Alright, so the past couple days I've been working on picking p and s arrival and polarity information to input into a focal mechanism inversion code that Andy has been wrestling with.  Late yesterday we succeeded in producing the first focal mechanism plot, and then soon after 5 more.  There are some minr bugs or kinks in the code that are still being worked on, but it looks like it's nearly ready to go.  After cleaning up the diagrams a bit we'll probably take a closer look at some of them to see what (if anything) can be determined from them.  It will probably also mean checking over my picks again to make sure I didn't do anything stupid ;)

It's been a pretty exciting time overall, but I have to admit that picking S-wave arrivals is a lot harder than P-wave arrivals.  Frequently you'll get a lot more noise from the P-wave coda mixed in with the beginning of the S, making it pretty difficult to tell where the S first starts to come in, especially with emergent arrivals.  Interestingly enough, I find that by unfocusing my eyes I tend to be able to spot patterns more quickly, since I'm looking at the entire waveform "at once."  I make sure afterwards that the pick is as close to the right place as I can get, but the  big picture view has been helpful a couple times in recognizing where an S-wave starts to emerge.  Anyone else here been working with S-wave arrival picking at all?