One is the loneliest number, but the CSC chambers might be working!
I like the (see edit at bottom) Beatles, and I'm missing Sara now that she has returned to Arizona, so the title of this post seemed appropriate. Don't really want to dwell on it too much here. I'll just say that things felt back to normal while she was visiting, and now that she's gone it feels like there's a part of me missing.
Gee, maybe I should marry her or something...
Okay, enough with the sappiness :). Things are getting rather busy here at CERN. The CSC chambers - the part of the ATLAS experiment that my group works on - are finally working! ...mostly! ...probably! Well, they have to do a few more tests but they think they'll have them working by the end of next week.
End of next week is good, because there is a test run of ATLAS where we look at cosmic rays right after that. Although we built ATLAS to look at particles coming from proton collisions we produce in the lab, those man-made collisions can't happen yet, so we look at what comes from the sky to make sure our detectors work. Our CSC chambers haven't been able to participate much in these ATLAS "cosmic runs" yet, since they the electronics that communicates what the CSCs are seeing haven't really been working, and we haven't had the man power (or really the experts on this type of problem) until relatively recently.
This is embarrassing. I think (although I haven't done a comprehensive check) that we are the last component to become functional, and way behind schedule at that. We who have written software for it will now get our first chance to really put it through its paces. I expect lots of debugging and small design changes in the coming weeks as we realize exactly what we need from practical experience.
Hopefully I've built my code in such a way that adding features will be easy, but we'll see. As long as I've been coding now, I haven't had much chance to see my stuff in real world conditions, so this will be a good learning experience in code design I'm sure.
EDIT: Having not only received a correction, but actually someone thanking the corrector, it seems this point is a sore one for many people :p. To set the record strait, it seems Three Dog Night did indeed do "One is the Lonliest Number". Not really a song I listen to very often, don't own it or anything. Don't know where I got it in my head it was a Beatles song.
Gee, maybe I should marry her or something...
Okay, enough with the sappiness :). Things are getting rather busy here at CERN. The CSC chambers - the part of the ATLAS experiment that my group works on - are finally working! ...mostly! ...probably! Well, they have to do a few more tests but they think they'll have them working by the end of next week.
End of next week is good, because there is a test run of ATLAS where we look at cosmic rays right after that. Although we built ATLAS to look at particles coming from proton collisions we produce in the lab, those man-made collisions can't happen yet, so we look at what comes from the sky to make sure our detectors work. Our CSC chambers haven't been able to participate much in these ATLAS "cosmic runs" yet, since they the electronics that communicates what the CSCs are seeing haven't really been working, and we haven't had the man power (or really the experts on this type of problem) until relatively recently.
This is embarrassing. I think (although I haven't done a comprehensive check) that we are the last component to become functional, and way behind schedule at that. We who have written software for it will now get our first chance to really put it through its paces. I expect lots of debugging and small design changes in the coming weeks as we realize exactly what we need from practical experience.
Hopefully I've built my code in such a way that adding features will be easy, but we'll see. As long as I've been coding now, I haven't had much chance to see my stuff in real world conditions, so this will be a good learning experience in code design I'm sure.
EDIT: Having not only received a correction, but actually someone thanking the corrector, it seems this point is a sore one for many people :p. To set the record strait, it seems Three Dog Night did indeed do "One is the Lonliest Number". Not really a song I listen to very often, don't own it or anything. Don't know where I got it in my head it was a Beatles song.