, or otherwise malicious programs on there. Which, I try really hard to keep track of things, so there shouldn't have been, but, you know, good that she checked. So, she decided it would be best to uninstall McAfee and see what happened. Fine.

So, yesterday she apparently uninstalled McAfee, it shut down fine. She tried to install a different version of McAfee (the version Scripps uses, so that I would have antivirus software on my computer), and something weird happened in installation and it stopped downloading. So, she decided to let it defrag, and see what happened.

I checked back today, and my computer will not only no longer shut down, it now won't access the internet unless it's in safe mode. It's worse than before! And, to top it off, the Scripps version of McAfee is partially installed on my computer, and she can't get it off anymore because it doesn't show up in the Install/uninstall programs list, and you can't delete the folder it's in. I know it's not at all her fault, but it's really really frustrating that it's worse, and there's nothing I can do about it. And it was fixed before!

So now her best solution is to reinstall windows totally. I'm pissed. I don't want to have to deal with this, I have other things to be doing, and I need my computer back and fully functional. Now. More like yesterday. I hate this. But she wants someone else to look at it before we go ahead with anything else. I just want McAfee off so that I can get on with things. I'm so mad. My computer's been so good. I don't want to wipe it. But, I've now been without a computer for almost 60 hours, and I'm going to be without one for who knows how long. It's going to be real interesting to see how long I can deal with this sanely. Especially when I have two papers due next week. Meh. Stupid technology. Why does it hate me?

I'd like to thank...

the girls who requested that their reading chairs be removed, so that I could have one!

I came back from lunch today and there was a chair sitting in front of my door. I was rather confused for a minute, until I realized that the maintenance request I had put in the second day I was here had finally been filled! They had brought me a reading chair. Happiness that it is, I now have a place for other people to sit in my room, and I have a comfy place to do all my reading. I'm very excited, if you couldn't tell. Yay for comfy chairs!

Technical Difficulties

So, Tuesday we (the EEG lab) were supposed to give a presentation for the trustees of Scripps. The presentation was supposed to start at 3:30. Alan wanted Abby and I there by 3:15, it only takes about 10 minutes to get ready, so it shouldn't have been a big deal. It was supposed to be a very simple 30 minute presentation of what our lab can do, with Abby being the participant, and my running the experiment while Alan narrated.

I got to lab about 3:05, and was surprised to find the doors already open and the lights on, since I expected to be the first one there. Abby was there, but so was a video camera on a rather large tripod, hooked up to a computer. Abby said that apparently they were going to stream the presentation over the web. Interesting. But they weren't going to be able to see anything at all where they had the camera placed at the moment. Whatever, it wasn't my problem.

I started getting things ready, making the solution, warming it up, and making sure we had towels out and such things. Alan came down, and started helping by setting up the computers. He wiggled the mouse on the Mac, and nothing happened. Well, the power outage apparently turned everything off, so we turned it all back on.... no picture on the screen. Tried restarting everything, still no picture, no response at all from the computer to the moniter. At this point, it's about 3:15. Alan goes next door to get IT, and the guy comes back saying "Oh, you have one of those macs." Apparently certain macs have a "special feature" that if the power goes out while they're on, you have to push this button on the motherboard to get them started again. Well, our mac is enclosed in a cart, so he had to take apart the cart, pull out the computer, open the computer, push the button, and then put all this back together.

Meanwhile, the camera people have come back, and after asking us where things would be happening, have decided that they want to put the camera into the experimental room where Abby and I will be doing the net application, and the actual experiment things. Funny thing about that is: there's no room in that room for much other than the equipment already in there, and once we got the camera in, we had to totally rearrange our moniters so that they could see them on the screen. Crazy! So, while Abby and I are rearranging our entire experimental room, I'm trying to measure Abby's head, and her vertex, while soaking the net and trying to figure out why none of the moniters in the room have power. Alan's talking to the trustees who have just arrived, and there are now so many people in these two rooms, that you have to excuse yourself to people if you want to travel anywhere at all.

So I go back into the computer room after we get everything set up for the camera guys, it's now 3:35ish, and the IT guy is just finishing resetting all the things that needed to be done with the mac, and the power's back on to the other moniters, so I go to set up the stimuli computer. Well, I went to type in the participant ID number, and the keyboard doesn't work. I trace the connection back, it's plugged in. I go back, and now the mouse won't work either. So we had to restart that computer as well. It was absolute insanity.

Fortunately, one of the trustees was very late, and they were very understanding about the computer and power outage thing. Apparently power outages don't mix well with electronics, who would have thought?! ;)

Anyway, the presentation ended up going very well, although it ended about 4:20 instead of 4. But, the trustees seemed very interested, which is good! Maybe they'll give us money.

So, I was rather pleased with how things ended up going, especially after all the insanity beforehand, and then I got an e-mail from Alan, in which he told Abby and I that he'd fallen asleep after lunch, and had woken up at 3:10 in a stupor, and then had to come down and do the presentation. So he thanked us for being very professional and saving the day. I was impressed with how well he handled it all. I guess a little adrenaline will wake you up real fast! Sooo crazy!

Well, that's the news from lab. Back to work.

Thunder Storms!

There's been thunder, and lightning, and rain all throughout late yesterday and last night! It was so exciting. Apparently there was also a rainbow, but I missed it. However, the clouds are doing awesome things today. I love lightning!

