It's Friday, it's Friday...
But alas I cannot 'get down' on this Friday, because I have data collection at 7am tomorrow. And on Sunday as well. Ahhh...I'm just hoping we can collect all the data we need this winter and not have to do it all again in Spring.
On top of data collection I'm also attending a conference. This is a rare conference that's actually in Boston (over at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, actually) so I can just grab the bus over to it. It's nice being able to just go home at the end of a day of conference-ing, but it's also kind of disorienting. Normally during a conference you're staying at a hotel near the conference and you're really focusing primarily on just going to sessions, networking, etc. This feels like I'm going to the conference part-time in a way. But, this conference also doesn't have a ton of stuff that's directly relevant to my interests, so it's nice to be able to just go to sessions I'm interested in and then do other productive things. Like printing out the poster today (I'm at this conference because we have a poster in it, basically; I probably wouldn't have registered for it otherwise) and giving one of our collaborators a tour of the lab. Which was a pretty boring tour because our lab is just an old house with the rooms being used as offices lol. But after two years of phone meetings with her, it was nice to meet face-to-face! I joined the project after the one initial in-person meeting had taken place so I had never actually met any of the other team, although I had weekly phone conversations with them for a while, haha. Modern communication technology is kind of weird when you start thinking about it.
This week I also took a peek at the Summer video data for the baseball project; as I had suspected, overall there's not much there. Basically it turns out that coaches don't engage in our behaviors of interest all that much during baseball games, apparently because they're busy telling kids how to play baseball (the most common code is 'instruction', ie the coach giving some sort of information or directions to the kids). Which makes sense, because baseball is a fairly complicated and technical game, so young children will require more instruction during the game. We'll have to see if these basketball games are any different. Of course if they ARE it presents problems for combining the data...if only we had filmed basketball games from the start. Oh well, we have the data we have.
Also it is freezing this week (literally, the temperature is below freezing every night and some days it's been below freezing all day as well). And it's super windy! It's pretty miserable going outside. My hands are starting to get all dry and chapped, I need to break out the hand cream. I had to invest in some a few years back when we had such a cold winter my hands started spontaneously cracking and bleeding. We may have more snow next week too...sigh, winter is truly here. And it's daaaaaark. The conference session I went to today wrapped up at 4:30 and I went to grab the bus home, and it was pitch dark by the time I reached my stop. It makes it feel much later than it actually is, so by 5 o'clock it feels like I should be getting ready for bed. I wouldn't mind winter as much if it didn't get so dark.
December will probably be quite exhausting over all just because of data collection every weekend...although, we're actually spending less TOTAL hours collecting data, since basketball games are shorter and multiple games are played on each Saturday and Sunday, so we have less travel time and less filming time for more total coaches. With the baseball, we were out for hours every weeknight...that got pretty difficult because I was perpetually getting to sleep around 1am. At least with this it doesn't go late into the night. Well, the games actually do last until night, but since it's an all-day thing we've been doing shifts with one team taking the morning/afternoon and another team coming in for the late afternoon/evening, and I've been on morning shift thus far.
Other than that...nothing much has been going on. With the conference it's been kind of a hectic week and also I don't do much outside of work during winter because it is dark and cold. I still need to write my FE Fates review...I actually started another playthrough because I want to at least marry all the royal siblings lol. And Kagero, and maybe some others? Ninja butler and regular butler are also good candidates! And Selena, Mozu, Orochi...actually tons of the female characters are great, but the list of male characters worth marrying is much smaller. Perhaps that is merely my personal taste, however. I also need to actually finish FF XIII-2, because I got like halfway through and then lost track of it because it made my computer overheat a lot. It tended to crash if played for more than 2 hours at a time; my laptop is juuuuuust barely good enough to handle it basically. It has a LOT of particle effects and shiny lights and stuff that my crappy Intel graphics card can't handle too well. It was kind of a hassle to set up my system of balancing my cooling rack on top of two books (I don't have anything both solid and wide enough to hold it so I need to combine two hardcover D&D books) and putting the laptop on the rack. I figure, it's safe for putting pans on straight out of a 400 degree oven, it's probably safe for my laptop lol.
I actually have plenty of TIME for gaming, but I'm kind of mentally tired by the time I get home from work and tend to just flop about, mushroom-like. I also have two books I need to read! So many things that are actually fun to do, but which I do not quite manage to make time for. Well, in fairness, I read and game a lot more in the summer because it's not so dark and cold. My house is really cold at night so I tend to huddle under a blanket and not want to use my hands to, say, turn the pages of a book, because they get too cold. The heat tends not to turn on until the middle of the night for some reason. Gotta say though, the heat doesn't get nearly as dry and gross as in my old place, and tends to run more quietly. I just wish we could like, turn it on and off. The bathroom actually does have electric heat, but the rest of the house is all steam heat. Most places in the area have it, it's all old houses around here.
