NeuroDojo

Did I mention the gods hate me?

Yesterday, I was just about done everything I could do that day, and was thinking of going home a little early, around 5:00 p.m. (6:00 p.m. is a more typical end of day for me). My wish to go home obviously displeased some deity or another.

I was working on my talk for Louisiana State University next week. This PowerPoint show is getting to be a big file, so I decided to move it into a directory of its own.

And for some mysterious unknown reason, a whole bunch of pictures suddenly swapped positions with each other in my presentation. Where there was supposed to be a neuron, there was s distored picture of a hermit crab. And on. And on. Scattered throughout the talk. A few places just had white boxes with a big red "X" in the middle, indicating the program couldn't find the picture at all. Cussing ensued, followed by a determined effort to fix this before I went home. Fortunately, enough of the slides were still intact that it wasn't like I was starting from scratch. A couple of pictures were very insistent about not being fixed, leaving me to stare angrily at big red Xs over and over. I think I've finally got them beat down, but making all the repairs took me until -- you guessed it -- sometime after 6:00 p.m.

All those trials aside, I think it's going to be worth it. This talk has grown into something rather different and more comprehensive than what I planned, and I'm real excited about it. In fact, I think I may be able to squeeze a good review paper based on the preparation for this talk.