kareina

That may not sound like much to those of you with "real jobs", but that is counting only actual productive hours, any time I pause to check e-mail or go refill my water bottle, or whatever, I make a note of it. I've been told that while most people are at work 8 (or more) hours a day, they don't actually *work* that many. Considering a few of my days recently have been less than 3.5 hours of work, I'm encouraged to manage so many today. (That brings my average hours a day for the month to 5.03 hours, counting every day in the month, not just week days.) Now, if only that had also translated into lots of new words for the thesis. I ran a couple of tries on calculations for one of my samples, then went to write it up, noticed one detail I hadn't previously noticed, whcih made me want to try a third set of calculations. Alas, the results of the third set aren't really as good as the first couple. I think. I'm also getting somewhat tired (not surprising--I haven't even gone for a walk yet today!), so I'll wait and deal with it in the morning.

However, before I go, I must comment on how much easier today's calculations were than normal. You see, the suite of programs I use for the calculations uses the windows command prompt as the interaction medium. I type in the name of the specific program I need at the moment, hit enter, and it asks a question, I type in a key stroke (or four) in reply, hit enter, it asks the next question, till it has enough answers with which to do the calculations. I long since figured out that I could type in the answers *before* it got to the next question, and have memorized the questions and answers (usually it gives a list of numbered choices, so I just select the number(s) which apply) and have developed a routine wherein I type in the program name, and then, as rapidly as possibly, type in all of the answers it will need. This is all well and fine when I don't make any typoes due to typing so fast. But today that all changed for the better. I opened Word, typed in the program name followed by all of the replies needed for each of the garnet end members. Then, as I did the calculations and plotting up the results, all I needed to do was select the heading of the series I was about to run and paste it into the command prompt. So easy, and no time wasted in typing the list over again due to mistakes. Why didn't I think of this *months* ago?

Note: the thing which prompted me to think of it at all is that mouse clovis_t purchased some time back which has nine different buttons, and the ability to program macros so that when playing a computer game he can hit one button on a mouse to do certain tasks, rather than hit a bunch of different keys. At first I thought "gee, can one program macros for the command prompt?", and then I realized that I didn't need to, a simple copy-paste would be more than sufficent to meet my needs!