Journals

This here is an attempt at keeping a journal during the summer 2004. Hope, you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed making it. For less serious stuff and more fun, check out the fun stuff section.

May 2nd - 8th	I got acquaint with Mirela, Holger, and other people at the Beta lab. We outlined the project and its main goals, threw around some ideas and figured out the priorities. I did some reading and researching on the topic bioinformatics, and in particular RNA and what people are doing with it.
May 9th - 15th	We dag out some of the code which we inherited from other people previously working in the area. Once we have familiarized ourselves with the code, we started to make decisions on what code we would like to keep and augment (and in what way), and what code will have to remain on the back shelf.
May 16th - 22nd	The fun has begun, we decided to look at MIS. It took us a couple of days just to comprehend the material and then the implementation took place.
May 23rd - 29th	For most Dynamic Programs backtracking is a trivial thing, however, this MIS business was taking forever! And then the horrible bug ironing process followed.
May 30th - June 5th	I started to re-familiarizing myself with the analyser code. We decided to go with the Baharak's approach to the problem. But be ware the algorithm as well as the implementation are pretty darn tricky! I bugged poor Baharak for a while about each little thing I didn't quite understand. Thankfully, she is a very nice girl and didn't do anything bad in return.
June 6th - 12th	I was on fire! The analyser needed to be done and more or less bug free BEFORE I left for Caltech, but all was not as easy as it seemed.
June 13th - 19th	Left the Beta lab and the analyser alone. People were pretty happy with the end result. Now, my little "break" has begun... the Caltech summer school was an intellectual boot camp! But it was all worth it. During this week, I got to know the campus pretty well (some people claimed you could get lost there, but definatly not after you've been accustom to running around the UBC campus) the people there were nice and friendly, which couldn't be said about the weather! It was just as warm as in Vancouver, I swear! And I thought I'd do some suntanning there. Not that I had time though anyway.
June 20th - 26th	If I thought that this Caltech summer school was going to be a breeze, I was mistaken! (Although of course, yours truelly didn't think that at all) It was as tough as nail! And so was I So, we had to do a project... and find parters. I found pretty cool people to pair up with Steph, Blair, Wojteck, Mike and me decided to work on something we called "Branching in DNA Computing" (check out my about me section, there I tell you a bit more about these people and about the topic of our project.
June 27th - July 3rd	During this week we tried to work and do more of the never-ending assigned readings. At night we were mistaken for vampires (with pale skin and dark circles under our eyes, all from studying! not because we needed fresh blood ) when we were trying to go out and have fun! And of course, we had loads of it. We went out to movies, restaurants, malls and even pubs... but don't tell anyone, since we all pretend to be too geeky to care for those things . On the weekend, my roommate Steph and I decided to go to Santa Barbara with one of our new friends from Caltech, Axar. I have to thank him for being a wonderful host, and not killing me for all the complaining and whining that I did . What can I say? I got spoiled by my parents and boyfriend, my wishes always come true .
July 4th - 10th	During the last week, we were all exhausted beyond belief, life was starting to look a bit too glim... people were falling asleep a lot during the day and many were sleep walking during the night... yet others were trying to keep up and work their butts off trying to meet the deadline for the presentations at the end of the week. But in the end we all made it.
July 11th - 17th	I am very greatful to Dr. Anne Condon for letting me spend a whole week with my parents after the Caltech summer school. I confess, I needed it! It was wonderful to see my parents and little bro again. Miss you guys terribly!
July 18th - 24th	Getting back was nice. Fixed some bugs, added more features... getting the latest news on the interface needs and the database design... finalizing things some more... and of course getting together with my friends after a long time of not seeing them .
July 25th - 31st	Finally, the cool part! I got to do web interface for our database in php with maaany embedded MySQL queries.
August 1st - 7th	If you think coming up with and implementing an interface is easy, you are wrong, my friend There were many cases and such other things to think about. We argued passionatly about the the help page and its definitions though.
August 8th - 14th	Finalizing everything and getting ready for the deadline. It wasn't easy. Hehehe, I know I say that a lot, but this time we were litterally camping out in Beta.
August 15th - 21st	Believe it or not, there were still some things to be fixed even after the submission. Although all of them were minor. So no panic or worries. It all worked out perfectly. It has been a great experience , this is also the time when I started working on this website.