So that's the story...busy with a conference and data collection, also it is reeeeeally cold and windy recently.
On top of data collection I'm also attending a conference. This is a rare conference that's actually in Boston (over at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, actually) so I can just grab the bus over to it. It's nice being able to just go home at the end of a day of conference-ing, but it's also kind of disorienting. Normally during a conference you're staying at a hotel near the conference and you're really focusing primarily on just going to sessions, networking, etc. This feels like I'm going to the conference part-time in a way. But, this conference also doesn't have a ton of stuff that's directly relevant to my interests, so it's nice to be able to just go to sessions I'm interested in and then do other productive things. Like printing out the poster today (I'm at this conference because we have a poster in it, basically; I probably wouldn't have registered for it otherwise) and giving one of our collaborators a tour of the lab. Which was a pretty boring tour because our lab is just an old house with the rooms being used as offices lol. But after two years of phone meetings with her, it was nice to meet face-to-face! I joined the project after the one initial in-person meeting had taken place so I had never actually met any of the other team, although I had weekly phone conversations with them for a while, haha. Modern communication technology is kind of weird when you start thinking about it.
This week I also took a peek at the Summer video data for the baseball project; as I had suspected, overall there's not much there. Basically it turns out that coaches don't engage in our behaviors of interest all that much during baseball games, apparently because they're busy telling kids how to play baseball (the most common code is 'instruction', ie the coach giving some sort of information or directions to the kids). Which makes sense, because baseball is a fairly complicated and technical game, so young children will require more instruction during the game. We'll have to see if these basketball games are any different. Of course if they ARE it presents problems for combining the data...if only we had filmed basketball games from the start. Oh well, we have the data we have.
Also it is freezing this week (literally, the temperature is below freezing every night and some days it's been below freezing all day as well). And it's super windy! It's pretty miserable going outside. My hands are starting to get all dry and chapped, I need to break out the hand cream. I had to invest in some a few years back when we had such a cold winter my hands started spontaneously cracking and bleeding. We may have more snow next week too...sigh, winter is truly here. And it's daaaaaark. The conference session I went to today wrapped up at 4:30 and I went to grab the bus home, and it was pitch dark by the time I reached my stop. It makes it feel much later than it actually is, so by 5 o'clock it feels like I should be getting ready for bed. I wouldn't mind winter as much if it didn't get so dark.
December will probably be quite exhausting over all just because of data collection every weekend...although, we're actually spending less TOTAL hours collecting data, since basketball games are shorter and multiple games are played on each Saturday and Sunday, so we have less travel time and less filming time for more total coaches. With the baseball, we were out for hours every weeknight...that got pretty difficult because I was perpetually getting to sleep around 1am. At least with this it doesn't go late into the night. Well, the games actually do last until night, but since it's an all-day thing we've been doing shifts with one team taking the morning/afternoon and another team coming in for the late afternoon/evening, and I've been on morning shift thus far.
Other than that...nothing much has been going on. With the conference it's been kind of a hectic week and also I don't do much outside of work during winter because it is dark and cold. I still need to write my FE Fates review...I actually started another playthrough because I want to at least marry all the royal siblings lol. And Kagero, and maybe some others? Ninja butler and regular butler are also good candidates! And Selena, Mozu, Orochi...actually tons of the female characters are great, but the list of male characters worth marrying is much smaller. Perhaps that is merely my personal taste, however. I also need to actually finish FF XIII-2, because I got like halfway through and then lost track of it because it made my computer overheat a lot. It tended to crash if played for more than 2 hours at a time; my laptop is juuuuuust barely good enough to handle it basically. It has a LOT of particle effects and shiny lights and stuff that my crappy Intel graphics card can't handle too well. It was kind of a hassle to set up my system of balancing my cooling rack on top of two books (I don't have anything both solid and wide enough to hold it so I need to combine two hardcover D&D books) and putting the laptop on the rack. I figure, it's safe for putting pans on straight out of a 400 degree oven, it's probably safe for my laptop lol.
I actually have plenty of TIME for gaming, but I'm kind of mentally tired by the time I get home from work and tend to just flop about, mushroom-like. I also have two books I need to read! So many things that are actually fun to do, but which I do not quite manage to make time for. Well, in fairness, I read and game a lot more in the summer because it's not so dark and cold. My house is really cold at night so I tend to huddle under a blanket and not want to use my hands to, say, turn the pages of a book, because they get too cold. The heat tends not to turn on until the middle of the night for some reason. Gotta say though, the heat doesn't get nearly as dry and gross as in my old place, and tends to run more quietly. I just wish we could like, turn it on and off. The bathroom actually does have electric heat, but the rest of the house is all steam heat. Most places in the area have it, it's all old houses around here.
So that's the story...busy with a conference and data collection, also it is reeeeeally cold and windy recently.