'redesign'

look what i figured out how to do. custom mastheads at last! this initiative was inspired by my latest foray into writing code; i'm starting a new experiment in the lab and need to teach myself how to program a piece of equipment. unfortunately, the equipment is about 15 years old, and uses a weird sensical-at-the-time, but not-so-sensical-now custom language. looks like my one year of java won't be of much use to me now...

i really enjoyed travelling this summer: to saskatoon, vancouver, and whistler in may for visits and a conference, to montreal and ottawa in june for more visits and a conference, and to new york and new haven in july for yet another few visits and a workshop. i was also lucky to have a lot of visitors over the summer - friends from ottawa, and montreal, and as far as new zealand. it's been a long time since i've seen some of the people i got to spend time with this summer, and each of them reminded me of how valuable friendships can be. thanks everyone. let's do it again soon.

this month has been, overall, a return to feeling (and actually being) productive, in the lab and work sense. i really needed some low-key time this summer to figure out the grand master plan for the rest of my PhD, and those travelling breaks seemed to do the trick. now that i'm back in toronto and not going anywhere for a few months (the carnival that is the Society for Neuroscience Meeting will go down in atlanta in mid-october), i've had a chance to seriously start two new projects. i love the feeling of getting something off the ground, and the time at the beginning of a project when you are organizing lists of supplies, scheduling each stage that needs to be accomplished, reading background literature to establish what you are going to measure exactly and how to go about measuring, and sitting down to learn and practice new techniques. i love this part so much that i've been spending most of my energy there this week, and ignoring the discussion of a paper that i really should be finishing. maybe in the next few hours i'll try to tackle that...