maggied’s blag

Well, I’m finally all done and settled in my new room. It will take a little while to get used to, but I’m rapidly getting used to the “team speak” and loud music that categorize living in Bemis. I set up my computer and my speakers, the only major thing I have left for my room is setting up the server Drew gave me.

Work is going well, although I’m rapidly running out of exciting things to do. Fortunately, only two more days and then I’ll be  able to get started on a real project this coming Monday. The grad student for work at the Media Lab finally wrote back to me, so I’ll be able to take care of that stuff on Friday probably.

As it turns out, I won’t actually be going home this weekend, unless something drastic happens in regard to my Grandfather’s health. My little brother is going to an Airsoft event in Massachusetts on Saturday, so my dad (and possibly other family members) will be driving up to the general area to hang out. We’ll probably try to go out to lunch and celebrate what we can for the few hours people will be around. It just isn’t worth going home on Friday, only to return on Saturday afternoon.

I should really try to be in lab by 10am today, so I will sleep Real Soon Now ™, but look forward to an exciting post about more than my life later today.

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I was walking through Stata today and there is now a sign next to the refreshments that indicates a badge is required to consume them. Sigh.

In other news, I have begun moving into my new room. I’m pretty happy with it so far. Although it is certainly smaller, I’ll be able to make the best of it with the new futon and all. I have more things than I anticipated, but still not very many things at all, so I’ll be fine if I just stuff random items in the closet. Many thanks to Drew, Capen, and Charles for helping me build the loft for my bed. Although it’s too late to take pictures of my old room, I might take pictures of the new one once everything is all set up.

I will most likely be going home this weekend, for many reasons. Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday, and father’s day is on Sunday. My birthday is the 21st, so my family was planning on celebrating the three occasions over the weekend like we usually do. Unfortunately, my great-grandfather’s condition has declined rapidly, so this is probably the most urgent reason for me to go home. I saw him for about 5 minutes a few weeks ago, but I hope that was not the last time I get to see him. Even in his old age, my great-grandfather has been sharp as a tack, and it’s a real shame that his body can simply not hold up anymore. He was in the hospital but is now at home under hospice care, as there is nothing more they can do for him. My mom says relatives are coming to visit tomorrow, but they might not be around when I come home for the weekend.

Things are extremely quiet in lab right now. As in, I’m the only one here. The lab assistant said I could leave whenever I got bored, so I think I’m going to head out soon to keep moving some of my stuff. Paymon isn’t in, although he might be here later in the afternoon, but I feel that my time isn’t really being used particularly productively today, so it might be best to just take off.

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I was passing through Stata this morning on my way to lab, and I happened to walk by a very lovely breakfast buffet. I wanted to be in lab right at 10am, and I only had about 3 minutes, so I walked by the food and kept going. Then I got thirsty, so I turned around to grab a bottle of water. I look around; no one seems to mind that I’d walked over to the table. I pick up my drink, and start to walk off. As I round the table, a 4 foot tall asian woman with a thick accent (who reminded me immensely of my 11th grade math teacher that I despised), yells, “This fo’ convention, this not public food.”

Feeling quite embarrassed, but thoroughly flabbergasted, I put the water down, and continued on my way to lab. I couldn’t really decide what to make of the whole situation. There were no signs around the area indicating that there was a conference going on or anything, and I’ve grabbed food from Stata tons of times. I think the most ironic part of it all is the fact that I’m not one to typically take advantage of food as I’m casually walking by, and one of the rarer times that I do, I get yelled at. I’ve never been yelled at for taking food at all here at MIT, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.

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I was feeling a little down the past few days, but my spirits have started to lift again, which is good. I went into the summer with a lot of things that I really wanted to get done, and wound up driving myself a little crazy this first week, which ultimately resulted in a less than pleasant downward spiral. Fortunately, the weekend rolled around and I had a lot of time to myself to relax. I’ve been spending a lot of time contemplating, having deep chats, and a little bit of rocking out.

I began to read more of the Berserk manga. All I can really say in regard to it thus far is “crazy shit.” It is even darker than they were in the animated portion of the story. Things are really picking up so I’m excited to keep reading. A few people and I have also started watching the anime Ghost in the Shell. As jesstess would say, “cyberpunk guyz.” I can now appreciate how funny it really is for people to connect me with “the major.”

