Brain. Gone.

I can tell I've been working on this project too hard & too much the past week or so when I suddenly have thoughts like this"

"You know, this would really make a great T-Shirt!"



...

In other news, I've now installed Acrobat Professional & Illustrator 10.0 on my lab machine (ooh! a whole integer of upgrade on Illustrator!), and the conversion of Excel charts to pdfs to Illustrator objects works surprisingly... at all. More importantly, it does everything I want it to in about five minutes. So yay.

Phase 1: Poster Presentation: Conquered

I did my big presentation of the project I've been working on for the last year (aka: since I joined the lab) today. It went pretty well, although I had a surprisingly large number of points where I went, "Why does this slide have this title/chart combination? This chart totally doesn't prove that point!"

Sigh.

Other than that, it seemed to go pretty well. We've already figured out the basics of what charts and pictures are going to get turned into figures for the poster (the poster being phase 2, and phase 3 being the complete destruction of the city, or maybe a paper instead. We'll see how we feel once we get that far. But the current step is figuring out how to convert all of the figures from Excel or R to Illustrator, since apparently I'm the only person in the lab who has ever used Excel or R to create charts.

Seriously. Apparently everyone else uses Matlab or LabView for chart generation.

WTF?

Random Life Updates

* I'm engaged. Next summer, here in the Twin Cities.

* I'm going to Grad School. University of Washington's Graduate Program in Neurobiology & Behavior. Cris--my fiance--will also be attending, in some sort of Micro- or Immuno- centered Bio program whose specific name & nature--obviously--escapes me at the moment. We'll be moving to Seattle at the end of August.

* I'm presenting the data from my last year of research tomorrow. After that, I need to have the poster done by the 11th at the latest (one of my advisors is moving to DC for a staff position of some sort at NSF, the detail of which continue to elude me); and then I need to be done with the paper by the end of the summer.

You can guess which of these is the reason I'm posting this information now, as opposed to some other time, at your leisure.

Also, I'm hoping to revamp the blog and start using it regularly again soon. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. We'll see how that goes.

Creepy Ads

From a Google Ads sidebar:

No More Dopamine
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www.3-minute-depression-cure.com

Maybe it's just me, but I think a life without dopamine sounds pretty depressing in and of itself. Although I've gotta say that the website itself is even more bizarre. I mean, it starts with "WARNING: Do not take any dopamine until you read this!!!" What's not to like?