The day before tomorrow

It’s basically the big day at this point and I still have a bit of work ahead of me before the official kick off. We have a very strict schedule and I need to make sure that things go smoothly, or as smoothly as possible. I’m not going to lie, we’re already off to a bad start. It’s going to be rocky and we have a whole 12 hours or so for the electrical gremlins to get into the equipment. The pressure is on!

For the past several days, I’ve been working hard on preparing for the thing that we’re doing tomorrow. An experiment of epic proportions! We’re repeating it in a few weeks too, but right now I’m just worried about tomorrow. It will be a very long day, the entire experiment will take about 8 hours, plus setup and teardown, so it’s going to be a protein bar kind of day (if there’s even a lunch break).

Basically all day today has been squeezing in time to get the equipment ready in-between everyone else needing the equipment. I’m so tired right now, which doesn’t bode well for tomorrow, but having everything ready to roll for tomorrow means that I don’t have to worry about things as much. It will (hopefully) make my life easier.

I think I spent most of the day programming the stuff into the computer that we need to automate the process tomorrow. Even with all the automating and prep work, we’re still going to be close to the wire with this one, so if I haven’t made it abundantly clear at this point, I’m kinda freaking out. I mean we’ll make it, it’s not the end of the world, but it would be nice to have this go according to plan for once.

There’s a huge team involved so we’re going to have at least a dozen or so people in the lab bright and early to help with the setup and day of preparations that need to happen. Luckily that will give me time to do final checks with the computer and make sure our systems are talking to the systems our collaborators are bringing.

We have so much data we’re collecting that we have three different systems and they all need to be synced together. Today I met with our collaborator to test our equipment to make sure that our equipment would “talk” to theirs. We had issues last time that we needed to overcome and honestly, it feels like we did that. I’m not holding my breath on that one because we thought we had it all worked out last time too and then there was a big issue and we almost lost everything, not fun!

It’s going to be a long day tomorrow and it’s already been an incredibly long day, so I’m just ending the post here. Next time I post we’ll be on the other side of the experiment though, so at least there’s that!

Here goes nothing! It’s going to be a wild day.