Another Cloudy Day

    Today was supposed to be clear and warm, but sadly, it was not.  Whilst it was warm, it wound up being very patchy and hazy, so I had no clear sunlight to take samples by.  Instead, I brushed up on the IDL programming language (and wrote a quick utility script to process a directory of data files) and began to learn a bit of visual basic to help parse and edit Microsoft office programs.  It all took a while, but it is nice to learn another programming language every once in a while.  I will say one thing: almost every online tutorial for about every language is quite dull and obtuse.  But nonetheless I was able to work through it and get the basics down.  If the weather continues to be disagreeable I've been tasked with parsing and manipulating excel files to create a multi-month simulation data file for modeling a virtual aluminum plant.  Once I get down some more VBA I should be able to parse it straight from excel and put yet another language (partially) under my belt.  In any case, I'll be keeping busy from now on.

Beginning with the SVC

     Today I finally got introduced to what I will be using for the rest of my internship - the SVC spectrometer, a big, projector looking thing.  Apparently RIT is virtually alpha testing this thing so it has a few errors, but from what I heard nothing I could work past.  It's heavy and the neck strap sort of hurts (perhaps I'll include a picture tomorrow), but not too bad.  I was hoping to do a bit more than the introductory work today, but the sky was cloudy and patchy so without consistent lighting there wasn't much I could do to get accurate samples.  It's all very precise.
     I am excited to use it though.  My measurements with it will be much more precise and careful, making sure that nothing gets in the way of accuracy, and for that reason I feel that it could get a bit tedious at times.  Apparently I can't even stand near my sample because light reflecting from my clothes onto the scene and lens could mess it up.  And to get a good spectral curve distribution I'll have to take quite a fair amount of scans for each sample (I heard the '100' figure being tossed around), and I'll have to be very precise in documenting exactly what I'm measuring to a T.  Seeing as I'll be outside, I just hope it doesn't get too hot.
     Overall, however, it seems interesting.  I'm looking forward to it and it will be nice to collect some useful data for my DIRSIG scene.  Hopefully it all goes well.

     Yet another day has gone by and I'm still waiting to be trained on the ASD.  There are still battery issues but hopefully they do get resolved.  So in the spare time I went and helped finish construct the clean-room with Dmitry and my fellow interns.  Last time we got the frame up and just about finished the paneling, so today we worked more on the ceiling, and attaching a few more of the various modules together.  It actually was looking like a room and less like a series of walls by the time I left, with all the fans and lights installed.
     Other than that I just programmed some and thought up some good materials to test when I get around to that (I'll show those once I wind up measuring them).  So I simply continue to wait.

       While I was possibly being trained on the ASD today, the battery problems persisted.  So I wound up doing very little today apart from checking my email, programming, and having a sweet barbecue.  On Monday however I will be doing more work no matter what, so I can actually start doing something again.  In any case, that's about all I have to say for today.

       While I was supposed to be trained on the ASD today, there we're battery issues with it.  So instead I continued to do what I could with what I had.  I set out to test the spectrum of a variety of monitors (I had already gotten an LED screen, but I was looking to get a CRT and LCD screen as well), but ran into a few issues.  Getting an LCD screen was no problem, and wound up being fairly easy.  Getting my hands on a CRT that I could use, however, proved to be a challenge.  I managed to get a CRT, lug it upstairs to my optics lab, and get and adapter cable, but the computer wouldn't handle the DVI to VGA conversion that I need to do.  So I had to scrap it.

       Other than that, after being thrown off the trail a bit, I didn't have much of anything to do.  I read a bit more of Dr. Ientilucci's manuscript, and programmed a bit.  But I really do hope to do some more work tomorrow.

       Today was my last day using the USB650 spectrometer, as I graduate onto the fancy ASD once Nina shows me the ropes.  I did get a few more good samples though.  One easy one was just an LED flashlight, whose spectral curve was fairly predictable (it was my third LED source, just in yet another form), but the cool test I did today was observing a lighter (a simple butane one) under a flame hood in the basement.  With John and Ian's help it went fairly smoothly and I got a solid capture.
       One problem I have realized is that for most sources I can do, if they're outside, I need to do it at night.  Maybe tonight I'll test a source or two, but outside of looking at the sky the light pollution might be just as detrimental to my tests.  Also, it would be a bit of a pain to work at night, especially seeing as that for some sources I would have to travel for, and I can't drive past nine.  Oh well.  I do have a fairly decent compilation of sources already.
       So tomorrow I'll get to use the new spectrometer, and I'll see what happens from there.  Hopefully I start doing a wider variety of measurements, like on materials and the such (today I did do a simple transmission measure on a transparent green folder I have - it actually worked quite well).  I'll see what happens.

July 23rd - Graduate Research Symposium Day

     With my adviser using my spectrometer today for demonstration purposes, I instead stopped taking measurements for a day and instead switched to finishing my other work and attending a series of intriguing graduate research talks over in the Louise Slaughter Hall.  At 10:00 AM I went to "Reverberation Mapping of the Size of the Dusty Tori in Active Galactic Nuclei" as researched by Mr. Vazquez (apologies, for I don't know any first names).  It was an interesting talk, but luckily not too far over my head, and it gave me an interesting insight into the mapping strategies employed by astronomers when basic optical methods just won't cut it.  After that, at 10:30 AM, the other interns and I switched over to "In-site Experimental Investigation of Transient Current Densities and Performance of PEM Fuel Cells", conducted by a Mr. Shah.  Unlike the first talk, this one did go a bit over my head (with it being overly technical, in my opinion), but I managed to get the gist.  Overall it was a discussion of how pressure and temperature fluctuations affected the electrical response of hydrogen fuels cells, as far as I could ascertain.  I also attended "Unified Rendering: A Ray-Tracing Equivalent Recursive Rendering Technique for the GPU Pipeline" by Mr. Tayrien, and interesting but similarly well-presented take on melding the formulas used in ray-tracing and gpu rendering into one algorithm whose variance is dependent only on recursive depth, and at 2:30 I attended "Design of Digital Systems, in Fractal Form, Using the Digital Basic Cell DBC 440" hosted by Mr. Quinones Sanchez, a similarly interesting talk on a modular, homogeneous design of processing units through use of individual logical "cells", without losing functionality.
     Overall they were all pretty interesting.  Outside of that, I just finished up my abstract and title and thought up a general "game plan" for the future, but for the most part everything I need to do is set up.  Hopefully tomorrow, when I get a fancy new spectrometer from Dr. Ientilucci, everything should be able to proceed nicely.