Settling In

It's official: as of this afternoon, I have lived in Chicago for 3 entire weeks. Oh. That's not actually very long. I suppose it's time for a couple pictures of the apartment. So, here they are - my bedroom and the kitchen (where I spend most of my at-home time)

So, yeah. Not very big, but it works. I get along pretty well with my roommates. One is a real estate manager currently in grad school for urban planning, and the other finished his masters in trombone performance last year and now splits his time between working at Starbucks and performing in a few local orchestras.

Work: it's good. Actual interactions with the monkeys only began this past week, and that's only at the most basic level; it'll take a while to get to the point where I'm training them and whatnot. In the meantime though, as one of the more "experienced" machinists in the group, I spend more time on mechanical projects (it doesn't take much to be the power-tool-person in academia, at least outside the realm of mechanical engineering).

The main project I'm assigned to deals with trying to track the eye movements of a monkey as it completes a "task" (moving a cursor on the screen into a box using a joystick of sorts), and then integrating that information into the data collected from the brain's signals that control the hand/arm movement. The idea is that we will be able to use the data of how the eyes are moving as a predictor/indicator of what the hand and arm will do next. Right now we're still just trying to get the eye tracking system working with minimal cost and time. It's not a trivial proposition. Our current plan of attack involves a camera that is designed to follow eye movement combined with a head-tracking system that will rotate the camera in order to keep the pupil in the frame. Let's just say that I am very glad that someone else is doing the programming to get all of the different components working together. Outside of that, I'm giving myself a crash course in Adobe Dreamweaver so I can take charge of the lab website, and likely I will soon jump into some basic programming (mostly in C, though there's also some C++ and C#). Good thing I took all those programming classes at Goshen. Oh. Shoot. I didn't.

Still getting used to the fact that I live in Chicago, as well as the culture that goes along with the 3rd largest city in the country. It's not a negative adjustment, but it's certainly an adjustment.

I'll see about getting a couple pictures from work up; I'll have to ask my boss about the rules for taking pictures of monkeys to share (we have to be careful because of PETA et al). I enjoy all my coworkers; there are maybe 8 or 9 of us total plus my boss and another prof, including grad students and other technicians.