Twenty Fourth Day

Well today I differentiated the various image making programs to meet the requirments of the different types of galaxies. The galaxies have visual images from a number of different sources that causes a nightmare in the programing. I finished most of the code for this project after Mark made a visit to the insight lab and helped me work through some of the mistakes in the program. By the end of the day I had about half of the galaxies finished.

Twenty Third Day

Once again, I was working on debugging this image making program for Mark. I am making progress, but very slowly as there are around 70 galaxies that I am processing into final images. Bryan, an undergrad in the Insight Lab, started his marshmallow challenge. He must eat nothing but marshmallow's for the next 5 days while we all get to eat food around him. This may be fun.

Twenty First Day

In the morning I fixed the scaling issues that were noticed yesterday. After coffee, I went to crossroads for lunch so I could make it back to Building 76 for the PhD defense at 1pm. The defense was ineresting during the parts I actually understood or had a general idea of what was going on. It was very technical and the language was pedantic, making it difficult for anyone not working in the field to understand. After the defense I finished fixing most of the images and emailed Mark for further instructions. He gace me a list of things to do, including updating my wiki and setting permissions. That took me to the 5 o'clock meeting.

Twenty First Day

Today was similar to yesterday as I continued to work on the program. I got the program to produce decent images by the 3:30 meeting. While at the 3:30 meeting, the fire alarm went off and with that so did Dr. O'Dea. I started to work on adjusting the settings of the individual pictures inside the images until the day was over.

Twentieth Day

Start of another week. I cannot believe this job is in it's second half already. Today was undulating between frustration and happieness as I worked on my program for Mark. In previous jobs, when something went wrong, a solution was always evident. This work I am doing now is different as there are a lot of ways to program something to operate in a way that seems right, but it isnt. I worked all day thinking my method was correct to find out at the end of the day, it wasnt.

Nineteenth Day

On this Friday of the fourth week here, I coded a majority of the "image maker" program for Mark. I worked most of the day reworking an old program that performed a similar task with very little success. As I was to leave early, I stopped working on the code when I hit a huge stand still and decided to download DSS images for those galaxies that lacked them. That task took me to about 3:30 when I decided to leave as my family had family coming into town and I have a habit of nearly going over hours each week.

Eighteenth Day

I had to download new Radio Images of the galaxies, this time from a different server then before. These ones were of much higher definition and showed greater detail of the radio lobes, center and even, in some, the jet. Later on in the day I started on the program but did not get close to finish. I left about an hour early - 4:30 - so I wouldnt go over 80 hours in the past two weeks.