Time management is a harsh mistress, and one of the things you have to learn in academia is that there are some times of the year when you're going to be rushed off your feet. Late January to early March is such a time - Open Days take up a full day every week, semester 1 exams and coursework have to be marked, Semester 2 teaching has to be set - the first round of semester 2 coursework has to be marked, our internal interim exhibition for the final year Product Design students has to be assessed, and it's not like the other responsibilities (PhD Students to supervise, seminars to attend, grant proposals to write, ethics applications to review, a Product Design programme to manage, visiting lecturers to look after). Now, none of these things are bad - even when they aren't fun, they're satisfying - but they are immoveable. And that means that everything else that you want to do has to fit in around them - so you have to be selective about what you go for. Opportunities crop up - seminars to attend, dedicated calls for proposals, research tools to develop. And some inevitably have to be kicked into touch for a period. You have to learn not to beat yourself up about that - and you have to make sure you sit down and take stock once the rush is over, so you know where you're going next. And blogging is a good place to sit down and work out those thoughts, and take stock.
Blogging is bottom of the pile during a busy period, of course, hence the lengthy radio silence. All the neat arduino and Raspberry Pi experiments I had planned have also been rested (my Raspberry Pi 2 has yet to be even turned on, over a month after ordering it on the day it was announced, and despite driving specially to the DPD depot so I could have it as early as possible!). I haven't gone near Python for a couple of months, except by proxy (PhD student Oscar Giles is doing some sterling work on implementing Bayesian Statistics on his work looking at interceptive tasks in children). But as you will know if you follow my Twitter feed, I have not been idle, nor have I been entirely swamped with teaching and admin. Indeed Twitter, as a micro-blogging service, is certainly proving its worth there - a photo or short notice can be pinged off in seconds. Blog posts take me at about an hour, and that's not allowing for the time spent mulling over what to say. And for the last few months, my free time has been given to the things that I have prioritised ahead of blogging.
I've been hard at work on FATKAT - the Finger and Thumb Kinetic Assessment Tool, which has now seen its first test run. Sarah Astill, Will Shaw and I got together to actually put it through its paces - and gather some initial data to try out the data processing algorithms, and initial results have been good. We'll be back in the lab later in the month to try the refined version, but I'm excited to have that up and running, and I'm hoping to provide a fuller overview of the system in a future post!
I've also joined the Leeds Hackspace, something I've been meaning to do for a while - lots of little projects on the go, and I'm hoping this will a) force me to benchmark time to actually work them, even if it's only once every couple of weeks; and b) give me a more social space to do it in - rather than sitting alone in my study!
I've got my little 4tronix robot base kit working, ready to start plugging it into my Raspberry Pi, and adding some sensors. The goal eventually is to turn it into a more "tangible" version of Button Bash - rather than just having an icon on a screen, having a buggy that could physically drive around would make for an interesting project. I was inspired by Kim Adams and Pedro Encarnacao with their Lego Mindstorm manipulators, and I'm also hoping that I can tap up some of the autonomous vehicle expertise here at Leeds to see if we can make it robust to poor control. That's largely for the future, though - right now, I just have a buggy that drives around under the code provided by Initio.
And where next? Well, there are a few things on the horizon. Communication Matters have just arrived at the Innovation Centre here at Leeds that's going to offer some exciting potential for collaboration. FATKAT will of course, be continuing in its development, and that I think will be the lion's share of where my spare capacity goes. I'm also trying to get an iDRO journal club set up - wish me luck, and I'll keep you posted!
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