Today I have my brain split. P., with whom I am to work on the semiconductors project, starts work today. This week, we are supposed to learn how to use the HPLC, whatever gas chromatography equipment is reserved for our use, get our lab area set up in general (we have to keep completely separate glassware, for instance), and set up our lamps for running experiments with the photocatalyst. But I’m not done with the Antartica project yet. Jenn, and I may very well be running a decidedly large experiment this week, doing a photobleaching experiment in triplicate, then basically running three sets of analysis on the samples we draw…

Yeah, so, I don’t have a car. And I’m living off-campus. This, of course, presents problems as soon as my schedule deviates from Jenn’s, and there are few things more annoying than a mooch. First there’s the everyday mooching a ride off Jenn to get to work. This isn’t so bad in terms of convenience since we live together, but we aren’t exactly splitting wear-and-tear on cars between mine and hers. The best I can do is give her gas money and follow her schedule as much as I can. Bumminess #1. And then, Wednesday was social night for the girls at work, but I had a lot of work…

Since active coding (other than basic fix-er-ups) is on hiatus while Dr. M and our Regressions Guy (it’s funny when you go to a school so small that there’s a single person in the Math Dept. that is an expert on regression analysis) attempt to isolate a method to estimate the error with the model we’re using, I’m hitting the documentation hella hard until a solution is reached. I want it to be as near iron-clad as I can get it. I’m at something of an impasse, however–how do people write documentation systems? Obviously, I can create a user’s guide and a developer’s guide in HTML (or maybe using a…

I remembered yesterday why I want to be a computer scientist. It seems bad to me that I, known for (among other things) my intense focus and determination, lost my way for two years. I didn’t do a bit of real programming, no design, no new languages, nothing other than idly tweaking others’ programs to make them work on my system or on my website. After the hair-raising C++ project of junior year, I wanted nothing to do with conventional programming. Never would I sit and peck at a keyboard eight hours a day hacking on some big system, trying to implement new features or fix old ones. Who was…

Yeah, so, I’m at work on a Saturday. Which is quite alright, because this means I have Internet, and can catch up on my site/news reading. Oh, and maybe publish a book review or two, since I finished The Once and Future King a week ago and the first Harry Potter book last night. I’m also a significant chunk into DeLillo’s Underworld and the second Harry Potter book. Looks like this is going to be a moderately decent summer in terms of book reading. Dr. M returned on Thursday and gave us real work to do. I’ve been analyzing the organic carbon and nitrogen content of several samples Jenn used…