week eight

august 01 - august 05


Monday, August 01:


A very interesting weekend indeed.  I went to the horse races in Saratoga Springs, NY, which were really fun and exciting, and I didn't end up losing any money, even after the pretzel and ice cream I ate as a victory prize.

Anywho, I came into work today very motivated to create something I could take to Baystate that would change up our approach.  It was a text description of the process that explained what my LittleJIL diagrams had captured.  I talked about this new approach with Rachel, and she seemed concerned that the text description would not hold all the data that a picture could, so we agreed that the best method would be to provide both a picture and its corresponding text description.  We'll test it out for the visit tomorrow.



Tuesday, August 02:

I met with Lori today to review what I'd been doing for the past two weeks, and help to prepare for the Baystate meeting.  She thought it would be a good idea to bring a copy of the glossary of terms I had written to help clarify the process further.  She also suggested planning several short, highly productive meetings on specific areas of the process instead of 2-hour long meetings that cover a lot of steps so that we may delve into detail regarding exceptions and special cases.  We talked about the new approach for communicating with the Medical Professionals, and she agreed that it would be interesting to test this new method.

At the Baystate meeting today, Rachel, Raunak, Dave, and I discussed only the duties of the Triage department with the Medical Professionals.  The Baystaters had the text of the Triage process, but could not see the LittleJIL diagrams that went with it because the room that was scheduled did not have a projector.  This prevented us from doing the picture and text combination, but I think the text worked just fine for them.  Of course, I'll find out how well I interpreted what they said at the next Baystate meeting.

I'm starting to get frustrated with the Chemo process.  I don't think I'll be able to get to a good stopping point, and I don't want data to be lost.  But I trust Rachel, Raunak, and Dave to pick up where I left off, or at least help to orient the next person on the project.



Wednesday, August 03:

  Today I updated my website in the morning before I went to Process Day #3.  The previous two were in July.  I listened to a number of presentations, arguments about syntax in the LittleJIL language, and a whole lot of topics that were over my head.  I guess I don't use LittleJIL to the degree that I could...never have I thought of using static variable bindings or channels to pass parameters.  I just stick to the basics.  After Process Day, I called to request more information from NPS about their civilian program for the Fall of 2006, and they are going to snail-mail me an application in September.  Yey!



Thursday, August 04:

I re-wrote the Chemo diagrams that we worked on in the Baystate meeting from Tuesday.  I've found that hand-drawing them goes at a slower, more primitive pace than working in VisualJIL, and it allows me to think more about what I'm doing instead of getting frustrated with the tools available.  Plus, having it on paper, then recreating the same diagrams in LittleJIL forces me to think more about what I meant in a particular step, as well as the "big picture" of the process.  Ahh, these iterations of process representation!  They aren't driving me nuts, but I still don't know what (if any) the best method of representing/capturing/discussing a process is.
 


Friday, August 05:

!! I CANNOT BELIEVE IT'S AUGUST 5th.  !!
Kate, Leanne, and Stephanie are coming up to visit me today!  I cannot describe how happy I will be to see them.  I've been away from my friends since late May, and I really can't tell them how much I appreciate them with an instant message or a voicemail.  Kate's birthday was a while back, and I didn't even get to celebrate it with her.  These girls are my sisters in every sense of the word.  I'm living with two of them in the fall, and I hope they don't think I'm as messy as my house in Amherst will show.

Anywho, the Medical Safety Meeting this morning lasted for two hours, and it centered on the complications of the Chemotherapy process.  Beth provided the wonderful perspective of a nurse in our discussion, which is incredibly important because us computer-science-folk lose the sense of what's important sometimes--programming language VS a patient's life in your hands.  The meeting went really well because everybody was engaged in conversation and actively participated, adding encouragements and experience from previous medical processes.

And today was my last LASER meeting, since next Friday I'll be in Kentucky for ASK's National Convention, and the following Friday I'll be on my way back to Merryland.