Fried Rice and the Magic School Bus

Today I don’t really feel like blogging (but don’t worry, I still will).

This was our half work-day and half day-off, so we spent from about 8am to noon working in our groups on our various common products. Cole and I had already finished most of the data processing, but we wanted to get a head start preparing the presentation and find a way to link the photos we’ve been taking to the points on the map. Constructing some semblance of a powerpoint only took a couple of hours, so with the extra time we began to experiment with adding hyperlinks to the attribute table in ArcMap. Our stab at using an in-computer path failed, and we realized that it would require everyone who wanted to see the photos to copy them to the exact same location on their computer. Instead, we decided we would upload the pictures to the internet and use URLs, so that everyone would be able to see them regardless of computer. That presented a new issue of where to put the photos online. With Facebook and Instagram naturally out of the question, we thought maybe we could try making a series of blog posts with the photos embedded so that each would have a unique URL. In fear of overloading the REU blog, though, we used a new, empty blog on my wordpress account. The results were beautifully effective, and hopefully will prove useful for anyone looking to view them.

The second half of the day was our half day off, so we went as a group to a beach and small town on the North Shore of Oahu. Most of the group went into town to eat and hang out, but a few of us made straight for the beach, not sure of how much time we would have. It turned out to be a good decision after we found out that, because of unfortunate car arrangements, two people would be forced to leave at 5, several hours before the rest of the group. Unfortunately, because Shelby and I had ridden over in the car going home early and hadn’t made arrangements to move to the other cars early enough, and because no one else wanted to go back, we ended up having no choice but to leave early. I’m not going to lie and say that we were thrilled about it, especially when it turned out the others were not leaving immediately after us, but hours later after watching the sunset and grabbing dinner. We still tried to make the best of it though, and made a pretty decent dinner ourselves of vegetable fried rice from whatever we could find and ate it while watching the Magic School Bus and White Collar. If nothing else, it was some good bonding time, and we already have plans to somehow make up for what we missed. We also prepared orange/guava juice popsicles to freeze overnight, which we plan on enjoying tomorrow while everyone else looks on in jealousy.

The final result then, is that I’m not in a great blogging mood right now, but it’s done, which means it’s time for bed. Goodnight!