Stella has arrived! It was delivered to my office this afternoon. Bob helped me set it up. Some men came to give it a "NASA – Property of U.S. Government" sticker. I've been doing some basic set-up and messing around with this version of Suse. I tried to do test run of the basic data analysis tools I use to ensure that everything is installed and working correctly. Here's how that went:

I downloaded data of GRBs 070810A and 070810B from the archive and uncompressed them; so far, so good. The next step is running a data processing script. "Command not found." Strange. I checked the permissions and double-checked that the file is an executable. I created a test script. "Command not found."

I messed around with my path definition. Bad idea! The test script ran, but error messages were abundant and the terminal no longer understood the basic commands of ls, pwd, nedit, etc. I changed my path back to what it was, and enlisted the help of Bob. The test script worked after I changed my notation slightly to adjust for the preferences of the particular shell this computer uses.

I tried running the data processing script again, but forgot to enter in the GRB coordinates. The text zoomed by so fast that I couldn't read it, and the terminal shell closed. Strange. I opened another terminal window and typed the script inputs correctly. The beginning text of the pipeline displayed on my screen for a few seconds, then the text zoomed by, and the window closed. Oh my. This tells me that 1) there's a problem running the data processing script, and 2) I have no chance of figuring out the error until I can get the terminal to stay open when there's an error!

I've browsed the shell preferences, but there's no "close the shell window when there's a error" box option to uncheck. I typed up an email to Bob about it, and discovered that my Thunderbird email client is allowing me to receive emails but not send them. I sent out the email through webmail instead. He's already gone for the weekend, so there's nothing I can do until Monday.

On the bright side, Bob managed to copy my backed up files off of the old Everin hard drive. The backup is from June 1, so I've lost all my later data. I'm not upset about it; I can redo my data analysis from June and July fairly quickly. But only if my analysis software works!

In an unusual coincidence, Swift went offline around the same time Everin died, and Swift is coming back online around the same time I'm getting Stella set up. In these weeks of being computerless at work, I've missed almost nothing. Now that Swift is beginning to observe again, I'm eager to get back into it!