Stroustrup and other tales

So today, I got to meet Bjarne Stroustrup, arguably the father of C++. The details of that experience is/will be published on my main blog, since I rather spare you the details on how I acted like a 12 year old girl meeting a famous movie star.

Research is going ok. I checked over the left-child, right sibling tree structure, and, sure enough, I can implement my decomposition strategy with it, and use a simple post-order traversal on that tree structure for the merging stage. This is all good news.

The bad news is, I'm supposed to be benchmarking right now, and I haven't gotten any done, which is quite sad indeed. The reason is due to the fact that I'm not sure how to use PAUP or the parsimony-ratchet algorithm to my advantage, since the documentation is somewhat confusing. So I'm torn between continuing to bang my head against the wall, or trying to piece together an Introduction and some diagrams for Dr. Williams by Friday. I mean, that's important, but I really need to start benchmarking. But, then again, I really can't since I don't know how. I got a surprise call from My Guy this afternoon, and I bawled to him about how I'm not sure what I'm doing and how this isn't getting done, and OMG, I met Stroustrup, and made a total fool out of myself in front him!. He thought the situation was very cute (normal response) and reassured me that I'll figure it out. *sigh* As much as I love working independently, I'm so nervous that I'm going to screw up something at this stage, and I really don't want to, and so I'm looking for guidance. I need to sit down with someone and go over this PAUP stuff with them. I don't know if I'll get it otherwise.