ah, the comforts of home
Jun. 15th, 2012 01:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaI have, since starting my current job, made an effort to actually work at my office. This is in contrast to having done most of the work for my PhD at home, and most of that in the evenings and at night. Yet, somehow, it seems appropriate that when working a "real job" that comes with a "real paycheck" to make an effort to be in the building and to even try to attend one of the two "fika" gatherings a day in the coffee/tea room (never mind that I don't drink coffee, nor tea containing caffeine--they don't care if it is plain water in my cup). But now we are into summer--mid summer will soon be here, and many of my colleagues are on holiday, and others have notes on their door saying that they are working from home. I will wait and take my holiday after Mid-Summer, when ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lord_kjar takes his, but in the mean time I have decided to revert to student mode and start working from home, with quite pleasing results.
Of course this required a minor re-arrangement of furniture to make it comfortable. I used to have my computer set up at the cheap recliner we bought from a second hand store when I moved in. Sadly, that chair reclines, but doesn't have a built in foot stool. Therefore if one wants to use a computer while sitting in that chair one needs to bend one's legs and put one's feet onto a free-standing foot stool, which creates enough of a lap to hold the computer. The down side to that is that it puts extra pressure on one's sit-bones, and one's but beings to hurt after not so much time working.
This was all well and fine when I was only using a computer at home for leisure time, especially as such a tiny percentage of my life has included leisure time on the computer, but it won't do for work. Therefore we took the monitor arm which holds my spare monitor and attached it to the huge speaker by the couch. So now I sit here, in comfort, kicked back on the good recliner couch, with my work computer in my lap, and a spare monitor at my side.
From this delightful nest I have managed to accomplish a fair bit this week. One important step has been resolving some errors in my data. Back in December, when I was still brand new in this job, they gave me a pile of spreadsheets containing data from lithogeochemical analyses that had been done on samples from what is now my study area. These sheets were organized in a manner which seems to be typical for the mining industry: one containing information about where each drill hole is located (where on the surface it starts, and the angle(s) and directions it goes into the ground, another containing the chemical composition of each sample, and how far along the drill hole the sample comes from, and the third stating what rock type each sample is.
Shortly after I received the data I imported it into Leapfrogto have a look at it in 3D. When I did so the program informed me that it had noticed a number of errors in the data, including instances of samples which started deeper in the hole than they end (which isn't possible). At the time I exported the list of errors and sent them to the database person at the mine office and asked for her help in cleaning it up. She replied promptly saying that it would be difficult, and she couldn't get to it straight away.
This week I decided that since I only have this data in spreadsheets, not as a searchable database, it would be helpful if I put the rock type information into the spreadsheet with the chemical composition--that way I could sort by rock type and graph the composition of samples grouped by rock type. The easiest way I could think of to do this was to insert enough blank rows into the chemical composition spreadsheet to copy over the part of the rock type sheet that included the duplicate information (region, drill hole #, and the start and end position of the sample within the drill hole) as well as the rock type. Then I could sort both sets of data by those duplicate fields and set up new rows to check if cell A1 and A5 contained the same information (and likewise if A1=A6, and so on) to be certain that I was about to insert the rock types into the correct places.
As it turns out doing this actually solved one of my problems, that of samples starting deeper in the hole than they begin. In a number of places in the spreadsheet I discovered instances of where three out of four sets of cells matched, but the fourth did not. In each of those cases it was fairly easy to tell which of the two non matching cells was a typo. For example, one spreadsheet might contain these numbers:
start end
16.2 16.9
28.3 28.9
46.1 46.6
and the other says:
16.2 16.9
82.3 28.9
46.1 46.6
In that case the 82 is clearly a typo. Needless to say, I have now fixed all of those sorts of errors, so next time I take the data into Leapfrog I should have far fewer complaints from the program.
I have also made some progress organizing my rock samples--I now have completed the process of photographing and describing 14 of my thin sections and assigning each to a rock type group. only 56 more to do from the current batch.
This weekend is Spelmansstamman, a large folk music and dance festival.lord_kjar and I will take off work early to head out to Gammalstad to help with set up, then we will head into Luleå to the bus station to pick up our friend who is coming up for the event, then return to Gammalstad for an evening of open dancing to live music. On Saturday morning we will return to Gammalstad to do the performance for our folk dance group and enjoy the other day time festivities before returning to the hall for another evening of dancing for fun.
I think we are busy with more of the festival on Sunday, too, so no fighter practice for me this week. Therefore it is a good thing that I got into armour on Tuesday. One of the fighters who lives near us was heading to Gothenberg for a Metal concert this weekend, so he wasn't going to be able to do Sunday's practice either, so instead we met up on Tuesday after work and got in a good half of hour of practice before he left on Wednesday. He is looking forward tolord_kjar getting his armour together, because that will make three of us with armour within walking distance, and increase the odds of us doing training on extra days during the week.
