Well, we now officially only have 6 days until the presentation ad 9 days until this internship is over.... and I am Not done with my project. To be honest, I'm very thankful I did not go on the Western Flyer this week (still stinks that the boat is officially gone and on its way to the shop though) because if I had, I would have been in trouble next week.
Starting last night, I had to rerun all of the tests that I had run on Monday and Tuesday because tere's some training library that is messing up the whole system... So I kinda have to start from scratch with the holothurians and find where the problem is... which means running a lot of things....... Really not helpful when I have a presentation in 6 days and a paper that I have to write in there somewhere.... Blah!
But in other news, the plankton data is together. Finding some interesting things in that... But you'll have to wait for the presentation for that one I'm just glad that that is working...

This past weekend at the Aquarium was awesome. Really had a lot of fun and was totally geeking out with the behind the scenes tour... and the mola mola in the open sea tank. Back hurt a little bit afterward but that's the price you pay for fun.

Not looking forward to next week being the last week. we need to slow down time somehow...

Last Confluence?!  Say it isn't so!

This week I have made a ton of headway in my project, which is fantastic news, though there is still much to be done to finish and get my presentation and paper together.  At the same time that I'm feeling much more comfortable with the direction and progress of my project, I am feeling the stress of the time crunch.  Jim and Dorota have been immensely helpful in helping me learn the finer intricacies of programming and Matlab, and they have been available to help in my interpretation of my data.  I finally feel like I have real ownership over my Matlab scripts, and I've been successfully plotting different datasets together and it looks pretty cool.  I now need to decide which datasets to use to tell the story in my project, so the complicated part of the analysis is here.

Meeting the NASA interns was cool, though I wish we could have spent more time meeting with them.  Maybe that tour could be scheduled earlier in the program next year.  It was nice meeting with the Aquarium interns and having dinner when we had a bit more time to socialize earlier in the summer.  Still, it was cool to meet all the different groups that came through this summer.  I am thankful that we have had multiple opportunities to stand on the stage of the PacFo' and talk, however briefly, about ourselves and our projects.  Each time I'm up there I feel a bit more comfortable figuring out how to talk to a large group and not be completely distracted by the view.

Here's to the final 100m sprint of the internship project.  Time to turn it over!

So much to do, so little time. This week I spent all my time almost exclusively on MATLAB, plugging through testing and deployment data. I've accomplished a lot on that front, but still need assistance with some of the deployment data. I'll be going over that with Rob McEwen on Monday. As for the presentation and paper, I'll be coming in tomorrow to continue working on those. Don't have much more than that to report. I wish this internship was longer!!

Diane: PacFo'... abbrev approval.

Aw, the end approaches. I've been busy preparing my presentation and paper all week, though when I start to work on something, it tends to remind me of something else that I have to do! I guess that means there's a lot of information to process and summarize. Oh well, I'm actually enjoying it despite the stress. There haven't been any major crises yet, definitely something to be thankful for. It's also rather nice to be able to step back and look at how everything fits together (or try to figure it out, at least...).

Let's see, what else is there to say... the Aquarium sleepover was a blast last weekend, as far as I know all who went had a wonderful time. And the nice weather earlier this week was also great (I had almost forgotten what sunshine was like!), though it's easier to stay inside and work more without it. I'm hoping there will be at least a bit of nice weather/a bit of time to enjoy the area this weekend as it's our last one here. I can't believe we're leaving so soon, it doesn't seem like we should be finishing up already! Looking forward to seeing everyone's talks next week/finally hearing about what people have been working on all this time

Sleepover was a blast, was also nice to see George doing his education/diving show!
Wrap up the last things at the beginning of the week and started writing my report. Still have data from Facebook to process.
Wednesday I went with Lonny from the video lab to see him give the mystery of the deep show and I really wonder why it doesn't end with a slide "Follow us on Facebook" because at the end of the 15 minutes you have a auditorium full of people excited by MBARI!!
Well as the other interns I cannot believe this is the last week!

Its with great pleasure to report that after two and half weeks of grappling with the COAMPS wind data (almost giving up two or three times) I've finally generated wind rasters in ARCMap that worked!!! This completes all the conversions I set out to accomplish during this internship... SST, Chlorophyll, currents, and wind all executable in ArcMap!! BOOOOOOO YAAAAA! 

 Now its time to run a couple of analyses to demonstrate what can be done with these data and prep like a madman for the presentation and paper. I cant believe this internship is virtually over. There is still much to be done next week and in a very short period of time, but thats what sets true scientists apart. Good luck everyone on finishing up and I look forward to seeing all of your presentations. 

I seem to get the most work done on "off" Fridays...also, I figured out why I was going a bit stir-crazy yesterday. I just needed a good sound track to keep me going! Listening to Enya and Saint-Saens right now.
Geraldine, they advertise Jelly Watch at the end of the Jellies auditorium show, so they should definitely advertise the facebook page at the end of the MoD show

I agree with Sam on the lots-of-work-to-do-still thread...
And thanks, George, for organizing a great BTS tour!

Diane, you can make one more post on Confluence if you would be happy with that. :-p By the way, it is so sad that my MBARI internship is almost coming to an end, but I would gladly face the fact that this is my LAST Confluence update.

