Good/Bad, Part 1
Apr 24th 2004WallabyGeneral & heart & nerd alert
Good: Rough draft of my abstract for FACSS is done.
Bad: End of the semester, Cathy’s leaving. Not that I really saw a lot of her this semester; the whole maybe-we-could’ve-been-more-than-friends-if-only-I’d-asked-her-sooner-but-now-she’s-leaving-so-no bit sort of got in the way of things. Plus, for reasons I’m still not clear on, the lunchtime Bible study group in the department sort of just stopped meeting, which was about my only other regular excuse for running into her.
Good: Got the first half of the data-analysis speedup macros done, at last. I’d been getting stuck before because, I think, I was trying to treat it too generally, with pattern matching across rows and finding specific text to indicate which data to grab. Now it just relies on the proper data being in specific cells and grabbing out whatever’s there… much less flexible, but (1) it works now and (2) it’s not likely the format for the data files is going to change anyway. Still need to get it to graph everything the right way and do the cross correlations. And then figure out how to get the peak fitting done automagically as well, although that’s a lot to ask without a much higher signal-to-noise ratio.
Bad: All of the above is *still* in Excel/VBA. Which is *still* one of the ickiest environments I’ve tried, with just enough random cool bits thrown in to make me wish I liked the rest of it.
Good: My sister’s graduating next week (woo!) and I’m going down Tuesday to see.
Bad: How can there be a bad for this? 
Good: Probably found a good roommate for next year. Nice to find someone I know isn’t going to cause more problems than he’s worth, and I promised not to steal his car keys .
Bad: We still need to find an apartment, although there’s some good possibilities lined up.
Good: It’s spring!
Bad: It’s nearly May 2004, with ~19 months to finish a degree.