The Ends, The Means, and What Constitutes Close Enough

Now, when I wrote yesterday's post, when I said "grunt out a lab report" I was under the assumption that all the calculations were done and we would just be compiling the stuff for about an hour. And for a while that's how it started. Then I noticed the axes on the graphs were backwards and the results were off by a factor of... a lot. As it turns out, we had done several calculations wrong and botched a few unit conversions, and it really snowballed from there. We worked from 8 till 1 last night and then the lab closed. So we met again this morning during the break to, again, compile and finish up for an hour. And we found more calculation errors. The net result was a momentary spike to homework crisis level 10, where there's more work to be done than there is time to do it, and corners and classes have to be cut. So, we missed the afternoon classes finishing up. We did finish, though. We think. We might not have done that well. Only one way to find out. As for what went wrong, how it took so long to find it, and why it took so long to deal with it, that will take weeks to come to terms with. To the TA's: Be kind.

Also now finished (tentatively) is the DBF CAD thing. There are a few publication issues to be addressed, but that shouldn't be too hard. Right? So I guess we're back to buisness as usual. Still much to be done.