Cisco Ramon (ramonnoodles) wrote in saveatlantisic, @ 2018-08-12 13:39:00 |
|
|||
As someone who was known to thrive in the very process of research, having the opportunity to work with someone in order to make it easier and push students and professors alike onto the future of recorded history was a great opportunity for Eva. She was one of the best students in the department and had offered to help Diego Martinez with his latest project, some kind of research and fact checking program that was sure to revolutionize the dreaded final papers, theses and so on. Eva parked in front of Diego’s lavish house, which he had undoubtedly worked hard to get, and which was also the location of his garage-turned-workshop. Carrying a bag, she made her way to the garage, grinning to see him already at work. “Morning! I brought coffee. Wasn’t sure how you took it so I brought cream and sugar on the side too.” Diego was looking forward to meeting Eva. They had spoken on the phone and he liked her ideas. He’d spent a lot of time as a student and he wanted to make things easier for future students to manage. There was so much out there that it could be hard sometimes to drill down and find exactly what you were looking for. He looked up when he heard her come in and gave her a smile. “Good morning yourself. I like cream and sugar actually. I suppose some people might call me a wimp for taking it straight but I don’t care.” He waved a hand at a small table not far from where he was sitting looking at something on his computer screen. “You can put that over there.” “Oh, please. People attribute courage to the stupidest things. Oooh you sir are a craven baby for not taking your coffee scalding hot and black as death.” Eva rolled her eyes as she placed the things on the table, then sipped on her own coffee - also with cream and sugar. “Anyway. Spiffy place you got here. So, what do you want me to do?” “Thank you, I kind of like it. It was a mess when I bought the place. I thought I was going to have to call the health department to sterilize it,” Diego laughed. “The previous kept some kind of weird gardening equipment and a lot of containers of mulch. I’m not for sure but I think they might have been trying to clone something judging from some of the equipment and the smell.” He was making it sound worse than it was although it had been pretty bad, that was for sure. He looked around and found a stool. “Bring that over here and sit next to me. I’ll show you what I’ve got so far and then we can tweak it and hopefully we can test it out later. Thanks for doing this by the way, I wanted someone who was in school right now to give me some ideas. I haven’t been out that long but it doesn’t take that much time for stuff to change.” Eva laughed into her coffee, brows raising. “You think they were, uh… cultivating some herbs? Maybe they had to shut down the business and left the equipment behind!” She paused. “Hang on, what kind of equipment? Did you find like a cloning machine or something?” Doing as she was told, Eva dragged the stool over to Diego with one hand while holding her coffee with the other and sat down next to him. “Thank you! This is super interesting and will be really useful, you’re really doing us all a service here. So what’ve you got, and how can I help?” “It could have been, it’s Colorado after all. Maybe they were hoping to come up with something unique. No, I didn’t find a cloning machine. One of my friends said that the thing I found was something that you might see in a greenhouse so your herb idea might be on the money. They didn’t leave any samples though.” Diego didn’t partake often but every now and then he did although he preferred his herbs in something edible, like brownies. “So far I’ve got a basic idea of what we need,” he pulled up a spreadsheet and showed her what he’d done so far. “I didn’t want it to be so overwhelming that people wouldn’t want to download it but at the same time it didn’t need to be lame either.” Diego had a point, although depending exactly on when the business had been in operation, it might not have been all that legal. Eva wasn’t very well versed in these things, but she did know he could also be right about invention: it seemed people were always coming up with new strands. “Maybe they accidentally invented an aggressive new plant that wants to kill all humans instead, then decided to run away.” Leaning forward, Eva looked over the spreadsheet, nodding as Diego scrolled. “Okay, this looks good, the structure. Already it makes sense to me, let me see if I’m right: There will be a virtual database of articles and documents from the school, and with this program we can search for them like in a library directory - but virtual. And you’ll attribute keywords to each one so that when we search, the program can calculate what is relevant based on what keywords we search for. Am I right?” He nodded. “You are correct. I’m hoping to pitch it to a few other schools so that we can get other libraries involved so that whoever uses it will have a wide range of places to search. There are a few things all ready out there that do that but I want to connect directly to the schools, not a huge place like the Library of Congress. Trying to find stuff on their website is a bitch,” he shook his head. “But you’ve got it. We’d need to find some people to beta test it but that wouldn’t be hard since they’d be getting the full version for free instead of having to download the free version and then pay for the full version. That’s always a good way to get volunteers.” Smiling to herself, Eva nodded proudly. She was a user of technology but in no way savvy about it to the extent someone like Diego might be. She snickered. “Yeah, I’ve used it a couple times. I’d like to never use it again. Making the gathering of sources easier is a great way to get volunteers too, in this specific case I mean.” Finishing her coffee, she rubbed her hands together. “Okay. Let’s do this!” |