Week 4

June 28th, 2010

Well, last week was a good week.  I have pretty much all the code done that I need to write and I am able to pull data in and start working with it.  And I was excited when I was able to implement some of the things I learned in one of my numerical analysis class.  As of last Tuesday I had all the code written and when I ran the code, it took about 400 secs to analysis 100 secs worth of data, so as you can see, it would take along time to go through 14 months of data (or however much we have right not).  So I spent the next two days rewriting the code, hoping that I would make it more efficient and my efforts seemed to pay off, but I brought the computation time way down.  So this week I will be working on the data.  Chuck wrote a program that makes synthetic data so what I will be doing is creating a bunch of waves, superposition them and run that synthetic data through my code to see what those parameters would produce.  I then have a good idea of what I should see and then I can go through the data to see if that is what actually happens.  My goal is to get through at least a month or two of data this week.  

I also had my first field day on Friday.  Three of the 19 monitors in our array were flooded so we went out there and replaced the data acquisition equipment and had to raise the action packer boxes so they wouldn't flood again.  The array is about 2.5 hours away on a soy bean field and it only took us about 1.5 hours to change everything.  So we spent more time driving than we did actually working, but that is okay, it was pretty hot and I was done after almost 2 hours outside.  We than went and had lunch and I had catfish for the first time, and it was amazing.  I love the food here and I will miss the food and the people when this is over. 

As for the world cup, I apologize, I haven't really been following along.  It seems that everyone else in the world is, but my wife and I are not.  I hope you all can forgive me considering I have nothing to contribute about the world cup on the blog nor on facebook.  I usually go have lunch with my wife and go sightseeing and go out to dinner with her and the little one in the evenings.  Again, I apologize for my lack of enthusiasm.  Good luck all and see you in December.