A week of frustration and low productivity. The new laptop arrived on Monday, and though the initial move of stuff from the old machine to the new went smoothly, thanks in part to a 30-minute setup appointment that Apple offers new product owners, way more time was spent Googling for help and chatting with customer and tech support at multiple companies (either online or on the phone) than I expected. I hope to work out the remaining issues over the next few weeks, and then I expect to love all the technology again. It was not all bad, however! A new external monitor came later in the week — this to replace the old television that had been pressed into service at the beginning of the pandemic when monitors were sold out — and it is bigger, brighter, clearer, and more flexible ergonomically, than what I’d been using. Really, it’s a huge improvement! It was lovely to go to my office at UMD, though I was there for only an hour and saw only one colleague (masked and social distant, of course), the daffodils are blooming, the weather has been tee-shirt friendly, and I took some personal time, too, even though that leaves me a bit even further behind on the gigantic long to do list. This list will never be empty, of course; there are always always always things to do.

Five new codes were added to our staged (unpublished) entries and one submitted code was assigned an ASCL ID this week. Eight existing entries were edited, and numerous emails were sent requesting information from code authors and others about new entries, site links that are not working, and an edit resulting in a new bibcode for one entry. I did not get any SciCodes work done this week, so that is something for me to work on this week in addition to the usual work on the ASCL. I’ll be concentrating on moving new entries into production at the beginning of the week, however, as that is my top priority.

For spring break, or even not for spring break, this was a busy week. I gave a Physics Colloquium, Schrödinger’s code: Opening the computational box, at Michigan Tech on Thursday; links to the slides, resources/sources, etc. are available online. It was a new talk, and though I could repurpose some slides from various other talks, creating new slides and working out the flow took a good bit of time. The colloquium was scheduled between two meetings of the SciCodes consortium. More about SciCodes is below.

Three code entries from our backlog were edited, assigned ASCL IDs, and moved in production, and three new codes were added to our staged (unpublished) entries. We have hundreds of entries staged; some of these don’t yet meet our criteria and may never do so. Thirty-one entries were curated and social media random code entries have been scheduled through March 31. One would think that scheduling these random code entries would be quick, but it took over three hours to stage the eleven needed to finish out the month, as entry curation is part of this work.

The SciCodes consortium holds two meetings on the same day to accommodate different time zones; members can attend either an early or late meeting. After the early meeting, a couple of people stayed in the Zoom so we could talk, as several people new to the group had questions. The meeting made clear that I had not prepared any on-boarding assistance, so that will have to be corrected.

This coming week, I will send out meeting minutes for the SciCodes meeting, try to figure out what I need to do to get the SciCodes web domain working again, meet virtually with a colleague (I hope) about our NASA project, and spend some number of hours getting a new machine set up, as it is supposed to arrive early in the week. I’m sure I’ll be thrilled with it once it’s set up, right? I’ll also be going back to my office at UMD part of one day this week; it’ll be only the second time I’ll have been in it since before last year’s spring break.

This past week, I refined the abstract for a talk I’m giving this coming week at MTU; I also did research into funders’ policies on code release to ensure my knowledge about them is up-to-date, this also for the upcoming presentation.

Four code entries submitted by authors were edited, assigned ASCL IDs, and moved back in production, and fifteen entries were curated. Several entries have had two bibcodes, a result of changes in authorship/author order. If you’ve ever noticed when looking at our dashboard that sometimes, ADS has >100% of ASCL codes, these extra bibcodes are why. I finally devoted time into tracking those down and sending the information on the duplicates to ADS to bring us back into agreement. This is a low-level issue, but it’s nice to get this loose end resolved.

The ASCL and similar efforts in other disciplines have come together to share ideas and work cooperatively in areas of mutual concern; at the moment, the coalition is called SciCodes. My main activities on SciCodes this past week has been getting the next 12 months of meetings scheduled, the schedule sent out, and confirming a presentation for it.

Peripheral to the ASCL, though also mostly because of it, I spent a ridiculous amount of time one day looking at new Macs. The OS on my current MacBook Pro is now too old to allow me log into UMD, which means I cannot access journals through the UMD Libraries on this machine, a critical need for ASCL work. It’s also having some issues, one of which, running hot during Zoom meetings, I have been working around by putting the machine on a bag of frozen mixed veggies. I don’t like upgrading and do it only when I absolutely have to. Do I want two ports or four? Apple’s M1 processor or Intel’s i5 or i7? How much memory, how much storage? And why don’t new MacBooks have SD slots?? A new machine is on its way to me.

This coming week will include the presentation at MTU, work on our NASA project, and the SciCodes meeting.

This past week has been pretty busy, with a presentation at SIAM’s CSE21 meeting on Wednesday and attendance at other software-related sessions. Eight new code entries were moved into production, three new entries staged, and code authors submitted seven new entries that will be worked on in the coming week.

Social media random code entries have been scheduled through March 17, and the forum and blog updated with February’s code entries. Curation and/or archival work was performed on or for 15 holdings; this included updating some entries with preferred citation information, updating links, and adding keywords, and downloading new versions of software that had been updated since we last downloaded it. Correspondence was sent to at least 24 authors.

In addition to working on newly-submitted codes, this coming week will include work on a presentation that will be given later this month, and progress on our NASA project continues.