I will continue in the same field of research for my honours year this year, working with hospitalised children in Adelaide.

I finish work on Friday, so mostly just packing up now. Ethics approval finally came through but its a bit late for me. I've had to hand the study on to one of the staff who will run the sessions with the kids and send me the data to analyse back in Australia. Oh well. I've spent the last week playing with the kids and making sure the setup works. They seem to enjoy it!

I haven't had much time for work/study due to spending my work days being paid to carve pumpkin, party and demonstrate my program to lots of different people touring the lab. I did get to go to a talk by the Chief Executive of Novita Children's Services, from Adelaide. It was really weird hearing an Australian accent, and realising that despite meeting him in Toronto, the guy could one day be my boss.

I have a working virtual art program and the art teacher and therapist are both eager to use it but unfortunately I need ethics approval to be able to do a pilot study and collect data, and my supervisor is convinced that collecting data is vital. I guess my next week is going to be filled with writing up all the paperwork for that, followed by a few weeks of chasing up forms from people who need to sign them. Hopefully I can get ethics approval before I leave, otherwise it will all be rather pointless.

So I've made progress. The Kinect is connected and I've written a simple program but I've got a lot of debugging to do before I can add features to it. Kids are back at school now so my job should get more exciting.

We all presented our work on Friday for the new PHD and Masters students who have just arrived. It was great to get more understanding of what others are doing in the lab. Very exciting stuff!

I can't get the Kinect to connect to my PC which makes it hard to program the device but I have created fun stuff using a webcam and c++. How did I end up back in computer programming? I seem to be drawn to the same technology that repels me, locking me in a spinning circle that I can't escape but can't get close enough to grasp a firm understanding of. One day I'll get good at programming or learn to enjoy it or something.

I eventually made it to work via 2 subway trips and a bus ride, just so the people in my office could laugh and show me the quicker route.  My supervisor gave me a brief overview of my project, then left me to my own devices, telling me to meet up with him to show my progress in three weeks. I am evaluating currently available proximity switches, and designing and testing a virtual switch. A bit more boring than I'd hoped but today I took over from one of the summer interns, doing all the data collection for another project, testing a new pen that can analyse signatures. Yay for lots of looking at Matlab graphs. That will be going on for the next two months.

I begin work tomorrow, legally! Thanks Vancouver airport staff for giving me a work permit.

I'll be working in the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital for 5 months. During this time my main project is to design and build a communication system for a child who is unable to talk or control their muscles, then teach the child how to use it. I have no idea how to. I guess with research and professional advice I'll get there.