Horrible Day

Yesterday was aweful! Just nothing seem to go my way... from forgeting my shorts and socks for volleyball to dropping my hot chocolate in the parking lot then setting up for the collect for it to be canceled again and have to pack up. Later in the day I went to a masters thesis where I swear I broke my brain from trying to think so hard to understand. Right before the thesis where I was getting food and a drink at the food table, the soda exploded on me! Towards the end of the day volleyball was cancelled due to rain. At the end of my work day I got pretty much nothing done on my abstract because I was having writers block. Thankfully I had a good end to the day by watching finding nemo with my bff after work.

Numerical Integration is over my head!

Working hard on my abstract because it is due by the end of the week. I hope it will be good enough. Im getting frustrated with numerical integration! Caitlin taught me how to integrate on paper and I understand what I am looking for in the end and sorta what I am integrating but I don't know how to do it in excel. For now I have my abstract to work on and then the poster but I need to talk to Dr. Dube because im just not getting it and it really sucks feeling like im not getting done what I should be.

Oops

I guess I forgot to blog for the past couple days. Being out of the office on wednesday and thursday really sucked but now I am back in my office. The paint looks a lot better and we now have a huge CLEAN white board almost the size of the wall. For some reason today I can't find Caitlin? I looked everywhere on campus she could be but no Caitlin... she is MIA! I have a few things I am working on and im making some progress switching back and forth so I don't get a headache working on one thing too long.

U of R

Todays field trip was interesting... I thought it was better than the last field trip because I better understood what most of the people were talking about. The introduction was more like a college trip introduction. I was sorta waiting for the financial aid slide. lol Three out of the four presentations I was interested in but I think that is because I could understand them. :-) There was a big surprise though...FIRE DRILL!!!...We had to stand in the rain for ten minutes...Fire fighters came in with axes so that was cool. On the bus ride the boys decided to shoot spitballs at us so Naba and I decided that we will retaliate when they least expect it...BEWARE BOYS!

No Office

Not having an office for two days because they are painting is more of a pain then I anticipated. Within less than an hour I had to walk back and forth 3 times because first I had to go to my morning meeting then I realized I needed a network cable to connect to the internet and then I realized I needed my password to connect. I know I will have to walk back later too and I am not looking forward to it. I am sitting on a comfy couch in the engineering lounge so it makes it even harder to get up. Later today we are going out to lunch before our field trip to U of R. After that we have volleyball. Im thinking today I am not going to get a lot done.

Word Unscrambler

I FIGURED IT OUT!!! The letters "IPESNRUHTERIRANP" spell out, "U R HAPPIER INTERNS." Seriously check it... it works :-)

Yesterday wasn't as productive as I would have liked but I wasn't feeling good. I had to learn Matlab because Excel was not capable of what I needed it to do. I am starting to get it but it is a little confusing. I got some graphs done and now I need to put them together and get all the scales right and hope that I do everything right.

Today was busy which is nice but excel is a pain sometimes. The x-axis was decending and I couldnt get it to ascend. I ended up having to manually reverse everything which took awhile. After all that I still am not getting the right graph but hopefully tomorrow I will figure out how to fix it.

Yesterday I worked for a long time on something in excel to find out that it was all totally wrong. At least now I do know what I am supposed to be doing after talking to Dr. Dube. Work is sooooo much more fun when I actually know what I am doing.

First Field Trip

Today we all went to JML Optical Industries. I really didn't understand much of what he was talking about. I was intrigued by two things today though. The first was that some of the machines that they use are from the 1940s which is pretty cool. The second was that they buy about 4x2x1 foot chunks of glass costing about 1200 dollars. I saw the enormous block of glass and just knew what I was going to blog about. :-)

Yesterday I had another quick meeting with Dr. Dube on the progress I have made. We went over the data and charts I put together and found an error so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. I started a little bit of my next project but we will see where that takes me...

Productive Day

Today was awesome because I felt so productive. Dr. Dube gave me two tasks at the meeting on Friday and I finished both of them! First task that I started yesterday was to find all the strong CMEs within the last ten years and today I went through the ones that were of a k value of 8 or 9 and confirmed that they caused geomagnetic storms and auroras. I also had to confirm on multiple sites the days they occured and affected us and the relative times. My second task was to convert a chart given to me into another chart with time vs. # of CMEs instead of speed vs. # of CMEs. I had to find 5000 CMEs from the years 1998 to 2001 on a site and copy and past them into excel. Through excel I manipulated the data to create the new chart. All in all it was a very successful day and I will look forward to more work.

First friday was great! I had my first meeting with my research group. I learned about what everyone else in our group was doing and how it all pieced together. The past couple of days I have been doing mostly research but now I know more about what exactly I am supposed to be doing. I started one task of finding all the strong CMEs between k=7 and k=9. Im excited for next week because I will have more interesting stuff to do, we have a field trip on wednesday, and vollyball. Im very happy with the research group I am in and the people I am working with.

I had a lot of fun working with Caitlyn today. We bonded. :-) Tomorrow I have a group meeting where I will hopefully learn more about what I am going to be doing. I have done a lot of research the past few days that I hope will help me be a little less clueless to whats going on.

Computer troubles

I am very glad to have a PC but the internet was acting up all morning. I also had some trouble with excel but finally figured it out and was proud of myself! By the end of the day I had a desk to myself. Yay! Lunch was also a lot of fun. :-)

First Day

Awesome first day! Wish it wasn't so hot. Also the Mac computers were a pain but I know you get used to them after time.