Jay’s Not Here

I’m getting screen corruption issues on my Macbook Pro; the one I’m using to run the study upon which I’m basing my thesis; the one I’m using to demo my project at next week’s RIA Showcase.

It’s a 3 year old machine with a battery that still lasts at least 4 hours. Unfortunately, it has the failure-prone nVidia 8600M GT soldered to the logic board.

I haven’t confirmed the GPU is the culprit. I’m currently backing up the drive (thank you Apple for Target Disk mode and Firewire 800).

I can’t take it to the Apple Store any time soon. I’m still anxiously waiting for my mom to be discharged from the hospital.

Aaaaaaaaaaargh >_<

Damn you, Murphy’s Law!

It’s been a while since I blogged about my study so here’s a quick update:

• Acquired a current-gen iPod Touch to give away to one randomly-selected participant.
• Signed up 3 people to come into the lab between now and Monday.
• Tentatively signed up 2 more over the next few weeks.
• Started writing tools to automatically collect statistics about previous sessions:
  • One participant saved their work 53 times per hour.
• Learned that a dual-computer setup makes video transcription much much faster. I’ve got one computer playing back the video on a 40″ monitor using MPlayer (awesome keyboard shortcuts for pausing and navigating video); the other one has an Excel spreadsheet with pre-labeled cells for storing the transcribed data. This setup saves me from having to Command-Tab between apps each time I want to type something. Plus, I get to see the video and the transcript at the same time.
• Discovered that using raw sugar instead of granulated increases the likelihood of caramelization during cookie baking.