A Magnificent & Disasterous Day

Today was both great and bad!

Work was awesome... my project is starting to get off the ground, and hopefully tomorrow I will get to cook some meat (mmm yummy) as part of it. On Friday, a coworker set up some programs and systems on my computer to read the data from thermocouples...but we didn't have all the equipment, and my computer is in my office. Today, my boss and I went to set it up on the computer in the project room, with more of the equipment. Unfortunately, it wouldn't connect. I couldn't figure out why! The programs use VBA, C, Dos, IP Addresses, Commports...none of which I really have experience with, except watching my coworker use it for a half an hour, the other day! I tried several things, repeated what he had done, and it still wouldn't work. To make things worse, the computers are all in Japanese (mine included), so error messages, etc are useless to me! My boss didn't really know what was going on with it either - he's never used this stuff before. I was frustrated and ready to quit, but I wasn't about to tell him that it wasn't working and I had no idea how to fix it, so I kept fiddling. Finally, I figured it out! I was thrilled and very proud of myself, especially since I understood what the problem had been and how I fixed it! We also had some trouble getting the rest of the system to work, but I troubleshot for a while and managed to figure that out, too. All in all, it was quite a rewarding day!

After work, I headed to the gym for the first time. This, unfortunately, turned out to be a disaster. A gym is a gym and a pool is a pool - Japan or Canada. However - there are small things and rules that are different, which are probably posted on signs and posters...which I can't read...so I don't know... yeah. There was one neat thing - they did a complete body analysis of me on this machine, and I get it done again in 3 months, to tell how my body has changed. Other than that - the gym was very busy, and I was trying not to look like an idiot, so I wandered a bit and did some of my routine. Then I thought I'd go swimming...I think I also broke some rules there (no one was rude about it, they just looked at me strange and one lady told me I had to have a towel in the steam room, which I'm sure was posted on a sign somewhere...). In fear of making more mistakes, hungry, and feeling rather frustrated, I gave up and went home (without swimming). I was mad at myself for giving up, but also feeling pretty self-conscious about not understanding what was going on. However - on Wednesday, I'm going back again! I will swim, this time.

T minus two days until internet...yay! I'm pretty excited about that.

PS - Sorry there's no pictures from the last couple posts...the server says it's busy when I try to upload them, but I'll keep trying!!