ARGH!!! *throws monitor out of window*. Well, fantasizing about it gives same amount of satisfaction, but not having to deal with after effects. I am sure UofM would be less than cooperative about it, since they are most of the time anyways. (no, I'd never throw my little donated monitor away)
Reason to my mild amount of frustration is that I am trying to create an image out of radio data. This is probably a very simple process, if you have done it before. It's the first time for me though. The more I work on it, the more I learn, so that is good. Problem is that all the extra knowledge is still not enough for making it work. Perhaps I'm running out of patience after having worked on it continously (well, almost) for 8 hours so far today. Which is really nothing, so I don't think I'm entitled to complaining just yet.
Tomorrow I'm going to a banquet. Free food is nice.
But, the reason to why I started writing is this: Tomorrow is Thursday. Thursday is day of meeting with advisor. I cannot believe it's already been a week since my last meeting, for which I felt exactly the same as I do now (what have I been working on? where are my results? WHY are there no results? did I get abducted by a UFO without noticing it? Gaaaah, I'll not be able to get out of there alive! Please let me get abducted by a UFO!) And this despite the fact that my advisor is one of the kindest and awesomest advisors one could probably have. I guess, when you're in the middle of something, it's hard to have results ready. This is what I really don't like about being a grad student though - almost always having this feeling of being chased, never accomplishing anything worthwhile. The few occasions when you do accomplish something are heavenly. But could they not come more often?
So, I guess this rant indicates I'm not having a good research day today. next time I write, I intend it to be a VERY good research day. Everything else is quite good though. Weather is awesome, getting paid on friday (YES!!!), wonderful people around me everywhere, birds at home, life could only be better if work gave more results. Yesterday was the first TA-session of the year, which was totally awesome. My little students learnt how to classify stars by looking at their spectra.
Well, I guess step 1 would be to stop ranting here and go back to Miriad (the reduction software) and its tasks. By the end of this day, I want to be able to see a GALAXY from my data and not just concentric rings in every direction. Grmbl.
3 comments:
I'm glad I'm not the only grad student who has that constantly being chased by my own research feeling. Actually, I think I had this terrible dream once where supernova remnants and molecular clouds were literally chasing me around the observatory.
For me, the thing that makes radio so much better than optical (i'm not biased or anything) is when you finally do pull out an image it's a kind of black magic that you've mastered. No one else will have a clue how you did it unless they've been indoctrinated by fire (eg. miriad, aips, aips++) too. I'm sure you'll pull out a great image eventually. Post a picture when you do (or, i dunno, clean components if you need to keep your images under wraps)!
come on Theresa, learn to love that dirty image :)
I too would like to see the 'final' cleaned image (is there ever REALLY a final clean image?
Software is evil, but don't give up! Good luck with the image processing.
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