Apparently I am too bold.

My blog is not a technical report. Nor is it a well-structured professional opinion source. I deliberately disregard SEO techniques and try not to care whether anyone is actually reading it. My blog is meant for me, and it's only public because I'm curious about your comments to my thoughts, if you care to share. This blog is full of sarcastic computer art, song lyrics, and the rantings of a 20-year-old girl from a very small place.

I never really let anyone make me feel bad about that until Friday.

Because someone I respect an awful lot took the outpourings of my frustration as if a few paragraphs can encompass the whole of my experience (though, to be fair, I gave no indication that there were good aspects to it), and then told me that NASA would never hire someone who writes such things. And I was so arrogant as to say "And I wouldn't consider submitting a resume." That was probably a mistake, but it was probably also my disbelief talking, my disbelief that anyone would blow something so out of proportion.

What I was trying to say, is--There are some things going on that I'm not comfortable with, so... here's the big rant. Unfortunately I have a tendancy toward dramatic turns of phrase (a side effect, I think, of the fact that the very first thing I wanted to be "when I grew up" was a novelist), and I'm sure that just compounded any hard feelings the rants inspired. I didn't mean anything too personal about any of the people I seemed to put in the line of fire, and I didn't mean to speak about NASA as a whole. I realize that I had a fairly unique experience among the interns. I restrict the scope of my comments to a general impression of the Marshall Space Flight Center. I don't like the attitude of the place, and I won't apologize for that.

But I am sorry that I didn't consider the offensive and disrespectful implications of such a one-sided rant. There was plenty to take from my experience. I learned a lot about image processing, which is a branch of my field that my school doesn't really touch. Looking at it that way, I'm actually really grateful for the opportunity. I learned a lot about how NASA projects are developed. And on Friday I learned a lot about how to identify things that I could have done differently.

I feel like I made a contribution to space exploration. Maybe. Every line of code I thrashed felt painful at the time, because thrashing is downright unscientific. Wikipedia calls it Cowboy coding. Fighting the feeling that I was asked to do it the wrong way (yes even after reassurances that this is how science research works) was a huge source of my frustration, and it rather gave me tunnel vision to the whole experience. So... Only now that I can step back and look at the whole summer, I can say I made a contribution. And I can dig that. But it wasn't to my own field. I repacked a few elementary things that have been done before, in a way that will help out space exploration. That's awesome for NASA and its goals, and in the end I'm pretty pleased I could be a part of it. But other than possibly creating a software library that other code monkeys can use in very specific projects, there was no deliverable or discovery that advanced the field of computer science. Any reasonably bright programmer could have stepped into my position this summer. And the opinion around there that the terms "computer science" and "programming" are interchangeable, is exactly why I didn't submit my resume to their file. So maybe it wasn't just disbelief talking…

Anyway. As far as accomplishments go, I wouldn't label this a failure by any means, but I do feel I could have done better elsewhere. The rants, and most of the troubles they indicated, are non-issues at this point, as far as I'm concerned.

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PS I made it home just fine. 14 hours between Huntsville and Vermillion. A night of rest. And now I'll finish unpacking.

Counting today, I have two days left of work at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. Early Saturday morning I'm hitting the road, and late Saturday night I'll be pulling up to my apartment in Vermillion.

I'm starting to get antsy. Yesterday I got serious about packing, and I'm loading up my car tonight, so that tomorrow night I can just hang out with the other interns.

I said goodbye to my roommate yesterday, who went out of town for a conference and won't be back until I'm already gone. If you ever meet Heather Brusnahan, watch out. LOL she's crazy. In a good way. Very chatty. I already miss her. Our dorm is so quiet without her.

I know I initally told some people I wouldn't be back for another week. But... I got sick of NASA, if you can believe that. So I rushed some 10-hour days and weekend hours to push back my last day.

At this point all I really have to do is finish technical reports--a short one for the research program that paid my stipend, and the lengthy one that my mentor wants as a "manual" that she can dump on whatever poor student gets to work with her next time.

