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).