Category Archives: Cardiac Electrophysiology

Cardiac Electrophysiology

First prospectus draft finished

I was up until 01:00h Saturday morning working on finishing the first complete draft of my prospectus write-up, which is pretty late for me. The review was on my desk when I returned, and it’s going to take a lot of work to address all of the comments. I have a few other things to do today, but otherwise this is going to be my primary focus Until it is DoneTM, for it must be done. Soon.

Today is August 7, 2006. I move to Baltimore in 15 days.

Daily Work Log 2006-07-26

July 26th… August approaches. Rob leaves the lab in a mere three days. It’s the beginning of the end as we start planning to take servers offline.

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There’s a new science blog aggregator from the creator of HubMed, called aggademia. It has only just started up, so I can’t really tell you much about it. The about page is here. The tags are currently pretty limited, but you can get RSS feeds for the tags that they have.

I’ve started a group for Cardiac Electrophysiology, but haven’t done anything with it. If you’re interested, go sign up and join the group!

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I actually came up with a bunch of stuff to write about today, but I haven’t had time to devote to posting about them. Maybe I’ll be able to squeeze in a little blogging time at home tonight. But probably not.

Daily Work Log 2006-07-25

I spent an hour and a half dealing with e-mail, health insurance, taxes, papers, and so on.

Blech.

A lot of it was stuff I’d been putting off, but was in my system. For some reason this morning felt like the right time to do it. Nobody’s here yet. I recently read a suggestion, I think on 43Folders, not to deal with e-mail first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, it’s something I prefer to have cleaned out, especially because my e-mail account has its own -Action-, -Waiting For-, and -Response- folders to check on.

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Right now there’s this metaphorical cloud on the horizon. Our lab is moving. We’re leaving Tulane. Sure, we’re going to “greener pastures”, but this city and university have been my home for seven years. This lab, for nearly four. The cloud is not only philosophical — it’s logistical. In a few weeks our servers will be shut down. The following week, all of the workstations will be packed up and shipped off. In one of our most productive times of year, we’re facing substantial downtime, yet deadlines continue to nip at our heels.

Some of us still haven’t got apartments in Baltimore yet. I am included in that group, unfortunately.

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I went to the Payroll building to take care of my tax situation (no big deal, but needs addressing), and I found that Payroll has become “New Orleans Jazz Orchestra”. At least that’s what the sign says. Apparently they never moved back to campus after Katrina. Everything else moved back, basically.

I wonder why they didn’t move back… oh wait. I know. Because it’s a pain to get them to do anything, and you have to go bug them in person. That’s a lot harder when they’re a 15 minute drive across town, rather than walking distance on campus.

*sigh*

I sent them an email. That’s step 1. Step 2 is to call them.

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I just spent some time discussing our workstation set-up with Rob and Umar. We currently use a central file server to host people’s home directories, and we remotely mount them on the workstations. Due to increased file I/O and bandwidth issues, that’s no longer a great solution. It also used to be more important, because people shared machines a lot. That doesn’t really happen any more, so it makes more sense for people to have local home directories. We’re going to want mirrored local disks on the workstations, where possible. For the machines where that’s not possible (like laptops) people should back things up onto external disks. I currently do that every night with my powerbook, automatically.

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Busy day. More news later. I’m going to try to make it home through the rain now.

Daily Work Log 2006-07-24

My focus this week has to be on my prospectus. I still don’t know whether I’ll have to be at Hopkins by August 24th or September 8th. Hopefully I can get that information this week.

Either way, the prospectus needs to be done before I go, and either way, that means soon.

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So far I’ve managed to get one (10+2)*5 dash done on my prospectus, and I’m in the process of the first dash on my paper. My “minimum” quota is 2 dashes for each of those projects. The minimum bit means that before I work on other stuff, I’m supposed to try to finish those four dashes every day. So far my track record is not that good, but last week was a strange week, with the visitors from Oxford and so on.

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Because of resolution issues, I’m redoing a figure for the paper. For some reason, even though I thought I used the same method as usual to make the figure, the activation maps from the model came out fuzzy when the figure was viewed at document resolution. None of my other figures were having an issue, so I’m re-making the activation maps on higher-res images. It’s kind of a pain, but the results look nice.

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Two dashes on the paper down, one on the prospectus. One more dash on the prospectus left to go for today. Then I’ll start going through the @Lab Next Actions without regard to project/priority. I prioritize projects, generally, but not Next Actions.

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Finished with all of my dashes today. I have stuff going on shortly after dinner tonight, so I’m going to go home at around 16:30. In other news, even after unsubscribing, the Heart Rhythm Society continues to spam me with training seminar notices, because they think I’m a cardiologist. Lovely. I have unsubscribed multiple times. I expect better from a professional organization. I’m going to run through my before-leaving-work checklist and get out of here.