When she said that, I considered it the last straw, and that's kinda why I'm blogging right now instead of writing my report. Oh, I'll get it done, and it'll be very good. But I think she's known for some time my heart's not in it. And this afternoon I have an end-of-internship meeting with my program coordinator, to turn in my last time sheet, tell her my general impression, and let her know whether I'm interested in future employment with NASA. It's gonna be one of those days.

Tomorrow should be good though. I'll clean out my desk, chat with some people I met here (and call it saying goodbye), turn in my keys, and maybe work a bit more on my report. Mostly just mess around. And be excited for going home. Yay!

Oh, and for anyone who cares, the product of my summer can be found at www.abbysdoor.com/sem_features. The technical report will be posted as soon as it's done, probably Sunday.

The poster session is next week, and they wanted posters ready for print by today. So here it is. 

Today I met a software engineer. He's a blue-badge. That means contractor. Not an actual NASA employee. I'm still convinced they don't exist.

My mentor found this guy after another conversation she and I had about the differences between CS and other sciences, and all the reasons this project and the work atmosphere make me uncomfortable. She started to say it again, "Well, in science..." and this time I didn't hold back.

She seemed surprised that I would take offense. She hadn't even considered the implication of her phrasing. So I asked her straight out if there were any CS people around, cuz I'd like to see what they have to say, and she had to go look. She found this one guy.

I wouldn't call him a computer scientist. He's a fine software engineer, but he definitely doesn't consider himself a scientist on any level. Less than two hours talking to him I could tell he's bright as they come, but doesn't give himself enough credit. He's been a blue-badge here for four years, commuting from Mobile (that's a five-hour drive), just hoping that a gold-badge (the NASA civil servant color) job will open for him.

I think meeting him just made everything worse. I want to go home.

I realize I'm very late with this blog entry. I've been waiting on purpose, really, trying to find something good to say about my job at NASA.

I still don't have any.

The social life down here in Huntsville is great, but the job... I don't know. I feel kind of bad. There are all these other students who are physicists and engineers who really love it, and I'm the one who has to say it's not so great.

There are several reasons.

First and most important: I haven't met a single computer scientist who works full time. I've met CS students, and I've met IT services guys, but I haven't met a single research scientist with a CS degree. I didn't realize why until yesterday, when I had a resume workshop (they are making me submit a resume at the end of the summer for their files. I'm considering rebelling) and the leader reminded us how to check on salaries at NASA centers. So the reason I discovered is--computer scientists go into private research or industry, because there they make a lot more money. A lot.

This is related to another reason I'm not having a good time. I didn't realize until a week or so into it that the summer program here is a training and recruitment ground. They don't actually expect me to accomplish anything. They want me trained up in an area that they hope to hire me into when I graduate. We, the students, are asked right and left whether we're coming back next summer or would like to work here full time someday. And they seem offended when you say that you have a lot of options and two years to make a decision. They have the attitude that NASA is the end-all-be-all of research, the ultimate goal, like no where else could possibly be better.

For aerospace engineers, that may be true, but software engineers definitely have better prospects.

I have three mentors. One is an x-ray scientist, one is a solar physicist, and one is a materials analyst. All of them have reasonably good programming skills, but it's clear enough talking to them that none of them have a computer science degree.  They x-ray scientist is my program mentor, and the first conversation we had was what I'm pretty sure was an argument about the scientific method. She didn't have a specification, or even a scope for my project. When I asked what the scope was, she said, "as far as you can get." I'm laying groundwork for automated feature recognition software, and the only methodology provided is to ask the solar scientist which direction to take next as I cruise through the tasks assigned one at a time. It's really quite disturbing not to have a goal. And it strikes me as completely unscientific.

