Day IV: Downtime and Tower Defense

Today's staff meeting turned out to be a reproduction of the MythBusters' Pirate Eye patch Myth. We sat in a dark lab for awhile, until our eyes adjusted to the blackness. We stumbled and bumbled our way around the room, trying to make sense of the vague silhouettes and avoid any invasion of personal space. For the most part, we were unsuccessful. Then, Bob told us to completely cover one eye with our hand and come outside. We took a lap around the third floor (Which really hurt my exposed eye) then returned to the lab and darkness. Then, we took our hand away. It was like putting on night-vision goggles. We could see perfectly. It was awesome.

After the morning's excitement, we had a bit of a slow day in the office. As Matt and Erika began to calibrate another tape, it was back to digitization for me. This time it was of the conversation experiments run yesterday. I processed the tape of Erika and myself, which didn't need calibration because of the ASL system used to make it. The tapes recorded in there are calibrated live and recorded with the crosshairs. So I played the Sand Falling Game while I waited for the tapes to transfer. 

Then, we noticed another problem. The camera I was using was the one that Erika and Matt needed to calibrate. So I had to stop my progress, give them the camera, find a new one, and hook it all up again. That set both of us back, but we finished calibrating and uploading two tapes before we broke for lunch. 

The four of us trooped over to Crossroads again because Matt and Erika were buying again. I'd brought lunch. I'm only going to buy lunch about once a week, or else I'd never make any money at all this summer! But I digress. It only took us a minute or two, we've found the fast way to get there. As Jane and I waited for our labmates to get their food, we chatted with Gretchen and Nicole about their work in the MRI lab. They've been scanning and graphing for three days now. Sounds about as exciting as the coding I'm doing today and will likely be doing all tomorrow. Absolutely enthralling, not even kidding. Bob and Joe stopped by our table on their way out, and Bob made a joke about the eyelash curlers that Jane mentioned in her blog. Word spreads faster than a wildfire in CA, I guess. Sheesh.

From lunch until about two, we really didn't have anything to do. At all. I updated the Twiki page and created a new page for the Interaction experiment we've been working with for the past day and a half, but other than that I did nothing of significance. I did beat VR Defender Y3K on easy mode, though. All 51 levels and only took 5 damage. Don't scoff about the low difficulty, that game is hard. The learning curve is an exponential function, that's for sure. Moving on past my geekiness, at 2 o'clock or so Tristan gave us an explanation of coding. This is great, I'm telling you. We get the privilege of going through every last frame of video designating fixations, blinks, and losses of track. It's riveting. 

Honestly. 

Yeah, not at all. But hey, and task is a task, and an intern is an intern. It'll be more interesting tomorrow. Sure, we've got to code some more, but it's useful work and there's a lab meeting too. We'll be discussing the paper we read the other day. And after that, The King and I for lunch! Can't wait!

Now if only I didn't feel quite so much like Asok...