As much as I like to be distracted… sometimes it’s necessary to get. things. done. When that time comes it has always been a battle for me. Well, no longer my friends! I discovered a technological tool that has been around for a long, long time.
You guessed it, ear plugs! Now I had seen these before, even used them on airplanes, or for sleeping though construction. Now in these cases, ear plugs don’t work. You can still hear the hammers, and you can still hear the airplane engines… What I didn’t realize is that you *can not* hear your lab-mates talking behind you.
It is incredible how well this works. I actually was about to take my earplugs out because I thought everyone talking in my office had left. Just before I did, I turned around and, to my great surprise! Everyone was still there just jib-jabbin’ away. It was completely silent to me and I continued my much-needed productivity.
Also, people tend not to bug you for unnecessary stuff if you’ve got little orange guys sticking out of your ears!
This weekend I finished reading a book that had been on my “to read” list for *years.* This is a book written by my father in 1980 three years before I was born (and again in 2003). The book, Practical Magic, is not about wizardry or any other kind of Harry-Potter magic. It is instead about some fantastic methods and results in doing brief therapy. My take away though, was on how directed attention to people’s communication methods and your own can be very important.
The book talks in depth about peoples’ sensory representation systems (auditory, visual, kinesthetic). It then teaches how to learn by looking and listening carefully, which one(s) an individual uses. The observation is then made that by understanding how people are repenting the world to themselves you can relate to them on a much more comfortable and profound level. This is a large part of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP).
The book’s supposed audience is other therapists wishing to use these NLP ideas in any type of therapy, but I think that anybody reading this book could learn something useful. Just days after finishing it I’m finding myself watching eye movements and body language and listening for linguistic queues to help me understand the ways people are experiencing their world.
Today I am in San Diego at “SPIE Medical Imaging.” This is my first time in California in a long time and San Diego is an awesome city. Seeing the big buildings right on the water is beautiful… The weather is amazing. When can I move here?
Last night I took the trolley downtown to check out the biggest Mardis Gras party west of the Mississippi. It was a good time, I even caught some beads! I wish I had some more time to explore this city with some good friends. Looks like there’s lots of fun stuff to do here. Alas, my days are spent learning about engineering… Just as fun, but less sunny. Back in Atlanta tomorrow.
This is an incredible sauce, and one of my first recorded recipies. Usually I just cook without regard to ingredient lists, measuring cups, etc. However, enough people asked me how to make this gem that I finally paid attention when I made it so I could pass the secrets on to all of you! This is simple, tasty, and sure to please. Click to continue →
I just finished making the poster that I will present in San Diego next week (take a look). I have a couple of thoughts regarding this experience:
1) Vector graphics are soooo cool. Always use them if you can… always. (note: I talk about how to get vector graphics in .eps form out of Matlab quickly and easily here: Matlab TeXniques)
For those of you who don’t know why vector graphics are cool, let me enlighten you! When you resize a normal image (gif, png, jpg) you will run into problems (click image above). If you make it smaller, you throw away data, and if you make it bigger, you have to make up data! Both of these are bad. With vector images, though, you can scale them up and down all you like and they look as crisp & clean as the day they were created! Wonderful.
2) If you want to put LaTeX symbols in your power point file, forget TeXPoint… All the cool kids are using TeX4PPT these days. Its *free,* much easier to use, and creates (you guessed it) vector images of your LaTeX stuff instead of bitmaps. One potential hang-up is that it only runs on Office 2003+. Sorry all you guys still on XP.
Some slight problems that I had: I think it was due to not setting paths right, but I had to put my .ppt file in the miKTeX root director for it to compile the TeX. Also, you can’t right-click your text boxes to “TeXify” if the text has the squiggly red underline (just find an un-underlined place).
After that rousing adventure in technical advice… if you’d like to see my poster without flying all the way to San Diego, click on the image above to open it in .pdf!
This algorithm analyzes statistics in small local regions of an image to try and separate the foreground from the background. This is an active contour segmentation technique, meaning a curve (or surface) is deformed over time to iteratively improve the segmentation until an optimum is reached. Click to continue →
In my new digs in Atlanta I’ve been doing some serious cooking. Two of my five new roommates (Ryan and Matt) are both great cooks, and are happy to contribute to and consume my healthy meals. This brings the experience to a whole new social level that I got only sporadically before. As a result of these new circumstances, I’ve decided to periodically post recipes that I find particularly delicious.
This is not the most dynamite recipe to start with… actually its one that I threw together very very quickly this morning before running off to class. BUT It was delicious, and I plan to make it again. (sorry no picture of this bad-boy, I already ate it : ) yum.)
Chickpea Salad: Click to continue →
You guessed it, ear plugs! Now I had seen these before, even used them on airplanes, or for sleeping though construction. Now in these cases, ear plugs don’t work. You can still hear the hammers, and you can still hear the airplane engines… What I didn’t realize is that you *can not* hear your lab-mates talking behind you.
It is incredible how well this works. I actually was about to take my earplugs out because I thought everyone talking in my office had left. Just before I did, I turned around and, to my great surprise! Everyone was still there just jib-jabbin’ away. It was completely silent to me and I continued my much-needed productivity.
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