This coming week is the last week of my MBARI Summer internship. Now, I am working on my slides and paper report, but also still trying to develop an idea for my project. I've spent too much time to figure out why our model doesn't work the way we think it's supposed to. After 2~3 week investigation, we found some of our data was corrupted (bad tidal frequency), and some part of the code was not able to handle NaNs in an appropriate way. It took so long to figure that out, but now it looks like it works. Hopefully, I can use this algorithm for my next field experiment in 2013! Apart from that, me and my mentors also tried to develop some ideas for evaluating ocean currents prediction in terms of autonomous underwater vehicle navigation. We've already come up with something, but I still don't think this is the right moment to wrap it up. I need more time...

I had a freakout on Thursday when I realized I did not use the right equations for calculating u-v wind components. (I had switched the sines and cosines.) I thought this meant that all my CO2 flux calcuations were wrong and that I needed to remake all my wind vector figures as well. Luckily, this was not the case, as I left out the negative signs as well. My equations were essentially equivalent. Sometimes, stupidity is harmless, when luck is on your side.

On Friday I worked more with the CO2 drawdown models and tested various scenarios at several stations in the bay. I looked at how long it would take the outer bay and offshore waters to decay down to the low pCO2 levels (~200 ppm) seen in the inner bay, where productivity is high. The analysis gave some interesting preliminary results about the fate of the high pCO2 upwelled waters. You will need to see in my presentation...

Today (Sunday) I am putting together my PowerPoint slides after selecting all the figures I want to present on. I hope to finish a rough draft of the slides today and start working on the paper tomorrow. Good luck to everyone on finishing things up, and thank you to George and Linda for taking such good care of us this summer!

Week 9?
You must be kidding!
Oh noooo!

This is not really our last Confluence post, is it? I thought we had one more!
I refuse to say, "Goodbye" to you wonderful people. I just won't do it.

I am feeling a bit nervous as we head into Week 10, as I am way behind schedule, and pushing to catch up! My project has felt very much like a roller coaster ride, with a series of ups-and-downs for the last couple of weeks, and it sounds like this has been true for other interns.

One of the, "ups" of Week 9, was that one of my mentor's researchers, (Julie), submitted an abstract to the upcoming AGU meetings. She charitably put my name on the poster, which was very nice of her. I am so happy to see that Francisco has written an abstract for this conference as well! Does this mean you will be back in December to present your poster? I hope so, as I will be there for at least part of the conference, and would love to see you!

The night at the MBA was so great! It was really cool to see George in action with his kelp forest dive program, and the behind-the-scenes tour was a once-in-a-lifetime look at the MBA!
Thank you so much, George!
I also want to thank Sam for her help organizing this event!

It was great to meet with the NASA/Ames interns, and hear their stories!
I agree with Diane, in that it has been awesome to get practice talking to people in the Pacific Forum (Pac Fo' (:>)).
I will be happy if I do not pass out on the little stage on Wednesday...

I really cannot believe our internship experience will end this Friday! I think that we would have done well with a 15-week internship! Okay, well, 12 is realistic, right?
In any case, ten weeks was just waaaaay too short!

It sounds like everyone is turning the corner into the home stretch with their projects!
I wish you all the best, and I look forward to your presentations!

See you soon!
-Patti

Late again... sorry.

Last week I mostly worked on writing various commands that could be inputted serially (either through HyperTerminal on a PC, or from the CPU board itself) to perform various functions on the LVLS board. Some of these included: setting the threshold for over current, over voltage, and under voltage conditions, turning the relay on and off, and resetting the circuit breakers. I also had to rewrite some code for the digital potentiometers to make them write to non-volatile memory instead of the volatile memory (that way settings are saved even when the device is turned off).

I played around with the serial commands for a while and tried to figure out the logic of how the board would react to various conditions. While playing around, I discovered a problem in the design of the circuitry (not my fault! lol). I fried the potentiometer three separate times trying to figure out what was going on. Apparently when I closed the relay, too much current was flowing back to the potentiometer (something to do with a built in RC time constant that is adjusted by the potentiometer... I'm not a hardware person so bear with me). Chad suggested that until the hardware is fixed (probably not until after I leave) that I just use lower voltages (under 7 volts) and keep that potentiometer's wiper set to full scale to prevent any more mishaps.

Now, I have to finish the very last part – software handling the various conditions. My thought was to enable the I/O expanders interrupt-on-change capability, which generates a pulse to the microcontroller every time one of the OC, OV, or UV pins changes state. Then, an interrupt would be generated on the microcontroller, which would then immediately handle the situation. HOW the situation will be handled remains to be seen, as the logic still has me a bit perplexed. We shall see.

And I'm late again...sorry guys. Well we're in our last week now, I can't believe it! Last week was all about finishing up small tasks that could be done quickly, including adding a map to let people see the boundaries of the different zones annotations are placed in. Once more zones are added, this feature will be very useful to people who don't work here and therefore don't know exactly where our ships go. I've been working on the presentation as well, of course, and today will be about taking screen recordings of the functions of the DSG for the presentation. And doing some work on the paper too. Then tomorrow will be all about practicing for the presentation!

Once again, the ten weeks was too short! I am certainly going to miss everyone here at MBARI a lot, but I'm sure I'll be back to visit!

Well I guess Brandon still has me beat

Last week I finalized the model to be physically tested at NPS. The model was sent out on Thursday to be rapid prototyped, they should have it finished up today and shipped. With any luck it will be here for the Wednesday presentation.  After sending that model out I started going back through the older model versions and generating HD renders for the presentation. At this point I have most of the geometry renders but still have to do the CFD renders. Unfortunately this seems to have surpassed the limits of both my computers. Each orbital render takes about 6hrs assuming the program doesn't crash... Other than that I've been working on my presentation.