Week 4: Storage, Software, and Seasickness

Here are some pictures from last week's oceanography camp.
 

7/6/10
   Greta and I replaced a pump at SAT 04. SAT 04 hangs 5-7 m off of the end of a pier, and to access the pump you have to pull the frame that holds everything up out of the water. Not really a big deal except that it takes forever. The frame is hooked through a pulley and attached to a crank. Unfortunately, the crank is extremely easy to turn, and thanks to the first law of thermodynamics, that means you have to turn the crank a bunch of times to move the frame a little ways. Oh well.
   After that I started exploring methods for automatically moving data from the glider into google earth.

7/710
    I spent half of the day teaching myself how to write software, which was new to me and extremely fascinating. The other half, Greta and I emptied out the shipping container where lots of instruments, instrument boxes, and other odds and ends are stored. The shipping container has sprung a leak so everthing had to be taken out and the container has to be painted, which I think Greta is doing right now, and I'll go see if she needs help after I'm done writing this.

7/8/10
   Michael, Katie, and I went out on a fishing vessel and deployed the SAT 02 buoy and the glider. It was a lot of fun, and I took a lot of pictures that I'll post next week probably. I got a little seasick again. I didn't throw up which was nice, but I could have been a little better.

7/9/10
  Today, I finished writing my first piece of software. It takes glider coordinates that come in a rather funny format and converts them into straight-forward decimal degrees. I'm not sure if the software will be at all useful for my project but it was very good practice.

That's it for week 5. It was really nice to see what all you other interns are doing. Nothing in my project is something I've done before so I am sometimes envious of those of you who are working in a laboratory setting where I would at leat know something. However, I get to go out on boats and turn cranks for what seems like hours, so I guess it evens out.