If I were to adopt a catchphrase, it would probably end up being: "It's been a funny old week...". That's the phrase with which I nearly always start the drafts of these posts: I try to remove it, just to avoid starting every post the same way.
It's true, though: one of the blessings and curses of academia is that there is no "normal". By their nature, teaching and research change constantly, and you never really do the same thing twice. The job is always fresh.
This has been a busy week: an Applicant Day, nine hours' teaching, an assignment in for marking, two theses to read for examination and one to read as it readies resubmission following corrections, a paper to finish reviewing, getting further to grips with prototyping for WHISPER. Oh, and a must-see presentation from Professor Gordon Marshall, who heads up the Leverhulme Trust (funders of Together Through Play, you may recall).
But when I wasn't doing all that, there was just one thing on my mind: getting the latest iteration of FATKAT installed for Will Shaw to start data gathering. This took a bit of doing. A lot of the changes have focused on usability: batch processing (so you don't need to process a day's work one file at a time), more robust calibration (so you can't inadvertently ruin everything by mistyping a file name) and allowing user-definition of input channels (so if wiring changes, you don't need to dig into the code and change gravity offsets manually).
Also installing the new manipulandums. They feel a slightly retrograde step, since they're made of Lego (like the original version from two years ago!), but they offer so many benefits over the more complex 3D printed version we were using.
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