smiley head

What a gorgeous snowy but not so cold day. 30F is fine for me. I am okay with the freezing point. 3F is bad, that is freezing my blood. (32F = 0C)

I happily had a long deep sleep. I missed long deep sleep. Last time I had slept well was a month ago.
I happily got up and played Jazz Samba by Stan Getz. Oh, man, why didn't I notice this great guy earlier? I noticed him a week ago when listening to Napster. I love Napster because its great Jazz radio. I was doing some no-brainer work. And this melody sparkled my mind. So I clicked open Napster and spotted the picture of the song and album. This is another thing I love Napster that you can visualize what you are listening to. Immediately I went to Amazon.com and ordered two CDs (in order to save the shipping fee). One of them was originally issued in 1961, and the other was in 1963. This is my first time exposed to an American Bossa Nova artist. I usually listened to Lisa Ono, an Japanese Brazilian Bossa Nova Goddess.

Oh, where am I?
Yes, I happily had one of the best breakfast -- plain yogurt mixed well with maple syrup. And write!
Finally I have ideas writing my last chapter of my dissertation.
A week ago, I was paranoid because Toby told me there may have been something wrong in my EEG analysis. I should have not low-pass filtered the raw data before averaging. Damn it! I hate that Net Station Tutorial. It told me to low-pass filter as the very first step. Never ever trust a tutorial not written by a cognitive psychologist! Therefore, I panicked. I had only three weeks to hand in my manuscript and I did not start writing the last chapter because my data was wrong. In order to push myself out of panicking, I re-analyzed the EEG data. Yes, I did. Eight hours again were investigated into this process. Why do I have such many experimental conditions in one single experiment? Who approved my dissertation proposal?
Anyway, the data look very similar to the previous analysis. The results actually do not change. That means I get to keep my plan of writing.

Last night, when talking to my mom, who has been always my Luck Goddess, I got email from Dr. Anna (whose last name will not be revealed) telling me that I am getting a job interview in two weeks and that I should call her to set things straight.
So I happily called her this morning.
Her secretary took a message from me. In two hours, Dr. Anna called. We had a good 30 minutes of conversation. Things were discussed. I am going to give a presentation and to meet a bunch of people and to explore the possibility of getting employed. It seemed that she liked me already!
It is always a nice feeling when you feel a positive energy on the phone from someone you have never met.

I happily left the apartment to my lab. I promised to come in to wire Toby up.
He and other students wired me up yesterday. It was for the award-winning program "Specialization in Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience" (a.k.a SCAN). Since I am so far the only student finished the program and I am paid as the teaching assistant of the program and I really want to see my own brainwaves (I never did even though I have wired up at least 50 people in the past 4 years), I volunteered to let students practice applying an electrode cap on me.
Well, there was not only a cap of EEG electrodes. There were also EOG and EMG electrodes on my face and arms, respectively. There were also two reference electrodes on my ear lobes. I knew all those stuff and knew how unpleasant it would be. It is okay because I want to see my brainwaves.
Last year, I volunteered for a class which was also associated to SCAN. But for some reason I don't remember, I did not do the task and did not see my waves.
This time, I was pretty confident that I would see my waves and ERP components indexing some cognitive processing. I stood the toothpicking and the novelists' inconfidence. Zabeth was happily taking my picture. Eventually after an hour or more, I was fully wired and prepared to be hooked onto the machine and do the task.
But the amplifier played dead on me. (Electrical signals picked up from the scalp are too weak to be seen. The purpose of the amplifier, called amp, is to magnify the signals at least 20 thousand times.)
Toby changed amp and even the head box (where the electrode cable goes), but nothing worked. Of course I was not the source of the problem. I was and am alive; thus I should have brain waves which should have been shown on the screen.
It turned out that the reference electrodes on my ear lobes were made of a different metal from electrodes on my scalp. That made me a battery. Different metals have different intrinsic potentials. Electrical charges run between two potentials, creating a current. Amp does not like currency.
I still did not see my own brain waves. It is torturing.

Where am I again? Yes, I happily came to the lab for wiring Toby up.
He stayed in the lab until 3 am last night to make sure everything is peachy and with the same type of metal.
Rose and I wired him up and watched him do the task. Things went well, I guess.

Around 5pm, I checked my mail box and found a brown envelope from a journal. My heart beat went up and my eyes brightened.
I tore it open. A congrats letter and some paperwork. I am accepted!
Correction. My paper is accepted!
This thing took me 2 years and 30 experiments and 400 posters to get the data out. Well, actually it was 2 and half years, 27 experiments, and 3 posters. Plus one manuscript rejection from a journal. It was a lot of work. I had been afraid that the data would never be published. Then I was not care about it would ever be published. Finally it is going to be published, and I was soooooo excited! So excited that I had to call someone to express my excitement. Someone who can understand the tiresome of this process. Someone who is also a frustrated graduate student. Someone who is online with Skype. I am happy it is Marc.

I happily talked to Marc. He is in France. He went to a milonga in Paris. He officially is not with me for the past two weeks. Emotionally we went up and down and down and down to a point that a break (whatever that means) was planned and executed.
For two weeks, I avoided talking to him, voice or text chat. I think we can play it peacefully now. I was happy when expressing my joy to him. After all, he is in the same position as me as a soon-to-be doctor looking for a career. He understands.

Oh, it is getting dark outside. I should get going to meet my gay friend.
Have I ever said that I love gay people openly on my blog?
I love gay people. (Talking about that, he just called me.)
They always make me laugh. Or gay friends I have always make me laugh.
The only criterion I have for my prospective boy friend or life partner is someone who can make me laugh. Not a joking or silly way of making laugh. It is something in personality, something in the sense of humor, something clicking me.


Let's walk in the snow and smile.