Sometime ago (over the summer), I bought a new eye-tracker. It takes a 'snapshot' of your eye up to 1000 times a second and works out where you're looking. If you have a really fast computer screen, you can do really clever things, like change what's showing at some position on the screen as you move your eye towards that position (never mind why we'd want to do that!). I had one of those, but I wanted another for the new tracker. But I'd forgotten that we're all into widescreen flat-panel LCD screens these days, and that no one makes CRT screens anymore. And those LCD screens are even slower than the train I'm currently on (well... not quite as slow as the train, which is stationary). So what's a scientist to do? Use today's technology that is worse than yesterday's? Nope... all he has to do is search on eBay, and buy two super-fast computer monitors from the same person who, coincidentally, lives just down the road. How good is that? Thank you eBay, and thank you to the nice chap who does the stage animations for IQ and who had the good sense to replace his CRT monitors with space-saving LCDs...
Speaking of which, perhaps eBay ought to do the eBay equivalent of Google Scholar, and have a site for academics where they can post details of their surplus equipment - there's always some poor person out there who's got a use for an old Sinclair Spectrum...
It's been a quiet time on this blog, which has given me time to reflect on why I do it (by 'it', I mean post parts of my life on it). There are so many blogs out there that are really very much more interesting than this one. Mostly, reading these blogs, you learn what it is that their authors think. But what you won't learn, necessarily, is about the daily grind of their lives, and the trials and tribulations they have to endure (not that I actually know what a tribulation is). Or about the impediments they suffer to a healthy life/work balance, and which lead to chronic frustration/depression/insomnia. So this is why I write this - to give some sense to the future me, when I have the time to go back and read these posts, of what my life was like at this point in my history. So this isn't meant to be about what I think, but about what I do. Or most often, don't manage to do. (And I hope a future me does read this, as that would mean that I had survived into the future..) So I guess this blog ought to be dedicated to those authors brandishing their pitchforks and flaming torches whose inexorable march towards Cognition (the journal I edit) keeps me from having any kind of life/work balance, let alone a healthy one.
That was the first time in my entire life I have ever produced the word inexorable. Amazing. And liberating too...
Something to look forward to: my next post, which will be so incredibly positive that even I will stand back and gasp...
