A Change of Plans, and of Link

As I found out on Monday, I somehow wiggled my way into a berth the ACO cruise to depart this friday about which I couldn't be more excited.  The length of time floating on the big blue, the hands on nature of much of the work to be done for the observatory, the sheer quantity of new instruments and equipment to be deployed all have me antsy to haul away the anchor and head for Station Aloha. For the next 18 days I will be channeling my enthusiasm and my blogging to that project so you can find details of the cables I get tangled in and quantities of M&M's I consume at the link below:

http://alohaobservatory.blogspot.com/

Donning a Hard Hat Always Means Good Things

A flurry is how the office felt upon returning to it after two weeks away.  I received a message from Craig a few days before saying “things have changed” and that I should plan to work outside on Monday.  This easily could have meant that the Marine Sciences Building had come crashing down and now my desk was located under a tree in the courtyard. In reality, the only thing that came crashing down was the A/C, causing problems accessing overheated and grumpy computers. What most significantly had changed was the schedule and personnel for the HOT and Aloha Cabled Observatory (ACO) cruises. The HOT cruise that had been originally scheduled to embark on Monday had already happened while I was away.  Though I missed that cruise, a vacancy had appeared on the ACO cruise for which I was trying to contain my excitement at filling.  Nothing was certain at 0900 so they told me not to get my hopes up. Trying to reel in my helium balloon of hopes was my challenge for the day.

As my desk was still located in it’s normal corner, working outside meant going to Snug Harbor with Jeffrey to help prepare equipment for the upcoming cruise.  Everyone chuckled a bit when I said that I was excited to go down to the harbor because the glass balls are very heavy, as I soon found out, and things are much dirtier than when tapping away at my computer.  New things are always exciting, however, and no one could convince me otherwise.

I started by wheeling around bicycles with flat tires trying to find a way to inflate them. Then I graduated to helping move around glass balls contained in two firm yellow plastic bowls that strikingly resemble yellow hard hats. With moving these you must be as careful as if decorating the Christmas tree with glass ornaments because no one wants chards of glass everywhere but as firm as if hoisting the weight of the whole tree onto the top of the car.

In the afternoon the spool of 200 m of cable, which will be lower to the bottom of the ocean with eleven temperature sensors attached to it, and I had a fine time rolling around the pier. In order to measure out the positions at which the instruments will be attached to the cable, I was supposed to get the cable as straight as possible. A bit like herding an oversized, uncooperative farm animal back to the barn, the spool needs constant nudging and alteration of course in order to unravel in a straight line. As dirty as a farm animal too, the spool somehow covered my legs in black and brown smudges. Had I only perfected my log rolling skills, this process would have been much easier.

The next day I got to participate in the dirty work again, starting with loading the flatbed truck with several instruments and boxes of supplies.  A forklift loaded the heavier items such as the ‘parking station,’ which is used for ‘parking’ wires as they are waiting to be connected to the observatory but which looks more like Snoopy’s doghouse. The forklift also swung the node, a large orange cylinder that Jeffrey described as a bird perch, Woodstock’s perhaps, onto the flatbed. This seems like a perfectly acceptable answer and the only thing that makes me skeptical is the logo stamped on the side of it is that of the Applied Physics Laboratory, not Petsmart. 

When we arrived in the flatbed at the harbor, I was handed a hard hat, which always means good things. It means I get to load with the rest of them and watch the happenings on the quarterdeck, which is hosting a flurry of activity currently.  Jason, the remotely operated vehicle (ROV), who will descend with the cable to install the instruments, has his innards exposed to have his wires tickled by engineers.  Swinging overhead at the end of the crane are platforms, weights, and other equipment being loaded.  I am slowly meeting all the scientists, engineers and crew involved in this project by bumping into them with boxes I’m carrying or asking them to hold the door for me.

When not loading boxes, I spent a lot of time with Nicholas in the stuffy beige tent trying to figure out how to attach two glass balls together and string a chain across them. After an hour of wrestling the hard hats together with no success, Jeffrey arrived to tell us that we needed to use the retrofitted hard hat covers shaped to fit together. Easy as pie from there. At least we got plenty of exercise lifting various glass balls.