Looking forward to getting back to work tomorrow, and starting to move into my new room sometime this week. I enjoy making plans to “pimp” it out, and I bought a new futon, so in that respect everything is thoroughly exciting. A bit of loft action might also be happening. I have to work out the details, because the room I’m moving into is smaller than my current room, and I have not taken the dimensions. At the least, I need to remove the loft from my current room, as per Joe G.’s request. Ironic as it is, I just recently started to really use my loft that I have right now. I moved a lamp and fan up there, so it’s like having a nice night table for reading before I sleep. I think it’s a nice alternative to reading in the black hole before bed, falling asleep, waking up 2 hours later and then going up to my bed.

Well, it’s time to read more ‘zerk and pretend to sleep.

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Upon reading the remarks of Bill Clinton in his commencement speech at Harvard, it reminded me about my earlier post about greetings, small talk, and “What’s up.” I’m referring to the following passage in particular, in case you don’t want to read the whole address:

In the central highlands in Africa where I work, when people meet each other walking, nearly nobody rides, and people meet each other walking on the trails, and one person says hello, how are you, good morning, the answer is not I’m fine, how are you. The answer translated into English is this: I see you. Think of that. I see you. How many people do all of us pass every day that we never see?

This reminds me both of my comments a few days ago and my own experiences in and around Munich, Germany when I was a child. We used to bike and walk the trails a lot, and every time you passed someone, it was common courtesy to say “Grüß Gott” (sorry, the link’s in German). The phrase is interpreted to mean either “God greets you” or “Greet God”, both of which entail a friendly and sincere appreciation for the other individual’s existence. In fact, although it applies mainly to Bavaria alone, many individuals would feel insulted if they were greeted with something other than “Grüß Gott,” such as “Guten Tag” (good day).

I was speaking with Drew about the subject yesterday, and he mentioned that in regions of Africa (Kenya, and possibly Uganda and Sudan), when individuals gather for a meeting, at least 2-3 minutes is spent discussing the state of the other individual’s life. They ask questions like “How’s the family?”, “How are you feeling?”, “How is your business?”, etc, to really relate to and understand what is going on with the other individual.

When I asked a few people what they thought about the issue of “small talk” greetings, many people felt as if that was just the way our culture had evolved, and therefore I should just accept this fact and not think about the subject anymore. But I can’t feel content with that. So many desire to emulate American culture in their own countries, and I dislike this because I feel as if our culture, much more than others, lacks inter-personal communication outside our close-knit circle of family and friends. On the whole, we don’t care about our neighbors anymore, and we tend to lack that sense of community that categorizes many villages that I visited while I was in Germany.

I’m sure many would agree that perhaps one of those frustrating things about culture and society is the fact that so many people are not genuine in expressing their true beliefs and feelings. While it’s certainly the case that a degree of tact is required to co-exist, so many people are “fake,” and in my opinion, there isn’t all that much worse than “faking” caring about the tedium of another’s life. I feel like we do need to be more emphatic to others, on the whole, or at least be there when others just need someone to sit and chat with once and a while. Pretending to care almost feels like a slap in the face beside the real thing. While I certainly can’t claim that I have accomplished anything near what I’m searching for in myself and others, I feel like it’s a good thing to work towards.

Even if I know I can’t change much, I’m certainly going to try to just be around, for those that need it. What bugs me so much is often the fact that there are so many people out there who are unhappy, and if we all just stuck together, and were there for each other, life would be so much more worth living, and I don’t see anything bad in that.

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I was feeling like I might be getting sick again, so I didn’t go into lab today, but I managed to finish up the FSL practicals I was working on from home. While I was hacking away, I came to a hilarious realization: I was logged on to 6 different computers simultaneously. My laptop, my desktop, my Sun server, the gateway for my lab research, the lab machine, and beast-dialup. Only at MIT, folks.

Other than that, I spent a lot of the day puttering around hall and hanging out. jesstess and I baked a cake for James O’s birthday, and I think that went over pretty well. I also played a bit of World of Warcraft with Paul, which was a party.

Unfortunate news came about, however, when I learned of the death of Ryan Davis ‘10. While I didn’t really know the guy very well, the reality of death sort of stuck home pretty hard for me.

I’m feeling pretty tired at the moment, but I’ll work on another application review for tomorrow. Maggie out.

