It seems like this entire week, we've been SO unproductive.  Lindsay never showed up to work today, so it was just the three of us.  It took us until about lunch time before Pamela came and talked with us briefly; she informed us that we didn't need to worry about the data acquisition card in order to get data from the GPIB!  UGH... we were making our lives so much more complicated that needed to be because we were trying to figure out how we were supposed to interface the GPIB devices and the Data Acq. card... when all we needed to do was to figure out how to get data back from the GPIB.

After lunch we began to tackle this problem, and we were working really hard to figure it out... we had the commands right according to the manuals... and we kept rechecking and trying random commands just to see if that would change it... and finally we ran across a command that formats the data output... this did what it was supposed to do!  another silly little command that was holding us back... it seems so silly now. 

anyway, these two menial tasks took us basically the entire day, and so we decided to start fresh on programming tomorrow morning.