Idiot!

I’m such an idiot sometimes that it’s a wonder that I can acutally dress myself in the morning.

Two idiotic things have happened in the last week with my thesis. One, I discovered that the response files that I’ve been making for the spectra are wrong for more than half the spectra, and two, I’ve been losing some of the latest data because I haven’t updated my SAA (South Atlantic Anomaly) history file.

The response matrix problem arose because I have a script that automatically makes the response files. The FTOOL needed to make the response requires the numbers of the PCUs used to extract the spectrum. I adjust these over time, since PCU #1 is only on intermittantly after a certain date, and PCU #0 lost it’s xenon later at a different date. It’s best to use as many PCUs as available for the data, so I use #1 and #0 before their respective malfunctions, but not after. In my response-generating script I had been defining which PCUs were used, but not actually feeding this to the FTOOL making the response. Idiot!

The SAA problem came about because I have a file in the “aux” directory for each observation that the reduction script (the rex FTOOL) looks at. The default requirement for data to be considered “good” is that the data be at least 30 minutes from the last SAA passage. The file that I’ve been using ended long before the latest data sets that I’ve downloaded, so all of the data has been rejected from these data sets. Idiot!

Anyway, I’ve since changed the response-generating script to feed the pcarsp FTOOL the acutal PCUs used, and I’ve updated the SAA history file in the aux directories.

Let’s try to avoid any further idiocy, boys and girls. Shall we?