1st Week - Learning

Well, my first week here at CMOP was pretty eventful. Before coming here I didn't really know a whole lot but this week, I really learned about the big picture - the CMOP projects that are going on and what scientific questions we are trying to answer. On Thursday I took a trip down to Newport to see the boat that collects data on cruises - this really helped me grasp the importance of the project that my mentors and I are working on. I met a lot of different people and saw many of the scientific instruments that we use to gather data. It's interesting because it made me realize that the whole process is so complex, and the stuff that I work on is really a tiny, miniscule portion of the big picture.

The rest of the days this week were spent installing software and learning the basics of HTML and PHP. I made my first HTML page which I think looks pretty nice although the buttons don't work. I also created a PHP script that does a variety of little random things - it can look inside any directory and identify and output which files are images, and it also incorporates my HTML page. On the page I added a little input box so that the script can work on any directory that the user submits. I can't figure out how to upload the HTML page itself so I am just going to upload the code used. Same with php script.

All in all an interesting first week. I look forward to learning more about HTML, PHP and SQL because those seem like generally very useful things that I could use in the future.