In other news, I am also making progress on learning to play my hammer dulcimer--I now know four tunes fairly solidly, and am making good progress learning another two. No doubt there is other news that has accumulated since last I typed, but it is after 01:00, and I do need to work in the morning. Luckily I had the sense to do my yoga before sitting back down to type this, so I can go straight to sleep after I crawl out from under the computer...
lord_kjar takes his, but in the mean time I have decided to revert to student mode and start working from home, with quite pleasing results.Of course this required a minor re-arrangement of furniture to make it comfortable. I used to have my computer set up at the cheap recliner we bought from a second hand store when I moved in. Sadly, that chair reclines, but doesn't have a built in foot stool. Therefore if one wants to use a computer while sitting in that chair one needs to bend one's legs and put one's feet onto a free-standing foot stool, which creates enough of a lap to hold the computer. The down side to that is that it puts extra pressure on one's sit-bones, and one's but beings to hurt after not so much time working.
This was all well and fine when I was only using a computer at home for leisure time, especially as such a tiny percentage of my life has included leisure time on the computer, but it won't do for work. Therefore we took the monitor arm which holds my spare monitor and attached it to the huge speaker by the couch. So now I sit here, in comfort, kicked back on the good recliner couch, with my work computer in my lap, and a spare monitor at my side.
From this delightful nest I have managed to accomplish a fair bit this week. One important step has been resolving some errors in my data. Back in December, when I was still brand new in this job, they gave me a pile of spreadsheets containing data from lithogeochemical analyses that had been done on samples from what is now my study area. These sheets were organized in a manner which seems to be typical for the mining industry: one containing information about where each drill hole is located (where on the surface it starts, and the angle(s) and directions it goes into the ground, another containing the chemical composition of each sample, and how far along the drill hole the sample comes from, and the third stating what rock type each sample is.
Shortly after I received the data I imported it into Leapfrogto have a look at it in 3D. When I did so the program informed me that it had noticed a number of errors in the data, including instances of samples which started deeper in the hole than they end (which isn't possible). At the time I exported the list of errors and sent them to the database person at the mine office and asked for her help in cleaning it up. She replied promptly saying that it would be difficult, and she couldn't get to it straight away.
This week I decided that since I only have this data in spreadsheets, not as a searchable database, it would be helpful if I put the rock type information into the spreadsheet with the chemical composition--that way I could sort by rock type and graph the composition of samples grouped by rock type. The easiest way I could think of to do this was to insert enough blank rows into the chemical composition spreadsheet to copy over the part of the rock type sheet that included the duplicate information (region, drill hole #, and the start and end position of the sample within the drill hole) as well as the rock type. Then I could sort both sets of data by those duplicate fields and set up new rows to check if cell A1 and A5 contained the same information (and likewise if A1=A6, and so on) to be certain that I was about to insert the rock types into the correct places.
As it turns out doing this actually solved one of my problems, that of samples starting deeper in the hole than they begin. In a number of places in the spreadsheet I discovered instances of where three out of four sets of cells matched, but the fourth did not. In each of those cases it was fairly easy to tell which of the two non matching cells was a typo. For example, one spreadsheet might contain these numbers:
start end
16.2 16.9
28.3 28.9
46.1 46.6
and the other says:
16.2 16.9
82.3 28.9
46.1 46.6
In that case the 82 is clearly a typo. Needless to say, I have now fixed all of those sorts of errors, so next time I take the data into Leapfrog I should have far fewer complaints from the program.
I have also made some progress organizing my rock samples--I now have completed the process of photographing and describing 14 of my thin sections and assigning each to a rock type group. only 56 more to do from the current batch.
This weekend is Spelmansstamman, a large folk music and dance festival.
lord_kjar and I will take off work early to head out to Gammalstad to help with set up, then we will head into Luleå to the bus station to pick up our friend who is coming up for the event, then return to Gammalstad for an evening of open dancing to live music. On Saturday morning we will return to Gammalstad to do the performance for our folk dance group and enjoy the other day time festivities before returning to the hall for another evening of dancing for fun. I think we are busy with more of the festival on Sunday, too, so no fighter practice for me this week. Therefore it is a good thing that I got into armour on Tuesday. One of the fighters who lives near us was heading to Gothenberg for a Metal concert this weekend, so he wasn't going to be able to do Sunday's practice either, so instead we met up on Tuesday after work and got in a good half of hour of practice before he left on Wednesday. He is looking forward to
lord_kjar getting his armour together, because that will make three of us with armour within walking distance, and increase the odds of us doing training on extra days during the week.In other news, I am also making progress on learning to play my hammer dulcimer--I now know four tunes fairly solidly, and am making good progress learning another two. No doubt there is other news that has accumulated since last I typed, but it is after 01:00, and I do need to work in the morning. Luckily I had the sense to do my yoga before sitting back down to type this, so I can go straight to sleep after I crawl out from under the computer...
