Thursday, 12 January, 2006

need a little catharsis once in a while...

been feeling rather strange and stressed-out this week as a result of having to re-built with new hardware and software what i did the last 6 months which i had to chuck away last week because of unfortunate technical issues... not kidding... dog days? well, i think perhaps a dog has a happier existence at times... and of course not everyone at the lab knows about it nor appreciate the woes of research because all they want and do is a 9-5 or less job, i mean honestly, who doesn't?!

... and am rather miffed by some particular colleague who has been pretty crabby... i also missed the social-happy-hour and got 'reprimanded' by the organiser... i didn't give an excuse... i have (almost?) given up on feeling bad about not attending events now... it took a long while (years) of many guilt experiences which were really not worth my energies... i simply didn't feel up to it and i am most certainly not a crowd-person nor a crowd-pleaser. i hate it though... how people still make you feel bad... that's just not right. there were other stupid little things... like i tend to question things... and some people hate that apparently... so maybe i should keep my thoughts to myself...

anyways... although my hormones and period cycles get screwed up in a lab that is dominated by male colleagues, i think i am glad that there are fewer women around... we tend to drive people up the wall... really, we do... (i drive myself up the wall sometimes too!)... women can be so hard to work with... too many hang-ups... perhaps... maybe it's just me?! hmm.

i think i'd like to be more 'male'... they are usually more easy-going about things... no?

one fun thing i did this week was to go underground in the basement of the hospital to visit the workshops to find tiny little wrenches for tightening my joystick knobs... it really feels like fraggle rock... funny coincidence...

other then that i was trying to figure visual basic.net out... and my other colleague's code in which he helped me implemented a wee prototype for my study inside a big general lab code which has everyone else's tasks and hardware component controls in it... sigh... should get a better learning book! perhaps trying to learn it in a few days just won't do... afterall it took me longer to get the hang of crazy MAX/MSP and even longer to feel comfy with MATLAB... i should give myself more time...

time... such a precious 'commodity' these days... and so few out there will fully understand.

posted by ~overacuppa~ on Thursday, 12 January, 2006 at 21:03 hrs
Comments

Ach! It's rubbish when you feel a moral obligation to go to social events that you're not in the mood for. I saw a lot of that in the staff room last week: the amount of emotional blackmail people who weren't coming to the start-of-term party got... I was just a bystander (because I'd decided to go for 'just one drink'...) but it still annoyed me.

Btw. you use MAX/MSP? That's interesting: it's something I've looked at a few times but put off because it looks like it probably has a steeper learning curve than I have time for right now (looks a bit like LabVIEW...) I'm ever more intrigued by your work, and looking forward to hearing about it properly someday!

Good luck getting everything sorted out...

Posted by: nick on Friday, 13 January, 2006 at 04:44 hrs

oh no, that sucks. just as bad as me having to keep getting the typesetter to make changes because the bloody Chinese co-publishers keep making changes. Frustrating!

Posted by: dimsumdolly on Friday, 13 January, 2006 at 10:50 hrs

hey nick! MAX/MSP is good if you are keen on making interesting sounds with different hardwares like video cameras that capture for e.g. movement of LEDs and then translating it to some sound or displaying graphics with certain sound frequencies in an interactive way... but it is unfortunate that the software can't sample at the same rate as audio for my needs... and the usb joystick information can only be polled at every ~10ms which is not good enough... we need close to 1ms or less for the MEG... and i couldn't get decent analogue signal from it directly so i have to scrap the whole thing... it was looking very spiffy as a programme and it was just really upsetting to have to abandon the whole thing after all the work. =C(

MAX/MSP is quite like LabView but i think LabView is better in that you can actually programme in it while the former is really graphical... which isn't my cuppa tea because i don't have the feeling that it is doing what i want in terms of the logic you get in syntactic programming language. also LabView can talk more directly with I/O of hardwares so that's a plus. but you can actually have a real Air-guitar using MAX/MSP with LEDs attached to your fingers and getting a camera system to capture it and then writing a spiffy algorithm to match what your fingers do to produce the sounds you want. yes... you can do that theoretically and i believe that it has already been done in machine-learning recently!

hopefully i will get to tell you a more happy story about the study some day...

DSD, i hope your typesetter will listen to you someday soon! that is also frustrating.

Posted by: overacuppa on Friday, 13 January, 2006 at 11:39 hrs

Hey cheer up. you are beholden to no one if you decide not to go :)

Posted by: Gor on Friday, 13 January, 2006 at 12:09 hrs

Got to start saying "no" sometime, tiggie.

Posted by: monoceros on Saturday, 14 January, 2006 at 07:58 hrs

i will try to remember that Gor and monoceros! it's just that some people take 'no' for an answer and respect that while others may not... but i suppose that's their problem... oh well.

Posted by: overacuppa on Saturday, 14 January, 2006 at 09:08 hrs

Wow - a real-life air guitar played with lights on your fingers! What an amazing thought! That reminds me of this interesting project I came across a couple of months ago - a computer-vision instrument that you can play by pushing objects around a table!

The sampling rate problem sounds familiar from days spent trying to get LabVIEW to play a video without flickering between frames. In the end an apparently arbitrary small change to the order of things in the code suddenly solved it, though I never did quite understand why. Computers - tsk!

Anyway, I hope it all clicks into place for you sometime soon!

Posted by: nick on Sunday, 15 January, 2006 at 09:40 hrs

nick -- that link's great... yes you can use MAX/MSP for lots of fun things like that... if millisecond-timing and response delay are not important to you... in fact you can even build a force-sensor for a play pen that makes a certain kind of sound depending of the force exerted on these sensors... more fancy things can be done like you can sum or multiply the different sensors' output for a global sound respond... the options are plenty if it's all just for fun. some guy's done this some years ago... perhaps he's patent it already! MAX/MSP is good for interactive stuff and large-scale interactive exhibition displays... but i am not sure if it can really cope with precision... it can certain record audio waves but i am not sure about other types of recording except it looks very chunky and that's really not good.

as for computing... and talking with I/Os... i think i should learn some C or C++ someday... the lower down you get, the better you are at controlling these things i think... not sure. in any case... programming is daunting for me even if i've learnt a wee tiny bit of it... i see it as useful but apart from that i am not crazy about it.

Posted by: overacuppa on Sunday, 15 January, 2006 at 13:55 hrs

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