To make things more exciting, we had a power outage yesterday, Scripps told us that there was a problem in a manhole which knocked everything out. However, I was told that Pomona knew about the outage before it happened. Weird. Apparently there was another outage last night, as Sarra came frantically out of her room this morning making sure everyone knew that it was 8:45. Which we all did because we all have battery-opperated alarms, which she does not. I think it's a midwest thing. When you live somewhere the power goes out fairly often, you learn not to have your clocks be electric. But it was interesting, because none of the rest of us knew anything had happened last night. I'll be curious to see if there's more today, or if we've had two and that's all. I certainly hope that's all! Having power outages makes things rather difficult, as the doors to the dorms are all powered, and it's rather nice to have computers which work. Although, having a laptop I wasn't so affected as some.

Anyway, I'm excited about the weather for once. Mostly because it's stormy instead of just rainy. And I hope it sticks around and is exciting for a bit longer. :)

Politics

Oh, there are crazy people in Washington. I cannot read this without laughing. This is from a candidate for County Executive:

Raising the living standard and quality of life. a) Grow the movie-making industry in King County. b) Increase free parking. c) Abolish height restrictions on buildings, and build into the sky so that more people can live close to where they want to be. People will drive less and destroy less wilderness.

I want to be in the sky! Especially when an earthquake hits and it all falls down. And of course, building into the sky will help there be less distance for people to travel around town... less driving. Right. Of course. *giggles* It's just so ludicrous I had to share.

Quotes

Walking past CMC's little plot of zinnias:
Girl: I'm Hawaiian, I can take of the land.

Me thinking to myself: And we shall call it this land. *sigh* I'm such a Firefly geek. :)


At the Lindy Hop table at the activities fair:
Girl: Is this Cotillion?
Me: No.
(Girl leaves, trailing random friends)
Ricco: So, I'm going to start inviting people to my cotillion club now.

How in the world do you get cotillion from lindy hop?! And here's how you sit properly ladies. Wait patiently for the men to ask you to dance. Nooo way.

Smoosh and Shiny

The day in which I smash an egg with my forehead, and get a new ID card:

We were at breakfast after rehearsal this morning, and you have to realize that having been up since 6 is really too early, and we're all tired and punchy. Colin managed to grab a raw egg from the bowl, instead of the hard boiled ones, so when he tries to open it, it kind of starts to drool. And we laughed at him, and then moved on in the conversation to nicknames, and how Stephi wants to call her kid Egg. After a while, I had the sudden urge to smash the slightly drooling egg which was sitting on Colin's tray still, and when I mentioned this, it was greeted with great enthusiasm by other people at the table. They placed it on my empty plate, and I was laughing so hard by that point, that I almost hit it with my head, which gave them the better idea that smashing it with my forehead would get me three bonus points. This was further clarified to be three humor/respect points, but I wasn't allowed to know which catagory they fell in. Anyway, I did eventually smoosh the egg on my plate with my forehead. It made a nice crunch sound. However, I have refused the continuation of this trend, in my peers telling me I should learn to smash aluminum cans on my head. Doesn't sound pleasant. But yes, I ended up with 2.5 points, because Colin looked like he helped me. It was highly amusing. Yay for entertainment when we're all way too tired.

I also, had to go to the card center today, because my ID card had decided to stop letting me into half the dorms on campus, and that wasn't happy. So, I went to maintenance, and they said there was nothing wrong with the card, so I had to take it to the card center, and they gave me a brand new shiny card. For free! So now I have the cool holography stuff on top. But I have to say, I kind of miss not having it, I was one of the few who still had the original card, and it was awesome. I also, no longer have the Disaster Hotline sticker on the back of my card. So if you have a disaster, I'm sorry, I can't help you anymore. (As a point of note, the sticker had worn away to the point that it said something like: Disast Ho and a random four digit number. But it was still useful, I swear!) However, I now have a shiny new card, so I can pretend to be a student, and get student discounts for quite a while. :) Shiny.

Awesome

So, today was pretty darn good. I got a new ethernet cord, a much longer one, so that I no longer have a trip-wire in the middle of my room, because it can go behind my furniture, which is really wonderful. I kept trying to fall and bring my computer down with me, which would not have been fun at all, so that is fixed wonderfully well.

My PerCog (Perception and Cognition) class was also incredibly awesome today. If you haven't had Prof. Banks, and you have the opportunity to do so, you should take it. He's great! So, we're studying the eye at the moment, and how we use it to see things. So he was explaining how an aperture allows light through, and as you make it smaller, an image gets more clear. However, as soon as you place a lens over the aperture, the image becomes incredibly clear because the lens focuses the light into one area, instead of having a large blur circle. Anyway, he had all these neat examples, and we spent about half the class in the dark, watching him open different sized holes in a covering on the window, and showing us what the picture looked like on a screen, changing the size of the hole, and whether there was a lens etc. But, the most awesome thing ever, was that he had carved a hole in the door to the classroom, and attached a doll house room to the door behind the hole! He put a lens over the hole, and we could see into the room, however it looked right side up, which, it should have been upside down. So, to prove to us that the image really was upside down, and that he had just built the room to appear right side up, he went around the door, and stuck his face in the room! And indeed, he was upside down. Him sticking his face in the room and making faces at us was pretty funny in the first place, but then he pulls out a Barbie, and has her "walk" around the room. He then brings out a large, green, stuffed monster and proceeded to have it "eat" Barbie! It was absolutely, one of the funniest things I have ever seen a Prof. do in a class. Just amazing. And the class was laughing so hard by the end of his little puppet show, that no one had any idea what he said to us, although the fact that he was in another room with the door closed didn't help any. But wow, it was fabulous. I wait in anticipation of what the man will do next. Yay for visual examples of academic studies! :)