Hopefully someone catches the reference in the title of this post, even although it could probably reference a number of things.  Hmm, maybe it'll help if I tell you that it seems like I'm running down a long canyon, with my goal at the far end, and I've got one shot to get it right.  Props go to the first person who correctly identifies the reference!

Anyway, I have a little over a week left here at my internship, sadly enough.  I won't lie and say that I'm not looking forward to being back at school this fall, but this internship has been great in so many ways...it kind of stinks that it'll be over quite so soon.  Ah well, that's the way these things go isn't it?

So for the past week or so I've been working on ironing out various scripts and codes that do various functions for us in examining events.  Let's see, in order of difficulty to get working properly:

sort_meca - fairly easy little script to write in the end once I got some help with the "cat" function, this just lists all the events in a directory, numbers them based on order and organizes them so that my other scripts can read it in without too much difficulty.  Definitely a critical part of the whole, however. 

Meca_plot - takes the picked best focal mechanism solution for the events in the directory and plots them all onto the map of the array area.

PT_plot - plots the P and T axes onto the grid, similar to Meca_plot, but only with axes (and creates two separate maps, one with P, one with T)

Skel_meca - for some reason this one gave me the most trouble.  Based on a similar script that Andy had put together, and stuff from some of the original coding I pieced this beast together to provide "skeleton" mechanisms.  Most of mine so far have been color based, with station names and all that jazz.  This one is the bare bones (yeah...hence the cheesy skeleton name I gave it).  Anyway, this plots crosses and open circles for compression/dilational stations respectively, and filled/unfilled triangles for the P and T axes.  On top of that it adds in the best picked focal mechanism solution, and the entire thing is humongous (well, 7 inches...but that's a pretty big focal mechanism plot).  I had so many issues getting this one to work that I was tempted to go skipping down the hall this morning when it finally worked right.

In addition there are four other scripts that need to be run that were mostly cleaned up by Andy (the code for these is seriously intensive, so thank gosh he knew how to do it!):

focprep - exactly as it sounds, this takes the information from my picks and what-not and compiles them into a variety of files that are read by the various scripts later to make out cool plots.

focrun - the "next step" this creates most of the focal mechanism files, finds best-fit solutions, etc.

focplot - this was entirely written by Andy, and it's where we started getting larger focal mechanism plots for easier visibility (for stuff like re-examining particular picks, or just getting a better sense of how things were falling).

focqc - quality control, woohoo!  This script allows me to go through and choose the "best" solution (usually I try to pick the one closest to the average) for a given event, which is used by many of my scripts later.

Oh...and one other scripts without which everything goes haywire:

grab_2hdrs - yeah, another one of my cheesy names, but oh well.  I wrote this script to grab information out of the SAC headers, the only issue being that I needed information from two separate file headers...and needed them input into the same file.  It was actually an interesting script to write, since it allowed me to work in some loops and stuff that I hadn't really understoof the purpose for before.

So...now that basically all of this coding is done (whew..thank goodness...it's certainly taken a while!) I'm back to combing through events and picks, looking for the good ones.  So far I've got 15 very nice looking events, and I'm hoping to get another 5 before AGU.  One of the really neat things is that the entire catalog has about 125 events or so...and looking at some of the ones I've already used it seems quite possible to get maybe even 100 of those events picked and up to snuff.  Now...I don't think it'll be ready for AGU but it'll be a fun project to work on during the school year (if I can get access to the servers, etc.  but that's hopefully in the works soon).  I have to admit it's really exciting to see things coming together, especially as we compare the focal mechanisms we're seeing from our data to that in published papers that discuss magmatic action since they look similar to ours.  I'll be crossing my fingers, but it looks like we may have some neat conclusions at the end of this :)