All by myself

Yaaawwwn.

For whatever reason, I decided to pretend to be a good grad student this weekend and have actually come to lab to do research for my advisor. Weird! =) I haven't really been doing too much work for her since summer. The thing is, I have what looks like a reasonable classification map, but I'm plagued by doubts about it and think that I really can't go any further without more training data. So we're waiting for the science guy at the military base to get that to us. Yay for an impasse! It's been convenient, since that's meant that I've gotten to spend most of my time dealing with classes, since I seem always to be taking too many of those. Go figure. Then of course I had to write a couple sections for various reports and was sent to Florida last quarter, and figured that that more than accounted for the time I was supposed to spend working.

Well, the base still hasn't gotten the extra data to us, so why am I working this weekend? Basically, because we had a project meeting last week =P. A much more exhaustive one than usual, actually. And somehow I dedicated myself to atmospherically correcting 5 flightlines that NASA finally sent to us. Well, I said I'd get to at least one in my free time (at which everyone laughed), but I figured I might as well try to go all the way.

Problem is, atmospheric correction takes a god-awful long time. I was in here for 2.5 hours yesterday after ballet, and only managed to get one flightline done. It wouldn't be so bad if you actually knew at any given time how long was left, but apparently that is impossible. The program has a progress bar that says what percentage of the process has been completed, but that cannot be extrapolated to time because it doesn't procede at a constant rate. It seems to slow over the course of the correction, actually. Highly annoying, since based on the first 20%, or even 50% you think you'll be out of there in not too long, yet somehow it takes 3 times longer than you expected. Damnation =). And the last 1% seems to always take at least half as long as the previous 99%. Urgh. That's the stage it's at right now. Somewhere in the middle of the last 1% of the 3rd flightline. Once this one finishes I'm going to get the 4th started and go home (via chinese take-out). I can't start the last one until tomorrow anyway, since JPL hasn't included some of the necessary information (like geographic coordinates) online like they're supposed to. Blaggards. That's ok. I have no desire to stick around here until after 8 anyway. At least I've got the atmospheric correction software figured out now, so that's always a plus.

The good thing about spending so much time in lab this weekend is that it's given me the chance to read the crazy long (150 pages) article my advisor assigned for tomorrow's group study. Oh, by the way, it is in fact meeting tomorrow, despite the fact that the university observes Martin Luther King Day. Oh well. Since UC Davis is bizarre, it's turning Friday into an academic Monday, and since this group study is my only Monday class, I'll basically be getting Friday off instead. Works for me, except I have to go to Bodega Bay all weekend for a class. Sounds great, but don't even get me started on how this is the absolute worst possible weekend for it...

So yeah... All alone in lab, stuck somewhere in the interminable last 1% of an atmospheric correction. Wheeee! Not too much new around here. John's taking his orals on Wednesday, though he keeps threatening to postpone them again. I hope he doesn't! I'm tired of getting even shorter shrift of his time than usual.

Oh yeah, one last thing... Another thing that came out of last week's project meeting (according to the minutes, though I swear it never conspired during the actual meeting) is that I may be giving another talk at a conference. This would be the AVIRIS conference in Pasadena in early April. Apparently it's kind of a scary meeting to speak at since the remote sensing crowd can be brutal... This time the talk is supposed to be about my "research". Hmmmm.... Hopefully I won't have any results by then so it will have to be axed =D. If I'm really lucky, the base guys won't have gotten that training data to us yet =D.

Still stuck at 99%.... grumble grumble grumble.