Day 113 - First real day of class

Today was my first real day of class. Yeah it's been great to not have class (except for that one field trip) for the first half of the term, but the rest of the term (i.e., the next 4 weeks) will be totally brutal.

My instruments class... it was pretty close to what I expected. I don't think I'll learn very much in that one (I already took an instruments class at OU, and have worked a lot with instruments since then) but I think it will be very helpful anyway because it's been a long time since I had such a class, my job starting in February will be very instrument-related, and I may want to teach the instruments class at OU some day, so it'll be great to know how it's done here.

The numerical modeling class... it looks like it will be quite helpful and I think I'll learn some things. But the bad part (and this is a big one) is that we have to use FORTRAN for everything. Grrrrr! I hate FORTRAN. It's been almost 7 years since I last used it and I'm not very familiar with it. Plus it takes about twice as long to do anything with it as with Perl. It can't use graphics libraries, so we have to import stuff into Matlab to plot it. And when it comes to processing data, there are a lot of nice things it can't do that can be done very easily with Perl and other languages. Plus I can't compile it on my laptop, so I have to be on campus to work on my assignments. Blaaah. Oh well. It's what almost every other meteorologist uses, so I suppose it might be useful to get familiar with it again.

posted by Matt @ 11:58 PM