I really need to get my act together with this blog. I have been chased down with guilt over the last week or so and haven't written much because of that. Just the usual - at the end of the day I don't feel like I have done much and I don't feel like writing. This is a really bad condition and I need to work on it because it propagates to the day after and then the day after and so on. This state is in large part due to personal problems that I have been having a difficult time dealing with - people whose mentoring I have greatly enjoyed leaving the department as well as trying to sever a relationship with a colleague leaving me less than motivated and concentrated. Both will probably get their separate posts in the future when the issues are not so emotionally charged in my mind. Now back to business. Last week I wrote a draft of the data reduction and analysis sections of the paper I am working on. The goal is to have the paper in a solid draft format by the end of the month. Goals are good and motivating but I haven't managed to get my adviser on board of this one and it's a little disconcerting about her lack of plan and sense of time.

I am still working on figuring out the systematics in the data for my thesis (I should probably describe my project one day too...). After the data reduction and analysis this is certainly the next biggie. And because we will be looking for low velocity dispersion systems we want to hammer the systematics of our redshift measurements down to minimum. So half of the data looks fabulous. But the rest is just sketchy, with varying errors. I am thorn between trying to figure out what is the ultimate source of these errors and just hardwiring a correction. For now I think we are going with the latter, but it is still a huge effort and requires many, many CPU hours. I need to upgrade my computer!

Finally, I am trying (desperately) to finish the analysis of my data. There are still a few bits and pieces here and there and it is driving me crazy! I did a huge data analysis effort earlier in the summer but then I ran out of steam and got brain-dead and stopped. That was bad, I should have just knuckled up and finished it. It's getting close...

All righty, until tomorrow!