Things I have that make me happy

#1.) A poster proof! It's all shiny and everything!

#2.) The first figure done for my paper. And decent revisions of both the Intro & the Methods section. No Results or Discussion yet... next week is gonna be hell.

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.

"FORESHADOWING"

So the abstract submission deadline for Neuroscience 2007 is coming up next Tuesday. A week ago, I didn't care a whit. But on Monday, my PI mentioned off-hand that he'd been meaning to ask me if I wanted to present a poster at the conference.

Did I? HELL YEAH!

Of course, that means that my entire week at work has been a rush to figure out funding (because I'll no longer be in the lab when Neuroscience runs around) and have results ready (so I actually have something to put in the abstract I have to submit by Tuesday). I've pretty much got the first half vaguely figured out. The second, on the other hand, isn't going as well as it could be.

So we were just in his office, discussing how we're both starting to feel excited about the results and that we were finally getting confident that we'd have an interesting story to tell. But, I explained, although I felt I was on track to have good results, I didn't feel like I was on track to have good results on Tuesday. He replied that it's fine, I should just write up a description of the experiment and in terms of the results I could have a... what's the word?

"Premonition?"

"I think in the sciences we prefer the word 'prediction'," I said.

"No, that's too specific. We need something more vague. You know how to write--what's the word they use in writing? Foreshadowing!"

"Foreshadowing? Actually, that puts me in the perfect frame of reference. Thanks." And oddly enough, that's completely true. Foreshadowing.