Various things...

I'll be writing this rather piecemeal during the several minutes of downtime I get in between running analysis codes in the lab.

I was up late last night writing some important correspondence. So I slept in this morning, until 9:15 or so. Given how early some days (ie, trip to Fermilab) this week have been, sleeping in felt nice. I went for a run in Lower City Park, which I enjoyed. When I got back, I ate a little and then packed up to head down to the lab. I packed my laptop (which I'm writing this on) because I might need to run IDL later and I don't want to be running up and down stairs to the astro computer lab on the 6th floor (our group only has 2 licenses). I wound up taking the speakers from the PC in the lab upstairs and connecting them to my laptop. Now at least I have music, which is a heck of a lot better than the lab noises I'd be listening to otherwise. In our lab, there's a constant, aggravating hum of electronics, and a whirring of vacuum pumps and pumps for coolant for the vacuum pumps. Typical physics lab noises... seriously, if I were a grad student in this or in a similarly noisy lab, I'd seriously consider investing in a set of those Bose noise-cancelling headphones, as expensive as they are. But music is good; periods like this, where I'll be here for a long time, give me the chance to listen to longer pieces, ie Mahler symphonies. I'm trying to get to know Mahler better, anyone have any suggestions?

( Sidewalk book sale )

At the library, I also got a Nero Wolfe mystery. I haven't read a mystery in a very long time, and this may be a pleasant antidote to the denser reading I've been doing lately. At the moment, it's definitely a lot more appealing than the ODE book...

(no subject)

I think I'm only realizing now how much work all this data analysis is going to be.

I just went over to the Java House and fortified myself with a hot chocolate. I can't wait for one set of analyses to be done before starting the next; I'll have to be working on several computers simultaneously. Thank goodness for John's IDL manual; I now need to look at, improve, and run some plotting codes written by my postdoc, who doesn't know IDL very well. Come Monday I have some codes to write, too, once he and I discuss the nature of the problem to be solved and I figure out an algorithm to implement.

The game plan is to work here until 11:00 or at the latest, midnight. Then home to shower and sleep. In the morning, I'll get an early start (7:30 or 8:00 at the latest), grab some more CD's, breakfast somewhere, crunch more data, and break for church and lunch.

I have to finish with the natural phonon data this weekend. That leaves Monday and Tuesday for analyzing the longitudinal and transverse pulses. Tuesday night is my drop-dead time; I then have Wednesday to prepare my final 10 minute presentation, due Thursday to the Sci Comm instructor. There's little stuff, like making a calibration measurement inside the vacuum chamber, and doing some calculations by hand (I already checked my advisor's theory on his new method). Plus we're set to move out of the lab on 6th this week, and into a new one. Oh yeah, eventually I need to prepare a poster, too, if for nothing else the Sigma Xi poster session back at Swat. And then there's the question of the paper for Physical Review E or Physics of Plasmas.

Only two weeks... good grief.

Enough of this. Au travail!

(no subject)

My postdoc's IDL code is, as I feared, a nightmare.

When your IDL programming experience has largely been the result of the influence of one man (John Boccio), you get used to doing things a certain way. I'm not talking about style, but rather algorithms and implementing things in IDL. Figuring out how someone else's code works is always hard, especially when it's not well commented. At the very least, it's helpful to say what the variables are supposed to stand for. At least the code is relatively simple and short; it's not like Chris Cothran's SSX magnetic field codes that went on for pages.

*sigh* Last summer, at the very least, Chris Cothran and I did a much better job of debriefing each other on the structure and use of the computer codes we each wrote, and on the structure of data files. This is what irks me: if I understood what the file structure was supposed to be like, I could probably save myself the headache and just rewrite the code. Part of this is my own fault, for not grilling my postdoc a little bit more on Friday afternoon about the structure of the datafiles and code before he left for the weekend.

Time to sleep. Tomorrow promises to be another long day in the lab.