After weeks of researching with which phone I should replace my slowly dying S2, I FINALLY bought an S4 (thereby continuing my habit of living behind the curve and usually buying whatever was just replaced by a newer model). I’m super bummed that I wasn’t able to move my Whatsapp conversations and most of my apps, but having a phone that doesn’t freeze once a day and that has working vibration is amazing! :) Also, my old phone wasn’t able to sync with my Fitbit, so that’s a nice bonus.
I’m a devout Mac user, but I’m always very weary of upgrading to a new version of Mac OS. Also, reviews always suggest you do a full hard drive back-up (which I should do more often anyway, ahum) and it’s taken me forever to put up the desk in my room and to locate my external hard drive in my mess of boxes.
But after my Macbook became extremely sluggish, I finally bit the bullet. While I’m not a big fan of the design changes, I’d like to think that my laptop runs a lot faster now, so yay.
I gave a talk in my department’s weekly lab meeting. My work focusses on language processing and aging – recently I’ve started looking into how old people understand complex sentences. Fun stuff!
A few days ago it hit me that I could take my kindle with me to the gym. When I mentioned this to a co-worker, he was all, “Oh yeah, you could read papers there!” Yeah… no. My e-book reader is strictly for pleasure. (Also, it’s really not fun to read pdfs on there, which sounds like a much better excuse, I guess.)
I spent the weekend at my parents’ place up North. As I’m never home during normal business hours, I tend to order a lot of stuff online and have it shipped to either the convenience store close to my house or to my parents.
This guy up there is my phone’s new best friend. It’s an external battery which supposedly holds five full charges for my phone battery. Let me tell you, my phone is my lifeline because it brings me to my participants’ homes, it records my experiments, and it’s got tons of podcasts and tv shows to entertain me at the gym or while commuting. Also, lately there’s been some bug which causes the phone to freeze – and if I then turn it on again, I find myself with the battery status dropped from 80% to 15%. No fun. Cue: external battery.
The battery is chunky (it’s a little bigger than my phone) but that’s really not an issue if you’re carrying around a laptop and other stuff anyway. I only use it when necessary, but it’s so convenient to just connect the two in your backpack with no need for an external plug. Great investment!
(No no no, I’m not getting paid by the company, I just really like their product.)
A huuuuge package from Amazon (seriously, these guys need to work on their box sizes) arrived and it got me a new gorillapod. It comes with a little spirit level which is cute if not necessarily all that useful. I’m happy with this tripod because I mainly shoot through a 50 mm prime lens, but it’s a little on the light-weight side if you’re using heavier lenses.
I finally sent my thesis off to the printer! Weeeee! :) There were some last-minute hiccups (What is my ISBN? Where is my cover? Why is Word so uncooperative?), but I finally hit send and can’t wait for the proof which I’ll receive next week. Yay!
I’ve been fighting with a Presentation script for a while now. The experiment would run smoothly but the log files were all wonky. I finally found the problem (I wish it had been more complicated than deleting a bunch of zeroes), which means that with all experiments running smoothly I can finally start our big study. Exciting times!
Because normal post-its are so 1968(/1974/1977/1980).
A few of my co-workers are setting up an EEG experiment and I got to play guinea pig. It’s fun to hear things like “Whoaaaaa, your frontal lobe, what’s up with that? … Oh, never mind, I forgot to turn of my phone, it’s interfering with the computer.” It turns out that my brain signal is full of alpha waves which isn’t news to me.
Shameless plug: If you live in Berlin or Potsdam and you are a native speaker of German who is also rather proficient in English, let me know! I can hook you up with a fun experiment! ;)
Like A Bat 