maggied’s blag

Well, I was alone in lab until about 9:20. I mention it mainly because I’m typically the last person to arrive in lab during the day, and therefore the last person to leave. This week, though, the trend will probably be reversed.

I was originally going to take this week off to focus solely on rush stuff, but since I missed about 3 weeks worth of work over the course of the summer, I decided to work 20 hours this week. My plan is to work from 9am-1pm, which is convenient because we have a few scans in the morning this week. Once I get out of work, I’ll be able to go home, have lunch, and then everyone else will be getting out of bed to start building. Forcing myself to wake up at 8:15am every morning was something that I tried to do during the summer, but failed miserably. Now that term is around the corner, and I know I have morning classes, it is time to start getting used to waking up early again.

Hopefully my grand plan will not be thrown off as rush stuff really gets started, although according to a few upperclassmen, it probably will be. I’m not one to miss sleep though, no matter the cost, so I guess we will see.

Speaking of rush stuff, progress is already being made. We moved all the wood on Saturday, which proved to be a bit more of a bitch than expected. Home Depot brought a forklift to help move the lumber, but couldn’t comfortably get it into the courtyard, and refused to move the rest of the order anywhere near. So we got out whatever we could and hauled/drove the rest of the wood over near Talbot.

Yesterday, the tour guide cage was built, and Vlad made a pogo stick again. Raphael, Vinayak, Anthony and I set up the speakers and the courtyard got its supply of AC/DC, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queen, Cake, and Dropkick Murphys. Hopefully we’ll get some Flogging Molly going later today. Two bigger projects also started building. For the Hamster wheel vehicle (James O.’s baby), both wheels are finished, and preliminary testing of the differential drive system have been conducted. Moving the two wheels together proved really difficult, but playing around with them individually was actually really fun. Olga’s rotating seesaw project also made a reasonable amount of progress. There was a significant bottleneck due to the fact that she needed to dig a 3-foot deep hole in rocky soil with nothing but two mediocre shovels and a crowbar. After that was done, the supports for the seesaw were installed, and there was lots of dancing and photos taken on top of the main beam.

It’s almost time for scanning, but I’ll post more in the upcoming days about rush including links to pictures if there are any. People probably won’t post any pictures until the end of rush, though. Vinayak and I are going to Ozzfest later today (lolz), so I will comment on that, too.

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I felt pretty tired Monday and Tuesday of this week, but things picked up today when the lab took a trip to Professor Corkin’s sister-in-law’s summer house on Canobie Lake. The house was beautiful, and because it was older and then renovated, it was right on the water. Current zoning restrictions would prevent newer homes from being built that close to the lake.

We left the lab at around 9:15am (I actually woke up at 8am, I’m proud of myself), and arrived at the lake around 10. There were lots of munchies to eat, so I snacked on tortilla chips and chatted with the other UROPs that had come along. A whopping 4 UROPs were in attendance this time, so it wasn’t really awkward. Around noon we decided to sit in the sun outside the house, because the wind coming off the lake was pretty chilly. I found a really comfy lounge chair and fell asleep in it for a little over an hour. Unfortunately, I rolled over on my side while I was napping, and I was lying there just long enough for half of my face to get sun burned. It looks pretty silly.

About a half hour after I woke up, David (a grad student in the lab), was finished grilling and we had a very nice lunch. Navine (a UROP in the lab) made cake for Bettiann (the lab admin) because it was her birthday. The cake was pretty awesome; Navine made it from scratch. I ducked out from the party around 4:45pm with David because I was pretty tired from the whole ordeal.

When I came home, a bunch of us went out to play soccer. I hadn’t played in a while; although we only had a handful of people, we still passed the ball around and it was a good time. I think I got a little bit more burned, so it’s starting to balance out the whole “two-face” thing I had going on earlier.

Overall, things seem to be getting better than they have been over the course of the past month; it’s just too bad that the Summer is almost over.

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Things with my UROP at the Behavioral Neuroscience Lab are finally starting to pick up (yay). I’m currently running analyses on data obtained after the MIT MRI scanner was upgraded. We’re testing to make sure that the upgrade was a reliable success. I’m also meeting with the grad student from the Media Lab later today to discuss the progress of the program I’ve been working on and get my paper work in.

I have been pretty busy with work, although I have been listening to The End of Faith, watching some Ghost in the Shell, and reading more Berserk. I feel like things are finally becoming more like summer. Everything is much more laid back now, and otherwise pretty awesome. I’ve settled into my new room, and am happily forcing Freeze Pops down people’s throats.
Additionally, my birthday is tomorrow, and it will finally really be summer. The sunshine makes me happy, so I’m really looking forward to it.

P.S. Vinayak is finally blarging!

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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 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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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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After 2 hours of sleep and a boring trip, I arrived back at MIT today. Went to dim sum, found out that my computer has an issue with the power supply, went to Wendy’s, and watched GATTACA. Oh man. It was great. It’s pretty good to be back, and I’ve kept pretty busy.

I’m starting work at the Behavioral Neuroscience Lab (BNL) tomorrow; I’m probably going to have to spend a little while of it learning either Matlab or Freesurfer, but I should be doing more than grunt work which is excellent. Have quite busy plans for tomorrow, including shopping and working out. Should be good.

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So I played around with a few different themes for the blog, but I don’t really like them all that much. If anyone spots a nice one, let me know. I typically prefer blue and darker colors as themes.

Today is my little brother’s birthday, so I’ll probably go out to dinner or dessert with him when I get back. Sunday’s hopefully going to be pretty laid back. I’m hoping to hang out with some of my friends then. Monday is my parent’s anniversary, and Tuesday is the science research symposium. Wednesday - early Friday will probably be just me hanging out by myself during the day and maybe the evenings depending on how lame or awesome my friends are. Friday I want to go into NYC, I have a party on Saturday, and then Sunday I’m coming back to MIT. So things look pretty reasonable right now; hopefully I will not die of boredom.

I figured out the rest of plans for the summer. I’ll be home for this week, and then at MIT from the 3rd of June through the rest of the summer. I might go home on a weekend or two. I plan on working for 11 weeks and take the week before rush off. I’ll be designing a new paradigm for the Behavioral Neuroscience Lab to test cognitive dysfunction in Parkinson’s Disease using functional MRI. The Media lab stuff is also still in order, so I should have plenty to keep busy. Might have some ideas in the works for an electronics project too…

In other news, today was pretty enjoyable, even though this damn cough makes it hard to fall asleep and I’m tired a lot. It was a little bit up, and then a lot down, but I’m pretty much okay again. Going home will force me to confront a lot of things that I haven’t been, which I hope will be good for myself, but this remains unclear.

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