To make this day even better, we filled the flat tires on the bicycles we were wheeling around yesterday with air enabling us to zoom around the parking lot in with alacrity and style.  Need me to grab something from the warehouse, bring it to the tent, skip over from the tent to the blue van, wait no, the PO van, then meet you over to the KM and head back to the tent? No problem.

At the end of the day, I was handed my second power tool for the day to unscrew the boxes in which some of the instruments are stored.  I helped Jeffrey set up these instruments on the observatory and in a tub of water in order to test them tomorrow.  

A Brief, Codeless Intermission

After a busy day on Friday of scampering back and forth between Branden's room and my own trying to find the links that hadn't been updated to the new ADCP plots website and pouring over Matlab Help in an attempt to understand time conversions it feels odd now to be computer codeless. I am on vacation in Kauai this week and next with minimal electronic contact. Perhaps a detox treatment away from typing will bring me back to Matlab with a sudden comprehension of the construction of double axes -- or at least a newfound enthusiasm with which to greet my old friend. In either case, the accounts of my adventures in code will recommence on Monday May 16th, so check back then to learn more Matlab vocab.

World Wide Weblearner

I am an official weblearner. I don’t want to risk calling myself webmaster again for fear that it may induce some sort of error in the html sending me back to the drawing board. For now, I am a weblearner – but I am official. The Shipboard ADCP Plots website is linked to the HOT website now and out for the world to explore.  Please enjoy the Bulging Spry Menu Bar and engaging color scheme for yourself at:

http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/HOT_WOCE/adcpplots/Shipboard.html

Of course, two days ago when I claimed that the html was complete, it was not.  Many vector fields appeared, which wanted entry into the Spry Menu Bar. There were margins to adjust. There was text to be edited. Then there were margins to readjust.  All small things are worth it, though, for the satisfaction of having that html pop up on the World Wide Web in more or less the same format in which I designed it. Naturally, it does not end here. I am sure I will have the opportunity to readjust the margins at some point in the future. For now, I will focus on artistically rendering plots of wire out versus time, and crafting haikus into m-files.

The more I calculate, the more I must recalculate. I spent yesterday and today averaging and re-averaging the wire speed from the Caley crane because each time I made a new calculation, I found a problem with the last calculation.  To start, I calculated the wire speed from the total depth of the cast over the time from start to finish. However, I had neglected to take into account the starting and ending wire out values, which were invariably non-zero. After I recomputed these averages, I realized that the boundaries I set for each cast were inconsistent. All the better though, because each set of equations I concoct make me think more closely about the 68947 rows of numbers.  I have also become increasingly crafty with my use of Matlab, making up functions until one works. Craig ‘Magic Fingers’ came by and remarked at how slow calculations by hand are, which spurred me to ask Matlab to do these calculations for me. Matlab, charmingly, obliged – however, only one column at a time.  For tomorrow, the goal will be to plot CTD data and Caley data in the same figure with dueling scales on the x-axis.

Unix language lesson for today:

‘!!’                   means ‘do what I just asked you to do again, this time with enthusiasm’

Matlab language lesson for today:

‘hold on’          contrary to intuition, does not mean ‘be patient with me, I’m learning,’ rather it means ‘keep this line on the plot while I add another’

‘r’                    means ‘make this line a vibrant color red’

Peace with Dreamweaver, Plotting with Matlab

A peace treaty has been signed with Dreamweaver, for now.  Yesterday, with the spry menu bar back in good health and alignments of boxes, images and text on a short leash, the page was sent out for approval. Approval was granted! All that was left to do was to populate the menu bar with the rest of the available data – a simple task of copy and pasting.   For Craig, this posed some problems because he had to make the rest of the data available for me to link.  Luckily his magic fingers and head banging were up to the task and we now have a completed html with ADCP plots aplenty.

