aaand, We're Back

I'm back from my vacation to Minnesota and ready to grind out some more posts to educate the filthy, teeming swarms of graduate students seeking to find out everything they can about neuroimaging, and also to get my paper up.

Speaking of which, you may notice that there are now advertisements on the sidebar and at the bottom of the blog. This wasn't a hijack by Google, but something I decided to implement, given a growing readership base and the increased production of educational tools and videos. For example, all of the FSL videos were recorded using a trial version of Camtasia 2, which I plan to buy; to help defray the costs, every once in a while drop a mouseclick on the customized ads which use highly sensitive personal information encoded on your web browser's cookies to scream at you that there is a babe stampede of Christian/Atheist/Buddhist singles available in your zip code ready to hook up right the hell now. Every little bit helps.

Also, I'd like to extend a big thank all of you who have posted comments on the videos asking more in-depth questions about different parts of modeling and the processing stream. It's good to see people getting involved and challenging me to answer questions I haven't thought of before; even better will be to get other viewers to share their knowledge and answer questions as well. This is all part of my vision to make the learning part of neuroimaging more interactive, more fun, and more dynamic in response to questions as they pop up. The existing message boards for the top three packages (SPM, FSL, and AFNI) are great tools to use, and I hope to complement them with screencasts which address questions as they come up, and to show, step by step, how to approach problems and how to learn the basics. I realize that there are only a handful of views on the tutorials so far, but I hope that they have been helpful, and that I haven't spread too much misleading information.

As mentioned previously, within the next couple of weeks I hope to create a small series of Unix and programming tutorials aimed at getting the beginning neuroimager off his feet and able to use the FSL and AFNI tools with confidence and elan. The ultimate goal being, of course, to get to the level where you can impress all those ripe hunnies in the lab with your technical know-how and insightful critical thinking skills. (That's the reason anybody does this, right?)