Blessed by the Potato

I just got my university fee bill, and my tuition for the semester is $2150.02. Right below that is a line for “anticipated aid” indicating that my scholarship will pay $2150.00. I don’t know if there was some sort of rounding error or miscommunication between the various departments of the university, but there’s a two cent difference there. In past semesters, that difference was more like $30, which we were told was for “tax reasons”. Years before that even (man I’ve been in school a long time), and we have an era where the entire tuition fee was covered by scholarships.

This is pretty confusing, and I don’t know if I’m expected to pay the $0.02, or if my scholarship will cover that and a simple rounding or other error happened somewhere along the way. At the bottom it says that any late payments not made by Sept 5th will be subject to a late payment charge of $105. I’m afraid that the university is just daft enough to charge me $105 on a late payment of $0.02, so I’m going to just pay it anyway, out of fear. I suspect though that it will lead to a balance carry-forward, which may lead to the hilarious situation where the university cuts me a cheque for two cents (two years ago they didn’t give me my fee bill on time, and I had to guess at what I thought tuition was and pay that… I of course made a conservative guess and overpaid by about $50, and instead of just taking that off my next semester’s tuition, they promptly sent me a cheque).

So I’m going to give the university my two cents, with the expectation that they’ll likely throw it right back in my face.

The drive to Ottawa was relatively smooth. There were, of course, a few construction slow downs, and a couple of insane drivers (one guy was zooming around lanes and passed me on the shoulder — I almost called 911 on him). The residence room here is pretty sweet. For less than the conference rate at the hotel, we’ve got two separate bedrooms, air conditioning, two desks, and a fridge and microwave. I knew it had a kitchenette, but I thought that would be fridge and stove, so I brought pots in pans so we could save more money and cook here… oops. Anyway, the full-sized fridge and freezer will let us stock up on drinks and soup and doggie bags from restaurants. We’ve got the dial-up working (as you can see by my access), but I forgot to bring a network cable to give the in-room high speed a try (it’s wired up, but they told me on the phone it wasn’t working).

There are really only two downsides to the place. The biggest is that the windows face east (right into the rising sun in the morning), and have crappy panel blinds, and both rooms have at least two panels missing, so it’s really bright when the sun comes up. If we’re gonna be here a week, I’m thinking some masking tape and tinfoil might be in order… :) The other minor thing is that the only light in the rooms are two lamps, and they took the light bulbs out of the desk lamps!

The conference doesn’t start until Monday, but I’ve got a full load of work to do here to prepare my presentations today. Hopefully we’ll get to do some touristy things afterwards.

“Anything that doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” As a Paladin, pretty much nothing kills you, so…

On a more serious note, playing a Paladin in WoW (even though I haven’t touched the game in almost two years) gave me the incredible ability to read a book 30 seconds at a time. (Seal, autoattack, read; look up, repeat). That ability is quite useful at the moment as I’m doing image analysis. Set up brain. Select fiducials, let computer chug for 30-60 s. Look up, pick next option, repeat.

I’m here late in the lab doing some data analysis to get ready for my presentations in Ottawa next week. It’s been pretty crazy, two 14-hour nights back to back now, leaving long after the sun has come up. And I’m still only a little more than halfway done, with just one day left to go.

During all these all nighters, I like to snack. And since everything is closed, I have to plan my snacks ahead a bit, and tend to go on the “safe” side and bring extra junk, which is of course not good for the diet. The last two nights I’ve brought some sugar-free gum to keep my mouth busy without ruining my diet or my teeth (good, especially since I just found out I cracked another tooth and am in line for porcelain crown #3). I usually avoid gum because it does stick a bit to my extensive dental work, and also because I usually have a strong desire to swallow it. Fortunately, that is not nearly as strong for mint gum (when I do chew gum, it tends to be yummy — not mint). I had two regular sized (12 packs?) last night of whatever free samples came in the mail yesterday afternoon (Trident? Dentyne?), and a whopping 60 pack of Excel that I picked up at the store tonight. After all this gum, I can share with you several observations. The first is that Excel does stay flavourful a lot longer than the Trident (Dentyne?), but that the excel gets so tough and unpleasant to chew before the flavour is gone that I spit it out not much after I would have spat out the Trident anyway. The second is that those new-fangled push-through pill-type packs for gum have essentially eliminated the gum wrapper, giving me no natural way to wrap up my discarded chew. Thirdly, my breath is very minty.

Wow, was that a long weekend. Scans every day, finishing off with 14 consecutive hours in the MRI suite on holiday monday. Imagine the overtime I’d get if I was actually employed!

It was getting pretty rough there, with no breaks to go eat, so I had a cooler bag with lunch and dinner. I had a cancellation right around lunch, which was kind of good in a way, since I was starting to fall behind in my schedule, and it gave me about a half hour to run to Timmy’s to stock up on donuts and get some more ice for the cooler bag. I got home last night just absolutely exhausted, and did not sleep at all well. Now I’m getting ready to go back for more scans tonight. It never stops!

About halfway into the afternoon, an orderly came by and dropped a patient (as in, an actual sick person in a wheelchair) at the door of the MRI, and ran off even though I was yelling at him (I couldn’t leave the console for another 10 minutes or so). Finally I get a chance to go up to this poor woman and ask her what she’s here for, and if I can help her (hoping that she’s not going to say “I’m here for an MRI”). She’s here for “a scan”. I ask if she knows what kind of scan, if its an emergency case, and if she knew whether they paged someone to come in and take care of her because I’m not a doctor… she says the only thing she knows is she has to get an injection. Well that, at least, tells me that nobody’s expecting me to give her an emergency MRI. I start searching the mostly lights-out nuclear medicine department for someone that might know what to do. Finally, hidden way in back around the corner in one of the treatment rooms I find one of the nuc med techs, who had been called in to help this woman and knew exactly what to do (and was also confused as to why she was dropped off at the MRI).

So, crisis averted, it was back to scanning for me. Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. We have two machines networked together to run the MRI. Basically, one is supposed to be running the scans, and the images are instantly sent to the other one for backing up to CD-R and viewing. Unfortunately, the hard drive on the other one filled up sometime on Friday, and noone who knew how to properly back it up and clear it off came in, which meant a lot of intense multitasking for me to make sure I got all my stuff backed up without having to spend an extra 7 hours at the end of the day to get it done. I was worried the same would happen to the main console itself, as it topped 90% yesterday…

So, a long weekend.