With a functional understanding of the language of Dreamweaver, I turn to Matlab, which I have neglected over the past week.  Today I worked towards verifying the calculations that the Caley crane, which lowers and raises the CTD during casts, makes for wire speed and wire out. Along the way, I am continually learning new functions that expand my repertoire of commands.  I started by calculating the speed of the wire by determining the change in wire out over time.  When plotted, this looks more like a tangled ball on the axis rather than a line because the wire speed is constantly changing over the cast. To smooth out the line I averaged the wire speed over 5-second intervals, and then 60-second intervals to see the pattern more clearly.  I learned of the possibility of plotting more than one line in the same figure, which allowed me to compare my calculated wire speed to the Caley’s calculated wire speed.

From this plot I found the time boundaries of the upcast and downcast.  Within these boundaries I can find the average wire speed when the CTD is going down, when it’s coming up, and for the whole time that it is in the water. What I found, for the first cast at least, is that the downcast is about 25 m/min and the upcast about 16 m/min making the overall speed about 20 m/min.  This shows that the heave compensation is, in fact, working to make the casts faster, but that the average speed of the wire is slower than previously thought – at about 35 m/min.

Computer language lesson for today:

‘cd’            means change directory to a designated folder

‘ls’             means list the contents of the folder

‘cp’            means copy

R2D2 Meets the Autosal

Wednesday, the Autosal and I were mere acquaintances. By Thursday afternoon, we were thick as thieves.  Duplicate water samples needed to be run through the machine to verify the machine’s salinity measurements remained accurate throughout the processing that Cammy completed this week.  I watched Craig run ten or so of these samples trying to memorize every button to press and surface to Kimwipe dry.  The key to getting to know the Autosal, apparently, is the opposite of that of any normal friendship. You must try to be as robotic and void of character in your interactions in order to function properly together. The Autosal determines the salinity of a water sample by running current in four spiral metal probes and measuring the extent to which the water surrounding the probes conducts electricity.  Small bubbles around the spirals, variations in the time the water sits in the cell, rinsing once to many or once too few times or failing to vacuum away all the water from the past sample can affect your results in small ways.  These small effects easily compound to skew your overall patterns.  After watching with strenuous attention to detail, I tried to repeat his robotic routine.  My first few runs were littered with small mistakes – forgetting to flush the water here, forgetting to Kimwipe there. But by my fourth practice run, I was feeling pretty characterless. I stayed true to the routine to the very end – even entering my results into the database, which was powered off and could care less. Just call me R2D2.

The war against Dreamweaver continues.  Naively, I had thought that I had won the war when, 20 minutes before 1700, I came to Craig’s office to show him what I had completed so far.  He did some more clicking of his magic fingers and put my page on the honest to goodness internet. Of course, it would be quite an Easter egg hunt to find the page online without knowing the URL. But that did not inhibit my excitement at being an official webmaster.  ‘Master’ turn out to be a little preemptive. The moment we opened the page, my spry menu disintegrated into a jumble of broken links.  The battle ahead will be to recreate the links and nurse my spry menu bar back to health.

The Battle of the Bulging Spry Bar Menu

Today, I experienced great victories over Dreamweaver. These victories were equaled by moments of head banging (which, against a laptop, you have to be careful with.) Morale is up, however, and the troops are hopeful.  After our win at the Battle of the Bulging Spry Menu Bar, it seems that nothing can keep us down.

The Battle of the Bulging Spry Menu Bar extended over a day and a half, with intermittent fighting. My adversary, the code window, far outnumbered me with brackets and equal signs.  I was only armed with ADCP plot figures, which are not particularly cooperative soldiers in this kind of battle. In fact, they sometimes appear to be fighting for the wrong side when they need to be resized or repositioned. The battleground was the left margin, where I intended to place my vertical menu bar. The code window defended this territory ferociously for unknown reasons. My intention was to layout links to the data in a more compact way to avoid excessive scrolling. The menu bar can only be described as bulging because of the 70 or so HOT cruise tabs to be inserted into and the submenus to be attached to each.  Victory came when an unexpected ally, the div tag, came riding in upon a white horse and divided my page into sections, leaving the left margin open for a menu bar.  Small victories followed in the form of color-schemes and margin adjustments. A battle waits in the next valley over concerning resizing the submenu tabs.