I didn't get to write an original algorithm until two days ago. To get it to work I had to get an array-oriented procedural language to handle a decent stack structure without recursion (the easier-to-program recursive routine caused the runtime stack to overflow in a glorious explosion of my win2k desktop). Though Goodman might be proud of my analysis of it, bringing it down to a reasonable order of optimization, I'd say by now optimizing array-implementations of stacks and queues is kind of old hat for me. And my mentors weren't impressed anyway. But it was the first real computer-sciencey thing I've done. Everything up to then was stuff a reasonably bright self-taught programmer could do.

In fact, if I had slightly better knowledge of the area of image processing, I could have been at this point three weeks ago. Because I haven't done anything original. The image processing algorithms I've been working with have been known for decades. But they didn't even want me looking for ideas in pre-built software libraries. In fact, when I say "software library" they say "canned code" in a derogatory fashion that I'm not comfortable with. I tried to tell my program mentor that it seems like a waste of time to discover that all I've done is re-invent the wheel, and maybe I should look into perfectly good source code already available. She said we just can't trust "canned code" and that "well in science we can't really do that. We have to know for sure exactly what our software is doing." First of all, I wanted to ask her why she thinks they call it computer science if it's not science, but held my tongue. Second, just to be clear on this, I never suggested blindly using proprietary code. I never suggested that we should trust the person who wrote any source code we swipe (although I'll admit I was inclined to trust the library I found from the US Geological Survey). All I said was that I'm new to this sub-field of CS, and I'd like to see what other people have done in case it would help me make this go a lot faster. She wanted me to get as far as I could, after all. But she wouldn't hear it. It's a philosophical difference that marked this experience from the beginning.

Topping it off my poster for the presentation at the end of the month is due next Wednesday. I still have four weeks to go and they want my poster next week. It just reinforces the idea that this is a training and recruitment ground and not an actual working experience.

All in all, I'm not happy, but it's probably still a pretty cheap price to pay for putting NASA's name on my resume. I feel like such a tool.

Yesterday was my first day at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). We received safety lectures, procedure lectures, and played a horrible icebreaker game.

There are fifty of us from various programs who are considered summer interns at MSFC. I might remember five of their names.

Then we got badged and sent to our mentors. The primary NASA complex is intertwined with the Army's Redstone Arsenal. I'm allowed to take my camera in, so when I get my camera cords I'll post pictures of actual Saturn series rockets, the historic rocket engine test site, the shuttle test tower, and more. And that's just on base. There's more at the visitor's Space and Rocket Center down the road, where a Saturn V replica stands.

My primary mentor is Jessica Gaskin, but she's in New Mexico waiting for the right high-altitude weather to launch a balloon full of experiments. In the meantime, I'm working with Greg Jerman in the Materials Research building. There are five scanning electron microscopes in his lab area, including a special one that does X-ray microanalysis and can produce 300,000x images. Today we used it to look at a Martian meteorite at 2000x and tried out the X-ray analysis.

The project they are currently working on in his lab is to reduce the size of an electron microscope from about a person-sized object to a flashlight-sized object so that it can be put on rovers sent to the Moon and Mars. I'll be writing software for the Moon-specific scope, to analyze the images and data produced to see if any samples show promise of materials that could be useful, say as concrete mix or as a product from which one could extract oxygen or water. The Martian scope will be looking for... well... Martians. But it is tabled until the Moon software is done because the Martian-specifics will just be a slight modification of the Moon-specifics. On the other hand, if I do it right, it could be used for both, and potentially for other research fields here on Earth.

Seriously. How cool would it be to say my software processed the data that proved there was once life on Mars? I've always been skeptical about that, but as long as they have me looking for microbes, that's what I want to find.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First thing to do is get back to studying Lunar geology.

Still sneaking small hours at the Internet cafe down the road. Other than that I've been reading the Black Jewels Trilogy that I swiped from Jesse before I left, and getting to know my roommates.

One is from Oklahoma and understands the small town girl in a big city dynamic. The other is from California going to school in New York. She's a little weirded out by our insistence that it's okay to leave the door hanging open. I don't know if it really is or not. Huntsville's a lot bigger than verm, or even Sioux Falls. But we are in a keycard locked residence hall. You know how we at USD have to swipe our cards to get into the building past 10 or midnight or whatever time it is? Well, at UAH, you have to swipe no matter what time it is, and all visitors are required to check in at the desk. Makes me feel pretty good about leaving our suite open.

