Oh No! It's Saturday!

Oh dear, it is Saturday and there was no post yesterday. That means I missed my weekly attempt to further the appreciation of a group of highly intelligent people that is sadly given far less respect than I believe said group deserves. In other words, I missed making a Scientist Appreciation post. I suppose I should briefly explain myself.

These days I am busy busy busy. I am working two jobs (one full time, the other part time and from home, but it's still a job with a certain number of hours required) as well as taking a course (which I believe I mentioned in some earlier posts - a political theory course to satisfy my social science credit requirement). The full time job is working in one of my physiology professor's laboratory. His research over the past few years has primarily focused on taking and analysing EEG readings from subjects performing various motor tasks. So far most of my time in the lab has been spent trying to figure out how to port the raw EEG data (taken by the LabView program) into MatLab where I will then develop some non-linear dynamical system analysis to augment the more traditional forms of analysis he has used in the past (mainly power spectrum analysis). Unfortunately, my drastic lack of skill in dealing with LabView has thrown a snag in things as the data does not seem to be making the transition to MatLab in any sort of accurate manner. It is a bit of a mystery, and it seems to be taking far many more hours than it should in figuring it out. Once it actually gets going, though, I plan to make a few posts describing the EEG and the various forms of analysis I am performing in more detail.

The second job I have is as a software development consultant for a start-up company called Cumulus One. My job is essentially to make the software run in the Windows environment (it was developed in Linux), and it will likely involve a GUI development as well. To be perfectly honest, I have only a vague idea of what I am doing, so it has been a lot of learning as I go. It is an interesting project, however, and the original developer of the software is a friend of mine. He is a very talented programmer, so I enjoy working with him.

Anyway, I would expound upon my impressions of Plato and Thucydides from my course, but my break for lunch is now over and I really should be getting back to work. Figuring out how to get different compilers and operating systems to talk to each other can be a rather confusing and arduous task.