After 3 weeks of wrestling with my programming, I have finally finished my research project. In fairness, most of my difficulty was with learning Fortran, and getting debugging it everytime I make idiotic mistakes in my code. Considering that it took me just over a month to get my program up-and-running (although I still need to clean up bits of it), and that I had to learn Fortran from scratch for this, I probably wasn't wrong when I felt that there wasn't very much scientific knowledge required to do my project. After all, when all was said and done it was essentially about multiplying some numbers together, although the algorithms I had to use probably needed more than just programming ability.

When I mentioned this to Kinwah, he seemed to be rather annoyed. He told me that what I was doing was part of front-line-research, even though my role in it was a minor one, so I should be happy with it as most other students get projects which are 'recycled' stuff which the supervisor has already done before. In fairness, even though the bulk of my work was something any competent programmer could do, the background preparation required me to know the problem in its scientific context.

Having said that, creating a program to model the spectrum from supermassive-black holes in galaxies at the edge of the universe is really cool when I'm not sitting in front of my computer swearing at a bug that I can't find. In any case, I have a month left to prepare my presentation and report, which is plenty of time, apparently.

In any case, this does mean that I'll have more free time on my hands, and I can now renew my acquaintance with my guitar. I've been suddenly hit by the performing bug, and if anyone knows anywhere that I could have a recital near London, let me know.