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Guess I still have this journal, which nobody ever reads.
Of course, neither do I, so it's not a big deal.

one more day before the storm
and the barricade of freedom

what a great song. just be positive for 2 hours and i'm done.

it's done. i think. i guess regina might have more revisions. but it's not going to change much more.

scheduling a defense is a pain in the ass. especially when people give you conflicting information about when they're free and not free. and considering it's largely a formality, it's even more annoying.

i am convinced the faculty pass e-mails among each other, saying "OK, now you tell him you're busy on Tuesday. That'll really make him squirm! ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Bastards. There goes my trip to Niagara Falls.

I appear to be capable of 2 hours of actual work a day.

Read "HP & the Order of the Phoenix" last night. Worst. Harry Potter. Ever. Well, a little better than Chamber of Secrets - but not much better. 850 pages to learn Harry has to kill Voldemort, or Voldemort will kill Harry. Wow. Never saw that coming.

So I'm using these 2 programs (GREG & DDASAC) to fit some experimental data I have to a very simple model. These two programs have been worked on by a professor (the "S" from "BSL" for any chemical engineering geeks out there) and a number of his students for roughly 15 years . You'd think they'd work well by this point.

My model has 2 parameters, and is basically a sigmoid curve. The program is supposed to give me the values of these 2 parameters as well as a 95% confidence interval (using some statistical methods, I imagine) in which these parameters could fall. All I have to do is feed it my data, and an initial guess for the values of the parameters.

If I enter an initial guess of "20,000" for one of the parameters, and feed it my data, the solver tells me the "best possible fit" of that parameter is 28,000, plus or minues 9,000 (to give me the 95% confidence band). If I enter an initial guess of "40,000" for the parameter, and give it the exact same data, it tells me the best possible fit is now 46,000, plus or minus 40 (again, for that 95% confidence band).

I'm 95% confident that the numbers I'm getting out of this program are bullshit.

while it seems kind of smarmy, i wish i wasn't having success with research now, when I'm trying to finish. it would have been much more preferable to have had this, oh, two or three years ago when I really cared.

i keep changing my mind on bookmark integration. go with the total itunes ripoff, just integrate what i have, something else entirely - impossible to say. impossible to work on either with frickin' experiments to run.