Penn State Week

I got here on Monday afternoon and was immediately wisked from the airport to the labs for a 3 minute introduction to everyone and everything before Paul (a.k.a. Dr. Weiss, the ride-giver and lab-leader-boss-man) disappeared never to be seen again. So I piddled around for a while, generally getting in people's ways and asking a bunch of questions about their STM setups, electronics, and software - all very interesting for an STM geek like myself. My next main goal consisted of altering some Matlab programs to work for my specific file formats - much harder and more time consuming than it sounds, let me assure you. I only today succeeded in the first project that I started Monday afternoon, and only shortly before that realized that it didn't do everything that I originally thought. Now part two of my Matlab goals looms much more ominously before me, since I understand it to be significantly more difficult and complex than the first. Also, to call part one a complete success, I have to create added functionality to an already complex system. Of course there are the requisite bugs that are a part of any programming endeavor, but mine are small, like the simple typo that killed most of today's progress. I have to say, though - at least I'm finally learning Matlab.

The visit as a whole is slightly better than mediocre, I'd say. Aside from dinner with some people on Monday, and brief lunches yesterday and today, it doesn't seem anyone's too anxious to be social. I suppose I understand since they probably get a lot of research visitors - they have someone coming next week as well - but even leaving lab at 6:30 leaves too much day left with nothing to do. I'm not a big fan of eating and going to bars by myself, but I suppose I could make the effort to meet random people. I'm guessing that by tomorrow night I'll be bored enough to actually do it. We'll see.