I still can't believe I'm actually here.

The first couple weeks of classes have passed now. Two weeks of it being my job to sit around and learn fascinating things as fast as I can. It's amazing.

I'm starting to at least see the routine that things will settle into, and the good news is that it looks very survivable. I have a couple base rules that I've managed to hold on to so far:
- Work is not done in my apartment. There's a cafe downstairs, parks nearby, and I have a cube in a grad office at the department, which is where I'm parking myself every weekday morning at about 9:30 AM.
- Work with deadlines is not done on the weekend. I can laze around and organize my notes from the previous week, or read papers that interested me but weren't assigned. But the weekend is my time and I'm making sure everything that needs to be done for Monday is done by the time it rolls around.

I don't know how long those rules will last, but I know that I'm working an average of 12 pretty solid hours per weekday day right now, which means that there's still a moderate amount of wiggle room before I have to break into weekend activities. This is good, because I'm visiting New York every other weekend as part of a trading off weekends visitation plan with my girlfriend in Brooklyn.

Speaking of work, I should acquaint everyone with the sources from which it flows. I'm taking 4 courses. Three 500 level and one 700 level. I don't know how it works in other departments, but in this one the 700 level courses are more focused on current topics (closer to a seminar), and the 500 are supposedly more focused on established information. In reality, we left the realm of "established true answer" about 10 minutes into the first lecture, but that's just because there is so little about the brain that has been truly established as definite.

So the classes are as follows:

Introduction to Cognitive and Neural Modeling
Vision Models
Speech and Hearing models
Planning and Timing models

I was sitting in on a computational neuroscience course as well (which is more based on the physiology/electrical activity of individual neurons), but when I found out I have to take it for credit next fall it unfortunately became something that gets put off until then.

The course readings are fascinating, and my biggest problem during the day so far has been getting caught up in my work and forgetting to eat. Luckily there's a 7-11 and a few restaurants close enough that I can reach them during the breaks in classes. There has certainly been some adjustment to the type of work being done. Over the past few years, people weren't interested in intentionally making something more challenging by withholding relevant data that they had in their possession. (Such as the answers to homework problems) Conversations happen in a very different and much more ambiguous way when one party has to avoid giving out information that the other party is ultimately seeking, and it's led to me misreading what the professor was saying on a couple occasions. Also, I'm very used to reading journal articles in my spare time, and having to put them down when I get to work. I have to keep telling myself that it really is okay to be reading them at my desk :)

Speaking of reading articles, I may have hit upon the perfect solution. I'm pretty good at reading on screens, but for mathematically based articles in particular I need to participate and scribble notes, restatements of equations, etc. So I got a tablet from fujitsu and stuck kubuntu linux on it (there was a bit of a saga where the touchscreen wasn't supported, so I had to write my first ever device driver, but that's mostly sorted now). Xournal is my first step. While reading a paper or in class it lets me write on, highlight, type on, and insert extra pages/images into pdf files. I knew it was working well when I caught myself doodling in the margins of a document during lectures. Combined with free access to a corporatequality scanner (one of those big document stations), I'm attempting to do a paperless grad school experience, and so far it's working out fairly well. I have two pages of unscanned paper on my desk waiting to be scanned and emailed to me tomorrow.

The second step is a little program called TomBoy (or if you use windows, zulupad is roughly equivalent). This is a personal wiki notetaking system, which lets me break out important terms, concepts, papers, people, systems, etc from my scribbled notes or during class. Each item has a title, and any time I type that title in another item, it is automatically hyperlinked (which is great for obscure terms and people's names). And it takes LaTeX input for mathematical formulas. I'm following a semantic tagging system I developed during my neuroanatomy course last autumn, which makes all the notes amenable to dumping into a SPARQL database, from which I can query things like, "all imaging studies published in the last three years which used human subjects and included a working memory test". And it will organize all the notes I've taken on items which match those criteria. Likewise, I could query for all the parts of the brain which help to connect the pons and the motor cortex, presented to me in order of connection from one to the other. It's fantastic, and it can just continue to grow throughout my time here and well beyond.

Anyway, that's where things stand at the moment. Boston is providing wonderful crisp autumn weather, and I'm going to see if I can't get my tablet onto the campus-wide wifi network and go do some readings under a tree by the river.