I've been grounded!

..or at least, benched, for the past 5 days due to hard drive failure. On Sunday night, at around 1:30am, I was finally able to do a clean reinstall of Windows 7 and Ubuntu. However, I also lost many of my documents that I haven't backed up in the past month, which is very aggravating to say the least. I thought that my troubles were at an end when I received multiple notifications from my computer that I need a new hard drive. So finally, I received my hard drive today and am currently re-reinstalling Windows 7. Oh PCs, how you aggravate me so.

I've also lost some nifty graphs that I saved from the R-script code that Lizzie wrote and went through with me on Tuesday. Though the scripting language still seems daunting, I can't deny that it looks very useful and helpful for sorting out a great multitude of data. Hopefully, once I am able to reinstall R and the VPN, I will be able to reconnect back to the server and run through the script again myself so I can update this post with some graphs (edit: Lizzie was awesome enough to help me upload the graphs from the R script that she wrote!).

Each color represents one species listed on Gates' records. The snazzy features of R allowed it to run the data in the excel sheet and colorfully map it out.

In the meantime, I've been reading the book that Lizzie uploaded onto the server, called R in a Nutshell, to gain a better understanding of this esoteric language. Fortunately, the author has an easygoing writing style that I like, which is similar to the books in the Dummies series. I like how it has a very nice, tutorial in the beginning accompanied by examples of the explanations and later on, provides more advanced material for readers that would like more in depth knowledge of R (in short, this book does not make me feel like such a n00b, so to speak).