June 21 - Happy first day of winter! Lucky me, I’m gonna get 2 of these this year. If it happens to be 60 and sunny for the next one I won’t be complaining, that’s for sure.
I don’t have much exciting news today, just more pilot testing and tweaking the program. Results are still looking good, and I think if all goes well tomorrow things should be ready to get started for real (cross your fingers, toes, t’s, streets, whatever). I also had to figure out how to work the fancy tDCS rig here…they have the version actually designed for psychology experiments (~$15k) whereas we have the knockoff version ($200) - a lot more fancy electronics on this one, so I had to figure out how to get it to do what I wanted. But I think I figured it all out.
So…random fact time I guess! One day I was bored walking into campus and I counted the steps from lower to upper campus (which I climb every day, sometimes twice if I go down to the aptly named “quadrangle lawn” to get lunch): 155! I don’t think I ever appreciated what a climb it was until I counted those, wow. I’m also on the 5th floor, so I should walk up even more stairs - there are signs encouraging you not to use the elevator for floors 2-5. However, the stairs require swipe access, which I don’t have, so I take the elevator like a jerk every time. In any event, I’m always pathetically out of breath when I get in line for the coffee cart (which was like, 30 people long today!), so apparently that whole half marathon thing did nothing for me…lame.
I’ve also been trying to figure out if I’m supposed to stay left on the sidewalks, because they drive on the left side here. From what I can tell, people pretty much just do whatever, although on the Manly Scenic Walkway last weekend a woman behind me did audibly complain about someone coming in the other direction not “keeping to the left side.” However, I get confused sometimes when someone is coming directly at me, because my instinct is to go right…and usually their’s is to go left…which means we both go in the same direction. So far no debilitating collisions.
