Moving to work

For the past two weeks, I've worked nearly full-time on CS course development from home. On Monday the professor will arrive in town and all staff will be colocated. I'll depart tomorrow afternoon and move into my apartment. Full-time work will resume Monday.

Full-time work begins

The time tracker for my full-time summer appointment opened yesterday. I did a bit of work then, but put much more time into it today. So far I've nearly completed my first task, which is to rewrite and improve a piece of the grading infrastructure. At this rate the summer should be extremely productive.

App hits 400 users, somehow

Despite the university being on break and most students leaving town, my bus app's install count has continued growing. It recently hit 400 users!

Clearing the backlog

Now that I'm back in the Quad Cities, I have some time to work on things I had previously deferred due to academics going on. Today I implemented an update to one of my programs that had been requested a few weeks ago. I'll see about deploying it tomorrow.

Summer development work begins

Yesterday I started doing some CS 125 development work. Even though my full-time appointment won't begin for a couple weeks, this semester's appointment is still in effect and there's some small items I can look into. So far I've tested out some possibilities for autograder infrastructure.

Assembly mostly worked

Sequencing results for my last batch of plasmids came in yesterday. Most of the new ones worked, but a couple have extra mutations and one failed to sequence, indicating that the assembly probably failed. Nevertheless, 7 or 8 of the 10 are ready to go.

Out of the dorms

This morning I packed my remaining items together and left campus. That's the end of my two-year stay in University Housing - I'll move into an apartment this summer and a different one in the fall.

Preparing to leave

I spent pretty much all of today moving stuff around in preparation to move out of University Housing tomorrow. The CS 125 professor is letting me store some stuff in our future workroom, so I hauled my appliances into there, one at a time, using the bus system. The current occupants of my summer apartment let me store a bit more stuff, so I hauled over my large computer equipment using a similar method. That should make it much easier to move out and, later, in to my apartment since I won't have to manage as much stuff in transit.

Miscellaneous work

Today was one of two full days on campus between my end of finals and departure. In the morning I went to lab to set up the sequencing for nine of my plasmid purifications. Results from those should come in tomorrow evening. Then I met with the CS 125 professor to discuss work related to our summer projects. In the time in between, I worked on some data analysis for a graduate student in the lab. Finally I picked up my apartment key and arranged to store some of my equipment there in my absence from campus.

Finals done

This evening I took the MCB 252 final exam. With that, I'm finished with all class work for this semester. In the remaining time before I depart campus, I need to stop by the lab to organize some things, get the keys to my summer apartment, meet with the CS 125 professor, and possibly find a space to temporarily store some stuff.

Free time for app development

With the long space between final exams, I currently have very little academic work to do. So I took some time yesterday and today to work on my bus app a bit. I made the stops list show a short summary of what routes serve each stop and improved its existing display of the new few departures for favorited stops. I also added an in-app feedback form so users could conveniently send thoughts and suggestions.

Half of exams done

Today I took the MCB 253 and MCB 300 final exams. Both went well, though I was very tired after the second. After handling a few emails and a bit of studying for my CS 233 exam tomorrow, I went walking on my quest to visit all the town's bus stops. On this trip I covered 8.6 miles. I've now visited over half (51.7%) of all the stops.

Busy Reading Day

Today was Reading Day, the day on which neither final exams nor classes are held. Despite the break, I was busy. In the early afternoon I helped judge the CS 125 project fair. Immediately after that I attended a get-together for a University committee I'm on. Then I went back to the dorm to study and process emails. Tomorrow morning and afternoon I have exams.

Assembly worked at last

Today in lab I did a miniprep of yesterday's cell pellets using a completely different purification kit. The new procedure was straightforward and went well overall. (The handbook even gave me a new tip on easily resuspending cells.) I was relieved to find that the results had great DNA concentrations relative to the volume I eluted in. The cultures grown in small tubes had lower yield as expected, with one set on the edge of useful concentration, but the purification clearly worked. Sometime next week we'll send these plasmids for sequencing.