Work
by Tom
I came into the summer not exactly certain of what I was supposed to be working on over the break. I knew I had an advisor to work for, and I had something of an idea of the focus of the project, but there was no real explanation of what the actual work would be.
So far, there has been some amount of physics, but the majority of my time has been spent coding -- a wonderful development, all thing considered. I worked in web programming all throughout high school and college, writing the back end structure for a handful of projects including a prior version of Port City Community Church's web site, so programming is pretty natural to me. It's also given me a chance to expand my programming comforts a shade to include Python and Fortran 90. I quite like Python as it gives me a great new way to write scripts to run locally, but Fortran is the devil. Why must physicists still use languages invented in the 50's? It makes sense, but it is truly inconvenient.
However, despite the nonsense of Fortran it's been a pretty good summer so far. I've gained a new appreciation for OS X (as if I needed one), mainly because it gives me a great UNIX platform. Half of my job is writing Fortran, the other half is working in command line, so I get all the goodness of UNIX with a UI that doesn't suck. Some of my fellow students are stuck on these awful department-controlled Linux boxes which are truly terrible, and I am grateful to have a laptop I control that can do everything I need to do and more.
