Future Ben

What does that look like? Huh? If you said, “a normal mouse brain,” you would be right. You would also be an insensitive dick who doesn’t know when it keep their damn mouths shut.

Well. Off to scan a half dozen brains just like that one, because whether you have a positive or a negative result, you need a statisticly valid n number. You can’t just fail an move on, you have to fail again and again and again.

I am on set at a music video. It’s good to know my fire skills are still appreciated. Although I am just a consultant for the dancers. The choreographer has done most of the dance for FischerSpooner so I am in good company.

I am in this weird zone between the crew and the talent. I feel like I should either be warming up or lifting something heavy. Instead I am explaining why frilly collars of straw won’t be good for dancers with torches. (costuming was pretty agreeable to that one)

It’s customary to not ask stupid queations on set, but I don’t think any of the actual musicians are even here. Unless they are crewing their own video. In which case they are truly hardcore.

I finished running all of the gas lines for a new oxygen enriched anesthetic system. Once the last part was in place I had to step back and get a picture.

Techically not steampunk, but all the gauges and pneumatic hoses next to the superconducting electromagnet reminded me of a panel from Girl Genious.

Next I will install a tesla coil and a giant knife switch.

I just want to send out a special message to the following programs.

PV4.0 (Came with MRI console) After spending several hundred thousand dollars on the extremely specialized piece of hardware you control, refusing to even start because of your licensing being locked into the network card.  Congratulations! You have protected yourselves from piracy! No unscrupulous hospital/research institute who drops a quarter of a million dollars on a new MRI console will even think about getting a cracked version of YOUR software.  And you’ve stopped all those punk kids from trying to reconstruct and analyze MRI data without giving you your due.

Amira (7000$/year) For crashing literally every 15 minutes and for the complete lack of thought given your file structures.  So sprawling and precarious that moving anything from anywhere can destroy even saved work.  I am sure there is some reason I have to carefully gather the dozens of random binaries you spew out just to crop a single 3D image, but clearly I am not smart enough to understand why you don’t just save it all in one fucking folder.

Analyze (5000$/year) What can I say? Not only do you not allow me to save files outside of your environment, YOUR DEFAULT EXIT ERASES ALL OF MY WORK!!! There is nothing I love more than the thrill that one careless click and everything I haven’t taken great pains to properly export one slice at a time will vanish. Wow what a rush! As a special bonus I am putting up the exception you threw when I was so idiotic as to try and open a file with the SAME NAME as one already imported! What was I thinking? Clearly not even the most advanced software engineers can work around such an insane twist of quantum logic. I should consider myself lucky that I merely had to restart my computer to get going again. I could have torn the spacetime continuum!

Vector NTI (1000$/year) Now I know you guys have been taking a lot of flack lately. Just because you offered your product for free to academic institutions and then 3 years later abruptly demanded a small fee for all your hard work, you have been accused of treachorous bait and switch tactics. Moreover how could you be called to task for intentionally obfuscating all the files in your database so that, unless we pay you your money there is no way we will be able to access the hundreds of sequences we generate each year. No user could be trusted with such a powerful thing as access to their data! You were saving us from ourselves! And for those of us that can’t afford to lose years worth of work or spend the months it would take to export all of our data as text files and reannotate them, you will continue to save us at 1000$/year.

Windows… you know what you are.

As a student I do not pay these ridiculous support fees, but I see what you are doing and I do not appreciate my lab being fleeced. The time will come when it is MY time to choose what tools I will use and develop. I will not be locked into your software just because their learning curve is not as steep as using open source scripts.  I will not allow my data to be held hostage.  I will always say, “no” to software that separates me from the work I do.  And no, we can’t all be programmers, and people should be supported for developing tools, but limiting consumer choice to protect your shoddy work will only alienate those who would buy your product.