Just a quick pic after a long 24 hours. My sensitivity is increasing, as is the sharpness of the outline of the magnet edge on my skin – the magnet is definitely being pushed on by my body; hopefully it doesn’t get pushed out.

There’s exciting work in the pipeline with some new coatings, so I’m watching eagerly and considering a part 2 if the results are promising!

At work, we’ve been going hard on building some reports while working with a particularly difficult database that ignores more normal forms than it follows. While my coworkers have found this frustrating, I quite enjoy it. Most of the code for previous reports has been handled entirely in PHP, with database queries getting all the relevant (and irrelevant) data, and looping through massive volumes in PHP (O(n^3+)). In my report, I’ve been working to offload all the processing to the SQL server, which has far more power than our web servers. I love solving the web of joins and sub tables. It’s essentially spacial perception – I visualize the tables and keys as blocks in space with specific connectors (the keys). Interestingly, I’ve never been terribly good at spacial perception – my teachers in pre-kindergarten in New Zealand would make me come to school early and do puzzles, which I despised, partly because it was hard, and partly because it took so long to slow down and think about (if you know me, you’re of course _shocked _that I didn’t enjoy a task that I wasn’t good at and forced me to slow down). The practice paid off though, and while I still have to think hard about 3D nets and folding, my 2D visualizations of SQL databases are a fun challenge.

This next week marks the halfway point of my summer job as a developer. It’s also near the five year anniversary of my employment with this company, and I’m starting to realize how unprepared I am for stepping into the job market in a more full way.

I’ve been formulating a mental todo list of tasks I’d like to do over the next year to try and shape up my employable skills (in addition to keeping up my grades, which is priority number one!).

Things keep looking better and better. There’s definitely a lump where the magnet is, and there’s one edge that’s closer to the surface than I’d like, but the skin is giving way to more top layer epidermis. I’m really happy with how it’s going!

This picture is after a day under a bandaid (I usually moisturize twice a day, and put a bandaid on it in the morning), and it can get a little more raw looking and feeling without protection, but generally speaking this is a great indicator of progress.

I’ve been playing with a magnetometer app on my iPhone 5S – it looks like, with my finger against the phone body, I can register ~4 mT (milliteslas), against ~45 µT of background flux. That’s about the strength of a common fridge magnet!

I’d love to get my hands on some more accurate equipment and see what an empirical measurement would be.

It tickles!!

After a few misfires and incorrect orders (my website is not JacksBrian.com), my final dog tag came! I’ll be wearing this at all times to let emergency medical personnel know about what I’ve got.

Seeing a bigger mound of scar tissue forming; definitely been more tender lately. That epidermal tearing continues, which seems weird. I’m still moisturizing twice daily.

It continues to get less tender with pressure. Hoping that the epidermis continues to close and toughen into scar tissue, and not start eroding and rejecting.

I’ve been moisturizing and wearing a bandaid during the day; I noticed some localized ultra tiny blotches on the surface so I’m going to continue moisturizing day and night, but without cover so it can breath and dry out more.

I just got to try an EPOC (made by Emotiv). It’s a 14 lead EEG headset that interfaces with a proprietary software (the model that allows you to access raw EEG data and use the SDK is about $600 more expensive), and allows you to train the system for various things, such as making an object move, rotate, or disappear. There’s also a facial motion system that senses what facial expression you’re making, including eye blinking, and mimics it on screen (it has a 2 axis gyro, so it cheats a little bit, but it’s pretty accurate for the most part).