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In the midst of all this Web 2.0 crap out there, I find myself constantly frustrated at being able to find a nice and simple interface for managing notes, to-do lists, and a calendar. A lot of different solutions pop up on Lifehacker, but few of them seem to possess the nice integration of all the features that I’m looking for.

Something that I would really love would be a software application/web interface that supported the following:

• Quick, easy notetaking. Good for just “jotting down” things that come to mind.
• A todo-list manager that allows one to:
• add items quickly and efficiently
• include due dates, notes, tags, etc.
• integrate with a calendar (preferably built-in)
• A calendar that:
• has quick, easy to add “command line”-like arguments
• Nice UI, easy to move around

Now, in and of themselves, it’s pretty easy to get a nice note-taking application, a nice to-do list manager, and a great calendar application. However, it’s the integration that is always where many of the great applications I’ve encountered seem to have failed me. I’ve cycled through a LOT of different applications to solve this issue. Ironically, I probably spend more time searching for a nice productivity setup that I spend less time actually being productive. But I’m sure it’ll all be worth it in the end.

Over the course of a week or so, I’ll introduce and comment on the different applications I’ve used/am using, talk about what I thought, and identify if they might be something useful. While many people have rolled their eyes at me when I’ve shouted at them to just “use 30boxes already,” I really feel like keeping track of things, particularly on the Internet, or another remote solution, is a great way to just “do more” with your life. Keep reading for my first such review.

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I’d first like to make a nice shout out to my good friend Jessica. She has recently created a blog which can be found here.

In other news, I managed to get into work earlier than the past two days. The grad student I’m working with now, Paymon, and I began working on the practice problems designed to learn the fMRI program FSL. What I found pretty nifty was how one actually calculates the “activation” that we represent on those pretty graphs. The fMRI contrast we are using here is the Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) response. The BOLD response is indicative or representative of increased oxygen usage in the brain, which in turn indicates neural activity. The hemodynamic response function (hrf) is a model of the BOLD response over the course of time. We create a square like wave that represents stimulus presentation. In order to determine if the data we are analyzing is due to the stimulus presentation, we take our hrf and convolve it with the Fourier representation of our stimulus presentations.

The way by which we determine activation is very elegant, although it might not seem that way. I recently took 18.03 (differential equations), and while I can appreciate the direct application to 8.02 (electricity & magnetism), I never really got to use 18.03 in something outside of course work. I found it pretty exciting to see this. It was almost like that moment of enlightenment when one learns that the velocity is the derivative of the displacement.

On an unrelated note, I have a small rant/gripe. Ever have people walk by and ask “What’s up?”, and then not pay attention to the answer. It’s like they are asking the question out of courtesy, yet don’t even have the “courtesy” to listen to your response. And what happens if you say “bad.” People just give you the automated nod and “That’s good.” It’s really irritating. I had an occurrence like that happen today. Someone asked what I was interested in doing for a career, and it made me really think about the question, and try and give a reflective and (relatively) accurate answer. But the other person didn’t even listen to the answer, and pretty much shrugged it off. Why even ask?

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So I pretty much spent the entire day reading fMRI stuff. Lots and lots of fMRI stuff. I finally get to do read work tomorrow, though. I’m pretty excited.

Other than that, I’ve been continuing my workout. I hope to run at least 2 miles a day for this week. It’s pretty good for myself considering the fact that I’m short, out of shape and anemic. I changed the power supply in my computer; I’m typing from good ol’ Padme right now. I had a bit of a brain fart and thought that the keyboard wasn’t working, when in reality the nature of the ports on my case just confused me and I plugged the keyboard into the mouse input. It said keyboard/mouse, damn it.

I’ve been thinking about ways to make my blog posts a little more informative for those not so interested in the nitty gritty goings on of my life. My next posts will be about various topics relating to things I wank about on the Internet. These topics include my attempts to find the ultimate to-do/calendar combo, other productivity related items, games, and other tidbits.. I will give you guys lots of links to places that I’ve used, and I welcome any suggestions of your own methods. I will link various things that I find interesting from the interwub, and you will like it.

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Work has begun for the summer and I’m already pretty busy. My assignment is to read 6 chapters in a book about fMRI, and then we’ll see what will happen from there. More tomorrow/later because I actually have to get up at a reasonable hour and get to lab.

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