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October 21st, 2009
 | 08:28 pm - Basic Excel feature request
This seems like it should be simple. I want to be able to make a worksheet full of data and charts showing assorted data summaries. I want to be able to cut copy and paste that into a new worksheet, and plug in a new day's batch of data. (So far, no problem). I would then love to be able to click a button that updates all of the graphs on the worksheet to the data in the same location on that worksheet.
I suppose I could probably use a template to do this, but A: don't wanna, B: I do make enough day-to-day changes to my data analysis that I would like to be able to easily choose between how I analyzed the data yesterday and how I analyzed it a week or three months ago, and C: I don't have enough faith in Excel to actually have gotten that far right.
The really frustrating thing is that this has gotten significantly harder since I upgraded to 2007, which is otherwise a significant improvement. Whereas before it could be accomplished with a right-click-left-click-enter or a right-click-tab-left-click-repeat-enter, it's now an complicated process that takes a couple minutes for each chart, which is really frustrating when I'm trying to update a dozen charts or so per worksheet while catching up on a week or two's worth of data.
[/vent]
Current Music: Doctor Who - Bad Wolf
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September 24th, 2009
| 10:16 pm - General announcement to the peanut gallery (or maybe just myself)
Thing #1: As part of a general new nose-reapplied-to-the-grindstone commitment I'm making to myself, I've decided to set myself a goal of reading at least one paper or relevant textbook chapter a day. To assist myself in following through on this task, I've decided to also try and make myself post little blurbs on each of them--synopses, notes, & whatnot--also, hopefully, each day.
Thing #2: As part of same commitment, I'm also going to try and do some mini-posts briefly going over what I do each day, just to force myself to actually be productive each day (or at least own up to it if I'm not). This will also hopefully include acknowledgments of things I wanted to do but didn't; whether it be due to lack of time, energy, or motivation.
Unfortunately, the nature of these posts is probably going to involve insight into my current projects around the lab. Due to the cutthroat fear-of-being-scooped nature of modern science--and even moreso out of respect to my labmates and PI, whose projects may also be involved (or at least interpreted by those with proper insight)--I'll be making some to all of these posts friends-only on lj to make sure I have control over who sees them. I'm sorry if a facebook-only friend feels screwed out of this, but I'll be honest enough to admit I don't think there's actually anyone who will miss the content. Regardless, however, if someone out there really cares it's not too much effort to make a livejournal account and friend me, and I would of course be honored if such occurred.
All for now.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/smile.gif) Peppermint tea
Current Music: Makyo - Devabansha (Tantric Laswell mix) | Powered by Last.fm
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August 28th, 2009
 | 12:15 am - Week in Review
NOTE: Assume all days also include "unpacking," "cleaning up," "organizing/re-organizing," & "playing Burnout 3"
SUNDAY: Gaming, 1st day of Chase's D&D campaign
MONDAY: Sick, sat around, read The Gods Themselves, broke iphone further
TUESDAY: Surgery ended prematurely; had iphone repaired; purchased and read The Boys vol. 4 & Thor Visionaries: Walt Simonson vol. 2; went to library and picked up Astro City: The Tarnished Angel, Ranma 1/2 vol. 2, Naruto vol. 2, Thunderbolts: Faith in Monsters, and The Savage Sword of Conan vol. 1.
WEDNESDAY: Surgery kept me at work from 9:30 AM to ~8 PM due to electrode and anesthesia issues; finished reading aforementioned Thor volume & also finished the WSB biography I'd been reading (which isn't handy, and I don't recall the title).
THURSDAY: Surgery kept me at work from 9:30 to ~7 PM due to mad electrode issues; dinner @ Cedar's with the m-i-l; attempted (and failed) to prepare for my Biomedical Research Integrity discussion group tomorrow.
*peering in my crystal ball*
FRIDAY: Lab meeting, discussion group, surgery will most likely either be done by 4 or run fairly late; publab in evening? Cleanup at old apartment in evening?
SATURDAY: Trip to Goodwill, followed by Ikea & maybe REI for needed furniture for new place (new dresser, new book/DVD case, shelf paper, indoor bike rack)
Any questions?
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August 19th, 2009
| 12:48 pm - Recommendation?
I am looking for rechargeable batteries, and am looking for recommendations from someone who knows more than I do.
Basically, my need is very simple: because of concerns of electrical noise, I have a ton of battery-powered LED lamps in the Faraday cage I use in the lab for my voltammetry experiments. However, they tend to drain battery life relatively quickly so I want to be a bit more economic and get a bunch of rechargeable AAA's. My sole point of interest is that I want to get maximum brightness from the lamps as long as possible on each charge--it's pretty clear so far that the lights dim rather quickly and then can maintain in the almost-too-dim-to-be-useful state indefinitely. I *don't* really care about how long the batteries last before they stop holding a charge, as this is on the lab dime. It would be nice to not have to replace them once a year or whatever, but on the scale of expenditures I contribute to the lab, that one is pretty tiny.
So I *think* that the value I care about is the milliampere-hour of each battery... but I'm not certain. Can anyone contribute thoughts and/or opinions? Are there other battery traits I should be concerning myself with?
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July 24th, 2009
| 10:58 am - Quotes highlighted from a reading of _Junky_
From the Prologue:
* I recall hearing a maid talk about opium and how smoking opium brings sweet dreams, and I said: "I will smoke opium when I grow up."
