melb100

I spent all weekend with Mr. America at the pub/ thai restaurant/ rugby/ burrito place/ cinema/ concert/ italian place so last night I had a valentine’s date with myself in my new flat. I bought myself some tulips and daffodils, then I tried to make risotto but forgot the rice (doh) so settled for bacon sandwiches and strong mugs of tea instead, with a single creme egg for desert. Then I knitted and listened to a miss marple audio book. Genuinely my idea of the perfect valentines night! :D

Even if the band didn’t actually start playing Hen wlad fy nhaudau until the crowd had just about finished! The chap in the row across from me had the most amazing baritone voice, it put my ready warbling to shame!

Felt a bit sorry for Mr. America as this was his first rugby game and it was hardly the greatest tribute to the noble sport, what with Scotland fumbling the ball left right and centre.

Afterwards we went for a burrito (I had half of one while mr. America and one and half) and then watch True Grit, which I thought I didn’t like until about 20 minutes after we left the cinema, at which point I realised how good it was!

Last night we went to Glasgow for a British sea power concert with a strangely ambivalent audience, and dinner at a Italian place which (weirdly) had a screen with cctv cameras of the tables! I had two slices of pizza and a piece of faccacia. Mr. America had a bowl of spaghetti, 6 slices of my pizza, and 4 pieces of foccacia. And his stomach wasn’t even swollen afterwards, whereas I looked like I was on the verge on triplets! Sometimes I really don’t like mr. America very much.

So after a horrible few months in which I was unable to test anyone and nobody believed that there was a problem with the eye-tracker rather than me just being unable to use it, it turns out the company who make these things have admitted that it wasn’t programmed properly and we have been sent a brand new camera! Hurrah! Testing resumes tomorrow and should be finished by end of Feb.

Need to start reading for the double windows study, and write up methods etc ASAP. Paper to be submitted end of March, assuming that something happens with the data.

AP&P paper to be submitted by the end of this week, and aphasia by the end of February.

Need to keep in touch with T about other aphasia paper – aiming for end of March to submit that one as will only be a short communication.

Have offloaded a replication with different task that needed doing onto an MSc student and we should get the results back for that in August. A bit longer than I would have liked to wait, but this way if the effect is task-dependent then I haven’t wasted time discovering that; if it does work with the new task then I can go ahead and start partitioning the visual field as of September. Also gets me “supervision” points to go on the CV.

In the meantime I need to learn MATLAB (apparently not so hard now that I can use R) and work out how to present dynamic masks on the stereoscope. Aiming to have made a good start on that by end of Feb. Ideally Costello paradigm with replication should be up and running by end of March at latest. Then I should be able to crank out at least 3 studies over the summer.

Also supposed to learn experiment builder but no one in the lab has ever used it. Can’t be difficult, but it would be easier having someone show me rather than learning from a book. Ho hum. Want to have that sorted by end of March.

A’s scene data to look at – may try and extend this if anything comes out of the moving windows study, but not until April at earliest.