I completely fail at programming. Every moment I spend trying to program is a moment of unhappiness for me. I am further determined to find a career path that does not require any programming whatsoever, and leave that job to the people who enjoy it. In the meantime, I'm going to do my best with the tools already created, and hopefully get away with the bare minimum of programming requirements.

The only progress I've made on the GBM project is knowing that I cannot use the binary file in its current format. The read_binary IDL function creates an array, but I'm not understanding the array at all. I need events, a collection of times which a photon or photons hit the detector (I don't care about energy). What I have are a seemingly random set of numbers that aren't even ones and zeros, but instead are integers, several of them being equal to zero. Does the values in the elements represent the number of photons that hit the detector during each interval of time? If so, what time interval is used? The time resolution of the instrument during that particular test? Why would there be so many elements with the value of zero if the threshold was set so low as to constantly detect background photons? I really wish I understood my data better.

I knew from a previous code modification I made that the code cannot use files that do not contain some kind of header information, and I'm finding this is still true. What I need is a FITS file or an event file with at least partial header content. I need to convert this binary file into a FITS file and create a header. I know this is way over my current training, so today I asked around to find someone who might know how to do this. Everyone on the GBM team is so busy all the time, but I hope to track someone down tomorrow and get this straightened out. Once I get my code to read the data, the process will be easy and enjoyable!

I've been reading a recent paper that mentions X-ray Flashes (XRFs) along with GRBs. This is so rare in papers I've read that I decided to do some reading on XRFs. I'm not really seeing much strength to the side that thinks they're unrelated to GRBs. They seem to be to be less-energetic (softer) GRBs or have some other connection. Because so many of the GRB detectors don't look for XRFs, they're largely ignored. I think that's a shame.