Journal - July
Week 5: July 3-10
Weekend: Friday sat around most of the day. Went to a park to run. Then at 8ish decided I should go to Lexington (W&L) for the fourth. Packed really quickly and got on the road. Got to Lex at around 2 am and promptly went to Waffle House with some friends. Lexington late night activities clearly don't change in the summer haha. Saturday morning got up and ran. Then got together with some girls from my sorority family and went to Goshen (a river that's like 30 minutes from Lex and has lots of big rocks that you can sit/lay out on). Found a pretty empty area with good rocks, which was impressive because there were A LOT of cars at most of the pull-offs. Had KFC for lunch at the river. Then came back, watched Harry Potter and had chicken burgers for dinner. Walked over to VMI to watch fireworks. Lexington's fireworks were great! Drove back Sunda and did my last run of the week on a track at a local high school.
Monday: Back to work. It feels like I've been away for a really long time. Probably because we had Friday off and because I was so far away. Working on getting caught up on some things. Generalizng that script from Thursday, etc. We're going to lunch with the lab and another lab today. That'll be fun. Working out this afternoon. Need to decide what I'm going to do.
Tuesday: Started working on a script to run all of our scripts in the right order... Left early to pick the Russells up from the airport. Made dinner (haha yum).
Wednesday: Finished the script from yesterday. Accidentally deleted EVERYTHING in my directory of scripts (darn *s ... oops!). Thank goodness for svn and having a few of the most recent things open at the time!
Thursday: After an svn update needed to fix a few things in the script (because some of the new scripts were called differently) ... just needed to talk to the others and figure out the best way to make things work together. Brainstormed in the afternoon about what to do next. I'm going to generate a comma separated values file to look at some data in excel. Will start on that tomorrow. Played a little ultimate after work.
Friday: Worked on the comma separated values file. It's working, but now I need to do some stuff to organize it differently. Played ultimate again after work. This was probably not ideal - I now have 3 workouts left for 2 days oops!
{back to top}Week 6: July 11-17
Weekend: Did a couple of my runs Saturday morning. Then hung around the house the rest of the day. Surprise visit from Grant this weekend. Sunday afternoon/evening went to run with Grant at Brandywine Creek State Park. Did the 5K course there. According to Grant, Runner's World has called it the toughest course in the Mid-Atlantic. The last two miles were almost totally uphill. Played Trivial Pursuit (the 1981 version I think) after dinner. I am soooooo bad. Haha. Trivia-type stuff is not my cup of tea.
Week: Sara was out of the office this week, and we were mostly working on scripts we started last week and looking at code written last summer that we'll be using and building on. It was pretty complicated code and the week felt sort of unproductive.
{back to top}Week 7: July 18-24
Weekend: Went to Maryland to visit some friends from W&L. Saturday morning made pancakes with all kinds of add-ins - chocolate chips, peanut butter, strawberries, blueberries, bananas ... DELICIOUS! Then we went 'white-water tubing' which was pretty hilarious. We met some W&L alums who were tubing as their bachelor party and were very entertaining. Sunday we hung out at one girl's pool and played bocce ball and ate sno cones. I got a little bit burnt, but it was a great weekend.
Monday-Wednesday: Sara was back this week. She helped us work through the old code and I wrapped up some issues I'd had with my script. On Tuesday I met with Lori and Sara to go over the results of the script I'd been working on and decide where to go from there. That was pretty cool, because we looked at the data that had been produced in different formats and started to speculate and brainstorm about how to use it (we already had some ideas, but now we need to decide how to actually put them into action, and we also came up with a few new ideas). The last few days have been so full and felt so productive that they make it feel like we did even less last week. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing ... I think it's good.
Thursday: I took the day off and drove up to PA to see a friend (my suitemate for the coming year) who was up there for a few days visiting her grandparents. We went to Hershey Park, which is not too far from UD, and had a lot of fun. I was really surprised that it was such a big and fun amusement park (for some reason I didn't expect that ... maybe because I thought the factory was the bigger attraction there). It was great that I was able to get off on pretty short notice, because she's actually from Missouri and it was pretty weird and cool that I got to hang out with her outside of W&L!
Friday: Wrapped up a few things before the weekend. Met with Lori and left a little early. We went over some of the data we've been getting, and next week we'll start to talk about our poster, a paper and how to change files from last year to get the output we want.
{back to top}Week 8: July 25-31
Weekend: The girls I visited in Maryland last weekend came up to Delaware this weekend. We got water ice, took the saltine challenge (6 in a minute ... failed) and ate brunch in our PJs at Buckley's Tavern.
Monday-Thursday: Started deciding how to use some of the data I've produced. Decided that some of our initial insights about how people use web applications are correct (in some of our initial brainstorming sessions, we thought about the factors and ways that input values change/are decided for web applications) so we're going to start using those insights and the data we've produced to create test cases. Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?) I went to see the Baltimore Orioles' baseball game at Camden Yards. Her roommate and her boyfriend and his roommate also came. The Orioles lost. There were two 2-point home runs in the first inning and then nothing until near the end ... after 9 it was still tied but it was getting late so we left. I think it went to 11 innings before the Orioles finally lost. We were moving our lab this week because there's construction in the building we're in. It started to get pretty loud toward the end of the week, and sometimes it was pretty hard to concentrate.
Friday:The actual machines were being moved on Friday. Since the data for the project is spread out over a bunch of machines and they couldn't be networked while they were being moved, we knew we couldn't really get any work done on Friday. Instead of coming to the lab, we went to the Amazing Maize Maze! It took us a couple of hours to get through it, but that was partly because we played around in there for a while ... there was a very slippery slide, a weird rope thing you climbed through, a "man-eating chicken", and lots of silly photo ops. It started to rain as we were getting out, but we still got to pet and hold some baby chicks and a pig!
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