Eric Stinson

I thought it was the 22nd that I was supposed to update!!

Oh well.  Here I go – one day late or one day early, depending on how you look at it.

I don’t really have anything to say, though.  So… updated!

Darn.  I thought it was October 22nd that I was supposed to update…  In my defense, I was stressing out about my mock oral qualifier on Wednesday.

I intend to make this site more professional at some point.  When that happens, this post will likely go away.

I’m still at Mayo, working in MRI.  I have my oral qualifying exam next week.  I’m studying hard for it, and hope it goes well!

I suppose I should get back to studying, but expect some more updates soon!

Eric

Here we go!  It’s been a year.  I’m at Mayo, working in MRI.

Someday I’ll get into an update schedule.  Or just take all of this stuff off and make it a completely different kind of website…  just wait.  It’s coming.

 So is V: Alien Invasion.

Tomorrow it will have been a year since my last post, so I better post today so it’s not a whole year!

It’s been a busy one.  I got married, bought a house, finished a master’s thesis, and am now working on my PhD at Mayo Clinic.  Whew! (and that was all in just the summer!)

I’ve joined a choir in Rochester, Choral Arts Ensemble and I’m having a good time with that.  It’s also jumpstarted the composer in me (which isn’t good news for the student in me) so I’ve been reading about composing some (here’s a nice set of online books, or at least a free set.  I’m not through them yet, so I shouldn’t judge them) and composing some!  I plan to enter a few contests this year and see what happens.

Well, I need to get to work.  I’m starting a new lab rotation today, doing some RF coil design.

73s

Quadratic formula, anyone?

I’m using a wordpress plugin that uses mimetex. You can learn more about the plugin I used here: http://studium.fstyle.de/weblog/2006/12/22/mimetex_112/ . I chose this plugin over others because it’s really easy to install, because it uses a public mimetex server. If you try to use this in your wordpress blog, you might want to know that the plugin from the above link must be modified to point to the current public mimetex server. It’s in the comments of the above link, but I’ll put it here too:

I just thought you might like to know that the address of the public mimetex server has changed, though, to http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mimetex.cgi

So line 82 just needs to be changed to:
$snoopy->fetch(’http://www.forkosh.dreamhost.com/mimetex.cgi?’.urlencode($formula_text));

and the plugin will work again.

Thanks to etonkin for that useful comment! (note: the link on “etonkin” also take you to his page where he describes the change that needs to be made)

More later on the things I have planned for this plugin. Sweet.

73′s

It has been so long since I updated.  Here’s the news of the last few months:

1.  I got engaged to Katie on April 8th (it was Easter, and some sort of anniversary for us)
2. I passed all of the courses in Medical Physics, and actually did quite well!
3. I went home for 5ish weeks in May and June and had a great time hanging out with family and friends and “cleaning my room.”  I put it in quotes because I didn’t finish.
4. I am working at the Montreal Neurological Institute on a distortion correction algorithm for diffusion MR images.  I have spent the last couple months getting used to things and reading general stuff, now I’m getting in to my actual project.
5. My parents came to visit at the end of June to attend the Montreal Jazz Festival.  I went with, and it was a lot of fun!  Highlights included: Holly Cole, Kurt Elling, Sean Lennon, and the singers on the Alcan stage.
6. I went home to attend a couple weddings at the end of July.  The weddings were a lot of fun, and it was great to be home and see friends and family.  While I was home, though, the 35W bridge over the Mississippi collapsed, and things were weird after that happened.  Everyone was kinda shaken by that, I think.
7. I’m working on a new musical with Mike Rakes and Dylan Thomson.  I think it’s gonna be awesome.  I also think it’s going to be a blast.
8. I watch a Star Trek movie with my roommates every Friday.
9. I hang out with my lab mates sometimes.
10. I’m trying to learn French.
11. I’m auditioning for a choir in a couple weeks.  I hope I make it!