Once again, I promise pictures in five days or so, as soon as I get my camera accessories from my parents.

I gotta admit the homesickness hit really hard that first night here, but the more time I spend without a phone call from Jesse the more I know I can do without. But just because I can doesn't mean I want to. So if anyone else out there can get ahold of Jesse, tell him to call back his girlfriend. More than two days without at least a phone call hasn't happened in like, six months... like, since we started dating.

Anyway, I start work at NASA tomorrow. Mostly orientation stuffs. Badging, car searching, fingerprinting, background checking, getting my computer network account, and meeting my three mentors. I hope it's a short day so I can get to the UAH ITS office to get my computer ready for the network. I'm going to be very upset if I can't get online by the end of the week.

My project at the NASA center has changed. Instead of the Moon dust online catalog, I'm going to be processing images taken of meteorites that NASA has collected. I get to work with "landmark recognition" or whatever else they call it when the computer can identify important features in a photograph. Something I've definitely never done before. Should be great.

This was a slightly more interesting drive, not least because I had to navigate through St. Louis and Nashville. I tell you what: 10-lane interstates rock my socks off. And all my socks are in the drawer right now, so that's some long-distance sock-rocking.

Anyway. It was a very uneventful trip, but now that it's over I can say hands-down Missouri has the best highways and Illinois has the most cops.

Illinois and Kentucky both. I saw 12 troopers on my whole journey, and 11 of them were from those two states. The other was in Tennesse. I have a feeling it's because Illinois and Kentucky have the lowest speed limits, both at 65mph on the Interstate AND it's down to 55mph for vehicles over 4 tons.

I wish I could upload pictures I took today of the Arch and St Louis, the lush green hills of southern Illinois, and the skyscrapers of Nashville. But. I left the accessories to my fancy new camera in Vermillion. Mom and dad will mail them to me, so I'll upload by the end of next week.

I'd say I'm already homesick. And not having the Internet at my 24/7 disposal is really tough. This cafe I'm sitting at closes in 20 minutes so I better get more stuffs done. Til next time.

Today ended in a hot tub sitting next to a guy named Boob.

This morning at about 8:30 I took off for the first leg of my road trip to Huntsville, Alabama. It was very uneventful, except of course when I crossed into Missouri and gas prices spiked up another 20 cents. But that's okay, I think, cuz it's tax money that goes toward making the roads nice to drive on. And let me tell you, after the last 10 miles of total garbage you get from I29 leaving Iowa, the Missouri roads are heavenly.

Navigating past Kansas city was no big deal. Apparently I435 was designed for avoiding most of the town itself and continuing on I70 east. Which is exactly what I needed.

So, all in all, a very easy drive today. 

I'm spending the night in Warrenton, Missouri. It's definitely a tourist town on I70, about 50 miles from St Louis city limits. I'm staying at a fairly nice, if a little creepy, motel. The hot tub... was really hot. Like... boiling. Like... 10 minutes tops for me, and I can normally spend a good hour in one of those.

I spent two hours there anyway, cuz those people were fairly interesting. A bunch of couples from Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. The topics ranged from my trip to their trips to wine for beer drinkers to kids and grandkids to the Testicle Festival. And why the guy I was sitting next to was nicknamed Booby Moon. If they weren't so nice I'd say they were weird.

Anyway, I"m tired. I'm going to call the boy and be done for the night. I have a longer day ahead tomorrow.

For 10 weeks this summer, I'll be studying Moon dust at the Marshal Space Flight Center in Huntsville Alabama. I'm leaving town May 25, and I'll be back Aug 6 or 7.

I really don't know what I'm getting myself into.

I'm told I'll be writing software to analyze and share data from electron microscopy experiments on Moon dust or "simulated" Moon rocks.

That's about all I know for sure. It's awesome.