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Rubber Ducky
Thursday, 7 December 2006 10:18 pmToday was a whole pile of work, and I loved it.
First off I had a chat with my boss, including a bit about a project I'll be advising them for starting on Monday. She said, "Why don't I show you the mice?" We went down the hall and into a lab housing a dozen white mice. (They're genetic knockouts for a particular bone-regrowth gene, and they're studying whether they have a higher, or lower, metabolism because they aren't making that particular protein. I think- it was explained rather rapidly.) Their boxes were sealed to the outside and had sensors for oxygen-use, food consumption, and a batch of security-system tripwire lasers in each box to measure their activity-levels. The data got dumped into a machine which... they were reading in an excel spreadsheet. Monday, they're going to ask me how to divide the spreadsheet data into time intervals. It all looked quite professional, and I hope it's as simple a problem as they actually described. (Of course it won't be; there will be exceptions. There always are.)
Shortly afterward, I got an email from a grad student in a spine-lab who had an easy(ish) Visual Basic question, and a difficult LabView question. We made plans to meet after lunch.
Lunch was the Department Christmas Party at the Faculty Club. I sat next to a charming and vaguely eccentric retired professor who lives out in the boonies and is getting Ontario Power to put a generating windmill on his property... The two administrative staff sitting on the other side of the table were getting a bit wide-eyed at some of the things he was over-sharing about (which I won't indulge in here, thanks much). I enjoyed the lunch and conversation, then excused myself at 1:30 to meet with the student.
The meeting was dizzying. This project involves a... robotic bench-press, sort of, which compresses and moves sections of spine (!) and measures the resultant forces in various directions. Her labview program is complex, but she thinks it should be able to sample at least four times faster. So I sat there for a while going "uh-huh" as she told me piles more information than I could understand at my current level... I was tremendously amused that just last night,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bats22 told melted_snowball and me about the Rubber Ducking technique, and here I was, a professional rubber duck. I did contribute a few general suggestions ("Can we break the problem into smaller problems? Can we move other stuff outside the loops?") and by the time I walked out, she had a pile of new things to try. This is precisely what I think I was hired for, and I hope to be able to gradually increase the usefulness of my comments. But boy do I have a lot to learn.
Hm, I was going to write all about my new to-do system, but I think that will wait.
Hey. I seem to have hit the ground running. I'm looking forward to tomorrow!
First off I had a chat with my boss, including a bit about a project I'll be advising them for starting on Monday. She said, "Why don't I show you the mice?" We went down the hall and into a lab housing a dozen white mice. (They're genetic knockouts for a particular bone-regrowth gene, and they're studying whether they have a higher, or lower, metabolism because they aren't making that particular protein. I think- it was explained rather rapidly.) Their boxes were sealed to the outside and had sensors for oxygen-use, food consumption, and a batch of security-system tripwire lasers in each box to measure their activity-levels. The data got dumped into a machine which... they were reading in an excel spreadsheet. Monday, they're going to ask me how to divide the spreadsheet data into time intervals. It all looked quite professional, and I hope it's as simple a problem as they actually described. (Of course it won't be; there will be exceptions. There always are.)
Shortly afterward, I got an email from a grad student in a spine-lab who had an easy(ish) Visual Basic question, and a difficult LabView question. We made plans to meet after lunch.
Lunch was the Department Christmas Party at the Faculty Club. I sat next to a charming and vaguely eccentric retired professor who lives out in the boonies and is getting Ontario Power to put a generating windmill on his property... The two administrative staff sitting on the other side of the table were getting a bit wide-eyed at some of the things he was over-sharing about (which I won't indulge in here, thanks much). I enjoyed the lunch and conversation, then excused myself at 1:30 to meet with the student.
The meeting was dizzying. This project involves a... robotic bench-press, sort of, which compresses and moves sections of spine (!) and measures the resultant forces in various directions. Her labview program is complex, but she thinks it should be able to sample at least four times faster. So I sat there for a while going "uh-huh" as she told me piles more information than I could understand at my current level... I was tremendously amused that just last night,
bats22 told melted_snowball and me about the Rubber Ducking technique, and here I was, a professional rubber duck. I did contribute a few general suggestions ("Can we break the problem into smaller problems? Can we move other stuff outside the loops?") and by the time I walked out, she had a pile of new things to try. This is precisely what I think I was hired for, and I hope to be able to gradually increase the usefulness of my comments. But boy do I have a lot to learn.Hm, I was going to write all about my new to-do system, but I think that will wait.
Hey. I seem to have hit the ground running. I'm looking forward to tomorrow!