I think that’s all I’m gonna put for now.  I’m gonna try to update this a little more in the future, but I’ve said that before…

73′s

I just found out there is already a musical called “MUSICAL! the musical.”  This is quite upsetting to me, because I have been doing some work on my next musical, “Musical!: The Musical.”  I don’t think the colon and different capitalization is enough to differentiate the musicals…  I guess I’ll probably have to rename.  Also, the other musical is all improv, which is close to a concept in my music.  How could this happen!?  And why did they think of it 8 years before I did!?!  I don’t know what I’m going to do…  I should write the musical though, cause it’s gonna be hilarious, I think.

I got the diffusion MRI distortion and motion correction project! Yay me! I will be working with Dr. Bruce Pike in the McConnell Brain Imaging Center of the Montreal Neurological Institute. The goal of the project is to develop an algorithm that will correct distortions in MR images due to eddy currents and patient motion and probably other stuff that I don’t understand yet. I have a couple papers about previous attempts made by other researchers, so I will start from there and see what happens. I believe I will start in May or June, but I haven’t talked about that with Dr. Pike yet. I’m glad I got the project I wanted, though. That’s a load off of my back!

Finals are coming up already. On March 28th I have a final oral exam for my radiotherapy lab, so my birthday will be spent studying for that. Yippie!! I’m going to study with a classmate today, so hopefully that will help put everything we did in lab into perspective. There were a few labs where I was very tired, and maybe didn’t pay enough attention, so I will have to review those labs especially carefully.

I have my guitar in Montreal now, so I have been writing a few songs. It feels really good to be writing stuff again and playing guitar. My fingers, however, do not feel so great. I have lost the calluses on my finger tips, and my fingers in general are not as strong as they used to be. They are getting better, though, as I play everyday. I started looking around at electronic music stuff on the internet last night, and found a program called SuperCollider that I might try. You basically program (in a C type language) what you want to hear. I haven’t looked in to it much, but the samples sound pretty neat. On a different note, have you heard of this Longplayer piece of music? It’s a piece of music that is 1000 years long! I remember Brian Campbell mentioning it once in class, but not anything else. It’s kinda cool sounding – bells and the like. It was programmed in SuperCollider, which is why I thought of it. I think it might be good homework music.

Well, I’m gonna stop here and start working on my flashcards for Applied Dosimetry. I need to do well on the final after my poor showing on the midterm. Hope everyone who reads my site (Mom, Anna, Katie, … more?) is doing well!

Eric

Big things coming up in the near future:

1. Friday there will be a talk about what research projects are available to master’s students for next year. I have heard that this usually gets delayed, but I hope that doesn’t happen this year. I have been waiting all year! I would really like to do MRI research with Dr. Pike, so hopefully he presents a project or two. I might go talk to him later this week to discuss his research a little.
2. Saturday the Muellers head to Mexico. I wish I could go with them, but I have a lab that day, and a couple more the next week, and then 3 midterms. I should have just quit school so I could go to Mexico ;o).
3. Next week I have 3 midterms. None of them should be too hard, but Medical Imaging has the potential to be tricky, just cause I’m rusty on Fourier transforms. Computers should be pretty straight forward, and mathematical modelling is actually just a quiz, so I don’t know if that really counts.
4. I have two midterms on Valentine’s Day. I don’t really have anyone to spend it with anyway – well, not in Montreal )
5. On Friday, the 16th, I’m going home for a week! Yay! I’m excited to return to Minnesota and see family and friends. I’m going to try to set up a meeting with some medical physicists at the Mayo Clinic (Katie has connections – booya!) and will of course be spending a lot of time with Katie. I will also be doing some studying, because…
6. The day after I get back, I have a Dosimetry midterm! I have heard horror stories about Dosimetry, but so far it doesn’t seem too bad (knock on wood). It’s fairly straightforward, I think. I hope! Kinda sad that it’s the Monday we get back, but what can I do? Nothing!

Well, I guess that’s about it for now. I have been working on a new song, expect it in the next year or so ;O).

73′s