In Dire Need of a Vacation
We're back over at Berkeley doing research at the big, shiny particle accelorator again. This summer there are four grad. students from my lab and two undergrads (both my friends and assigned to work on my project... I have minions!) It's been a bit chaotic as usual, but in some ways more so since the big D (one of the two Sandia boss guys, the machine is his baby and thus he is far more anal about it than the rest of us) is in Colorado this summer and isn't around to keep the machine up and running and keep us all inline about using it properly. His poor postdoc has that doubious honor, which I know he isn't enjoying. The rest of the people there are either his other boss or former post docs who have all been using the machine for much longer than him. Nice guy and he's doing better about telling people they're being stupid. Looks like he'll do fine.
We had a 12 hour shift yesterday and I was hoping to finish up my thesis projects (the one's the minions are helping me with). It should have been a simple day, we've done basically this exact experiment 2-3 times already and the chemicals we're using are dependable. We had tried to run this experiment on Thursday and had issues, part of which occured because we accidentially knocked the laser mirror at one point. This meant that they had to realign the darned thing, which involved venting the machine and many, many wasted hours. Turned out ok because they were able to do some stuff scheduled for the following day so we didn't really screw up the schedule, but we didn't get to collect data either. Yesterday we got everything in working order and put in our precursor and went to check the signal and how well it was photolyzing and... nothing. We saw great signal for the substance, so it was clearly flowing and in the system and the laser was working fine... but no photoloysis products. This was especially odd because we've used this stuff for years with no problem and know what conditions it needs and what it should look like. El Jefe (my advisor's old boss man at Sandia and the other boss men there. El Jefe and the big D are like parents. When you don't liekthe answer from one you ask the other and they're always on opposite ends of the spectrum. It's usually a safe bet to pick somewhere in between on how they tell you to handle the machine...) didn't know either. After puzzling for a bit, my mystery warrented it's very own "WTF?!" in the official notebook from El Jefe, which is reserved for the truly bizaar mysteries.
The good news is that we were able to switch to a different system and got good data for the rest of the day. The bad news, my project still isn't working. I suspect this is the nature of data that is needed to finish off a thesis. It's unobtainable, like true enlightenment or good BBQ in SF.
The day did get better as I was able to meet up with commodoremarie and saklani2 for a lovely dinner and an evening with David Sadaris. Even got my book signed. I think he was amusing himself during the signings by drawing pictures in each book of animals, which made it a lot of fun. commodoremarie got all of her books signed and got a different animal in each, although the last book didn't have an animal, but the inscription "thank you for making me rich." The show itself was fun and funny, although the one story about flies was kinda gross. Did much better with it than I thought I would, but it was clear from the question and answer portion that quite a bit of the audience didn't really relish the idea of flies eating vomit. I did enjoy his answer to the high school student that asked about his stories ending up in text books. He made the point that authors don't always mean to make their work as deep and insightful as it ends up being, sometimes these things happen on their own. This was my biggest complaint with English classes in Highschool as I always thought it was BS when the teacher would ask "what is the author saying here?" Maybe they didn't mean to say anything, and I have long held that is the beauty of writing and, more importantly to me, reading. If authors were aware enough to plan every single simile, every single bit of social commentary, etc. it would be far too cold and calculating and just takes all the fun right out of it. Maybe this is why I hated English in Highschool, but it was still fun to listen to David Sadaris appologize to the kid because he'd had to write an essay about David's work.
After a brief jog over to Green Apple and Quickly I made it home a mere 18 hours after I left my house to discover that I had left my house keys in the back of commodoremarie's car. Go me! I think my fuzzy thesis brain needs a break.
We had a 12 hour shift yesterday and I was hoping to finish up my thesis projects (the one's the minions are helping me with). It should have been a simple day, we've done basically this exact experiment 2-3 times already and the chemicals we're using are dependable. We had tried to run this experiment on Thursday and had issues, part of which occured because we accidentially knocked the laser mirror at one point. This meant that they had to realign the darned thing, which involved venting the machine and many, many wasted hours. Turned out ok because they were able to do some stuff scheduled for the following day so we didn't really screw up the schedule, but we didn't get to collect data either. Yesterday we got everything in working order and put in our precursor and went to check the signal and how well it was photolyzing and... nothing. We saw great signal for the substance, so it was clearly flowing and in the system and the laser was working fine... but no photoloysis products. This was especially odd because we've used this stuff for years with no problem and know what conditions it needs and what it should look like. El Jefe (my advisor's old boss man at Sandia and the other boss men there. El Jefe and the big D are like parents. When you don't liekthe answer from one you ask the other and they're always on opposite ends of the spectrum. It's usually a safe bet to pick somewhere in between on how they tell you to handle the machine...) didn't know either. After puzzling for a bit, my mystery warrented it's very own "WTF?!" in the official notebook from El Jefe, which is reserved for the truly bizaar mysteries.
The good news is that we were able to switch to a different system and got good data for the rest of the day. The bad news, my project still isn't working. I suspect this is the nature of data that is needed to finish off a thesis. It's unobtainable, like true enlightenment or good BBQ in SF.
The day did get better as I was able to meet up with commodoremarie and saklani2 for a lovely dinner and an evening with David Sadaris. Even got my book signed. I think he was amusing himself during the signings by drawing pictures in each book of animals, which made it a lot of fun. commodoremarie got all of her books signed and got a different animal in each, although the last book didn't have an animal, but the inscription "thank you for making me rich." The show itself was fun and funny, although the one story about flies was kinda gross. Did much better with it than I thought I would, but it was clear from the question and answer portion that quite a bit of the audience didn't really relish the idea of flies eating vomit. I did enjoy his answer to the high school student that asked about his stories ending up in text books. He made the point that authors don't always mean to make their work as deep and insightful as it ends up being, sometimes these things happen on their own. This was my biggest complaint with English classes in Highschool as I always thought it was BS when the teacher would ask "what is the author saying here?" Maybe they didn't mean to say anything, and I have long held that is the beauty of writing and, more importantly to me, reading. If authors were aware enough to plan every single simile, every single bit of social commentary, etc. it would be far too cold and calculating and just takes all the fun right out of it. Maybe this is why I hated English in Highschool, but it was still fun to listen to David Sadaris appologize to the kid because he'd had to write an essay about David's work.
After a brief jog over to Green Apple and Quickly I made it home a mere 18 hours after I left my house to discover that I had left my house keys in the back of commodoremarie's car. Go me! I think my fuzzy thesis brain needs a break.