Status Report for April 2002

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Below is my status report for the month of April.  I remind all, that if 
you have been doing work it is OK to send a status report to the list and 
Michael for the status report section of the web page.  Status reports are 
not required for tass.  Nothing is required for tass.  But I think they are 
nice to have as a record of what we have done.

Tom Droege

Status Report for April, 2002   Thomas F. Droege

25 CDs were generated during April.  The stack is now 479 high.  More data 
could have been taken if I were not concentrating on other things.

I have a big stack (12) of cameras sitting in the basement waiting for me 
to put them together and test them.  New drive motors have been received 
for the declination.  These will be stiffer, but will still not solve the 
sloppy chain drive.

There continues to be a problem in getting systems working.  This is the 
memory board problem that I have discussed many times before.  I have 
finally decided to spend some time building a more elaborate test fixture 
so that I can make better tests.  Dan has been set to work to design 
it.  It will be a good project for him to learn how to do such things.  It 
has to be some minor thing, so it is just a question of making the proper test.

Most of the month has been spent learning Unix.  It is a strange kind of 
religion.  I am now a junior apprentice acolyte.  I fear I will never make 
it to full priesthood because I really don't believe.

I have been able to look at data and find problems.  I am itching to 
process the whole stack of data so that I can write an engineering run 
paper.  While I am sure we will improve the analysis in the future, it is 
time to get some data out.  Several small programs were written in perl to 
help with the data analysis.