A Free Day

So, it's 12:36, and it is going to be a GREAT day! I thought I had to do hearing screenings from 8-5, I got here at 8 only to find that I didn't have to be here until 9 ... and then I was done at 12. Now, I just got the okay on my thesis chapters from Dr. Tasko (my advisor) so all I had to do was fix my figures (which I just finised) and then I'm done with my thesis until my commitee meeting!

I have nothing more to do today (besides homework for my online class)!! I have a free day - I'm going out for lunch!

Just thought I'd share that with you.

Famous People

So, I met my first 'celebrity' of sorts yesterday.

Bronson Hospital has posted some rather large billboards around Kalamazoo. On those billboards it the profile of the top 3/4 of a man's head. There is text beside his head that reads "The brains behind the brain" or something to that effect. Anyway, so they're boasting about their top-notch neurologists on staff.

Well, last night I was hanging out with Meghan (one of my speech-path friends), her old supervisor (Wendy) and a couple of Wendy's colleagues and friends. Among them: Jeff, the neurologist on the billboards. At first I didn't recognize him (seeing that until that point I'd never seen his whole head, or even his face), but after someone mentioned him being the "brains behind the brain" it clicked.

So, nothing big - just keeping you updated in the aspects of my, ultimately, boring life.

In other news, I have spent the whole weekend working on my thesis (I'm actually typing this at school, Sunday night at 11:51pm, after just sending my advisor my last round of edits). In addition to headings and titles and other such nonsense, I now have figures. Four of them to be exact. They are all visual representations of respiratory, phonatory and/or articulatory movements during speech. But they're done!

I had a bit of a conundrum in getting them to look right. I was using a software called MatLab - it's like a giant calculator and graph generator and a whole bunch of other stuff I forget right now. Anyway, I was building the figures in MatLab, and it does not support subscripts (apparently neither does blogger, I tried to give you an example, but to no avail). Anyway, subscripts are like footnote numbers except at the bottom of the word.

So, using my problem solving skills, I realized that I could paste the figure itself (without text) into powerpoint and then add the text (subscripts and all) in powerpoint. It worked like a charm. Well, almost. In order to get the figures into the word doc. I had to save them as pictures. I saved them as an enhanced media file (.emf).

I had done all of this work on the speech lab's computer, because MatLab isn't mac compatible (I don't think anyway). So, I emailed the thesis to myself, got home opened it up and the figures didn't load. (Needless to say, I was frustrated). So, I came back to the lab to redo the figures (and save them as something else - this time .jpg). I did that, and fixed some other stuff on them (the tops of some of the numbers got cut off, and that suddenly really bothered me, so I fixed them). And now I'm here.

Now that it is 12:04 (and officially Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day) I'm going to brave the bitter cold and go home and go to sleep. Only to wake up, do some work for my online class and I'm going to work on my thesis (ooh, something new and different for me ... hopefully you can sense the sarcasm dripping off of that last phrase).

Ballets and other such nonsense

So, I went to my first live ballet performance.  I went with three of my speech-path friends to see the St. Petersburg Ballet Company perform Swan Lake.  It was nice and all, and I would go see it again, but I think they put too much emphasis on the court scenes.  In case you aren't familiar with Swan Lake, there are 3 acts and 4 scenes.  Act 1, Scene 1 presents the audience with a lively array of dancing: the prince is coming of age and it is time for him to find a wife, but he doesn't like any of the women.  So there's a lot of fal-da-ral and fiddle-y-dee (did you like my reference to Roger and Hammerstien's Cinderella?), and ho-hum dancing.  Then, in Act 1 Scene 2, the prince goes out hunt with the arbalest his mother conveniently gave him in Scene 1.  Now, Act 1, scene 2 - this is where most of the stereotypic ballet representations of Swan Lake come from - you know the "Little Swans" where there are three women with arms linked in connected circles, dancing on their tip-toes.  Well, scene 1 was considerably longer than scene 2 (but scene 2 was considerably better than scene 1).  

Then Act 2, Scene 3 (I don't know why they even label the scene - there is only one scene in the act).  We're back at the court - more dancing stuff.  Meanwhile, I'm thinking - bring back the swans, at least they had good choice in costumes (the courts costumes were rancid).

Act 3, Scene 4.  Back to the swans.  I was excited - I like the swan scenes more than the court scenes.  Well, my elation was to be short lived.  The scene was entirely too short, and the final fight scene between the prince and the evil magician, Robart, bland and short.  I realize that it's ballet, and they can't do massive amounts of stage combat, but I had hoped that the fight scene would be more than the prince leaping past Robart.  But, what made the fight scene even worse was Robart's grandiose, long drawn out death scene.  He took twice as long to die as it took the prince (Sigfreid - I just remembered his name) to kill him.  

Apparently, some of my forays into high culture have left something to be desired.

In other news, I will be submitting the introduction, literature review and methods sections of my thesis to me comity next week.  (hugh sigh of relief).  It's not finished, but I have been working incessantly on it, and I'm glad to have some measure of accomplishment.  If anyone wants and incredibly boring read I can send it to you.  It's all about chest wall adjustments prior to speech initiation, and tongue blade speed movements, and spectrograms and acoustic signals.  At another time I might enjoy reading it, but right now I'm sick of it.  Deciding what measures to take was an incredibly arduous process.  We're looking at the coordination of speech, and so to get a closer look at the coordination of speech we have to take measures from the articulatory system and the respiratory system, and would it be better to measure from the onset of tongue blade movement into constriction until the onset of /sh/ or would it better to measure to the first sign of air release.  Just stuff like that.  I've got some minor edits to do tonight, and then we're having another meeting, and then I get to take a break for a bit - I might celebrate by reading fiction!  Or, maybe I'll watch a movie.

Anyway, not much else is new here.  100 days left until graduation.  I've begun a countdown on my facebook page.  Oh, graduation, how I can't wait until you are here.  I might begin a countdown on my computer too - one can never have too many countdowns when graduation is involved.  I remember that back in high school my friends and I started a countdown the very first day of school.  My friend, Frank, had a magnetic dry erase board in his locker, and so we would draw a new picture featuring the new number of school days left.  It was great fun.  The drawings become more ornate as the remaining number of days grew smaller.

I begin my internship, at Southwest Michigan Rehabilitation Center, in February, so I'll let you know how that goes.

The Beginning of Ends

So, I sit at the end of my last semester break before my last semester of grad school.  It's really the beginning of the end for me.  And this is a good thing.

To sum up my last break I did a lot of reading fiction (a total of 4.5 books), I worked on my thesis, competing the bulk of the methods section.  I drank a lot of coffee, slept in more than I have since beginning grad school, and did a whole lot of nothing important (aside from my thesis, that is).  All in all it was a good break.

And now I'm about to embark on the last journey - hooray!!!!!

Anyway, I didn't begin this with the intention of reminiscing on how this is the beginning of ends - "ahh, it's the end of grad school" [identity crisis to ensue shortly].

I actually wanted to write about the latest book I read, "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold.  I really liked the first 4/5.  The ending was just CRAPPY!  I had heard such good things about it, and was just annoyed by how it ended.  I won't spoil it for you, but anyway, just know that I wasn't impressed.

Anyway, in an effort to get to class on time, I'm signing off.