* After this my friend "packed me in" because the relationship was endangering his standing with the group. I saw there was no compromise possible with the group, the others, and I found myself a good deal alone.
* I'd once got on a Van Gogh kick and cut off a finger joint to impress someone who interested me at the time. The nut-house doctors had never heard of Van Gogh.
* The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict? The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don't wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict.
( Read more... )
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July 11th, 2009
 | 01:12 pm - Quotes found highlighted after a recent re-reading of Fear & Loathing
* "Not that we needed all for the trip but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."
* "This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel... total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue--severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally... you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it."
* "One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, it that everything is serious. You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug--especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes."
* "No! I thought. I must be hallucinating. There's nobody back there, nobody calling... it's a paranoid delusion, amphetamine psychosis... just keep walking towards the car, always smiling...."
* "...I knew he understood our position: We were past the point of debating the wisdom of this move; it was already done, and our only hope was to get to the other side."
* "The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we'd gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it... When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies."
Current Music: Thelonious Monk - Epistrophy | Powered by Last.fm
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June 11th, 2009
| 03:26 pm - Complaints
Background: I have a conference to present a poster at the second week of July, and I'm pretty desperate for data at the moment due to having issues getting equipment up and running back during April & May. I just got in a new fancy stereotax yesterday, so I could return the one I was borrowing from my collaborator's lab.
I spent the first five and a half hours of today establishing that it appears to be physically impossible to use my fancy new ultra-precise equipment in order to do my surgeries, because this equipment is big and bulky. It is literally physically impossible to use this equipment to place two electrodes in a mouse's head using their electrode holders: one of the holders alone takes up more than half of the area above the mouse's skull! Even though the other one is specially designed to jut out of the way, I still half to fit the entire other electrode and the cap where the wire plugs in below the first electrode holder--not possible! Agh! So they're shipping out their cheap crappy non-precise equipment because it's at least small enough to use. WTF?
In the half hour since then, I have whacked my head on the top of my faraday cage (twice!), stabbed myself in the finger with a pipette electrode (used!), and had my drill bit break while trying to clean it (just snapped in half!)
It's not my day. I'm going to shortly go home, eat some chips, drink some beer, and watch basketball. Hopefully this will not result in catastrophe.
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April 23rd, 2009
| 02:58 pm - Sentence I don't think I've ever read in an article before
"The animal was sacrificed at the end of the experiment with an overdose of injected urethane and incinerated."
...the animals were anesthetized at the beginning of the experiment, so they were unconscious at the time. Just in case you were worried.
Current Music: Dario G - Dream to Me (Airscape remix) | Powered by Last.fm
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November 19th, 2008
| 11:48 am - Scooped?
The boys just got back from Neuroscience and reported a poster featuring the project I've been setting up to work on for the next six months to a year or more.
Doh!
At least if I got scooped, I got scooped by Harvard.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/confused.gif) confused
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November 14th, 2008
| 01:17 pm - Kill me now
Injected animal with terminal dose of anesthetic at 9:08 AM.
Gave animal booster injection at 12:50 PM.
Animal is still unconscious at 1:18 PM.
Don't you just love that moment when you realize your only hope to get out at a reasonable hour is that your animal suddenly up and dies before you get your data?
Le sigh.
Current Music: Foetus - Why Can't It Happen to Me
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October 29th, 2008
| 06:32 pm - Exhausted
Cris & I were sick most of last week. This was mainly problematic because I was supposed to get a rough draft of my NSF GRFP application to my advisor by last Friday. I didn't work on it at all because I was using all my energy just to keep up with other things.
So I spent all the weekend writing two of the essays, and all Monday night writing the third.
I spent yesterday & last night catching up on my stats class (having not been to class the entire previous week, but there are podcasts of the lectures online) so I could get the homework done.
Woke up feeling exhausted, then I spent all day today failing to cut 10 micrometer thick carbon fibers down to 100 micrometer lengths with a scalpel. WITH A SCALPEL!
I need to revise the three essays tonight; and I need to read four papers for class tomorrow, two of which are reviews. Probably, I also need to do other things that I'm not thinking of.
This is all a long way of saying I'm really really tired.
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September 8th, 2008
| 07:29 pm - Oh yeah, this totally happened a couple weeks ago.
Short version: So I know what I'm going to do for my dissertation project, and it's going to take at least 6-8 months to get the equipment.
Doh!
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August 7th, 2008
| 02:07 pm - I don't know if I've ever seen a bigger delta...
...of joy experienced in my life. Coming back from the wedding, from 'sota, to being in the lab calibrating electrodes all day every day. In the hopes of having 10 usable electrodes for a surgery next week.
At least I finally know _how_ to do the calibration. Last time I had a surgery scheduled (two days before we left), I wasn't even able to learn that much before hand.
But so far? Zero working electrodes... well, maybe one. Out of 5 I've tested thus far this week. Ugh.
Some of them might be working, maybe I'm just having problems with the flow cell... if only I could talk to my postdoc and find out. But all I can get out of him is "do you try this, that, or the other thing? Yeah? Man, you're getting all the weird stuff." It's all I can do to get him to come down to the lab and look stuff over with me.
Incredibly. Frustrating.
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