revchris

The Director of the instrumentation center downstairs is teaching a class this semester that is basically a quick "these are the machines we have and how to use them" course to give people a better idea of what is available and how they could help out people's research.

In two weeks he's doing a lecture on optical microscopy, and using my teaching lab for it.

As part of the lecture, I'm going to make a sample for him ahead of time. He's going to present a picture of the result, and tell people that it is an "artificially colored sample done with the equipment in the room." Then he's going to have them figure out how it was done.

How it's going to be done: I'm going to make an empty mount and grind and polish it flat and smooth. Then I'm going to drill a hole about halfway through it. Next, I'm going to pack the cavity with very tiny pieces of colored modeling clay, and use a razor blade to cleave the resulting mass to flat. Finally, if it works, we're going to take pictures of it.

As a materials science gag, it'll go over well.

As something to do to make your class think, they're definitely not going to like it, since it's going to come right after where he talks about cross polarized light, which can be used to induce false coloration in optically active surfaces and is frequently used to determine orientation angles.

We got money from the College this year to do some upgrades in the teaching labs.

one of the projects was a new computer for the xray powder diffraction system. I got all the software installed and then went to set up the machine, only to realize that the old machine has been around just long enough for me to forget that the interface card is a full-size PCI card. Every computer I've got that is newer than the current one doesn't fit the card either because Dell puts stuff in the way whenever they can, or there is a drive cage along the full height of the tower.

I can't replace the card, because I don't know if there's a smaller one, and this one cost $12k, so I don't really have budget for another one. I put the card back into the old computer (a 1.8GHz p4), upgraded the computer from 256MB of memory to 1GB, and then spent yesterday and today upgrading it to WinXP (from 98) and getting everything to work with the network login. Eventually, I may look into a big case and build a new computer.

During this whole process, I decided to use the (planned) new computer to replace the other computer in the lab, which controlled the older xray system. It was a much easier move (so far) than I thought it would be, as the hard drive on the computer I was replacing is dead (no head noise, no platter spinning noises, and a blinky LED on it's circuit board).

The new computer is set up with the analysis software and the search database, and everything there also works with the network, so that's good to go until somebody decides that they need the old machine to work, at which point if I haven't found a backup of the software (completely homemade, no backups in any obvious locations, the old backups probably having been eaten by a drive crash years ago), we'll decide whether we want to have the drive recovered, just scrap the whole works, or see if we can talk the ECE department into making it a senior design project, which is how we got the software in the first place.

During this whole process, I'm also printing posters. One of the grads from E's group emailed me a poster on Tuesday, with a note that there would be a few more for next week's conference. Yesterday I got another one, and today they sent me two more, with a note that there were another two coming. I replied by saying that I only had two or three posters worth of good paper left, so they might have to wait. It turned out that I had three posters worth, plus eleven inches of paper, which is just enough to finish the third poster without tripping the "out of paper" sensor. The guy who was doing the last two posters is willing to have them printed on bright white bond, so they'll get printed in the morning.

This is one of the reasons why work pays DoIT annually to make my email box hold 1GB (instead of the normal 200MB), as each poster arrives as an 8-20MB powerpoint file.

All the poster printing goes into my new hardware fund, and this batch is going to put another flat panel monitor into one of the teaching labs. It takes a conference or two to get anything good, as we basically only charge costs, so a 3'x4' poster costs either $30 or $45 (full-color posters - i.e. backgrounds too - cost more). They don't want me to charge more, and I won't charge less, as this way people think about the costs before they decide whether they're printing every random thing they have or not.

I, of course, get anything I want printed free, but that's the advantage of being the guy with the printer, and of being the guy who sends out the printer bills. Most of what I print out, however, is line art on plain paper (think floor plans and equipment drawings), so nobody really worries about it.

Tomorrow I'm teaching the TA that's going to be running the xray lab next week how the new setup works and I've got a guy from one of the Civil Engineering research groups coming over to use one of the microscopes to take pictures of nanoparticles.

Now, off to think about what to make for dinner, not knowing when teeka will be done teaching class.

Some days....

One of my profs ordered a new electron microscope about a year ago.

It was supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Yesterday, after a couple calls to make sure they knew where to deliver it, I got a call saying it didn't clear customs (it's coming from Germany), and it'd be delivered on Friday.

This morning, the customs expediters called the prof te tell him it cleared this morning. Nobody said anything, however, about the fact that they were going to put it on a truck and send it right over. I had been thinking about taking the afternoon off, but hadn't quite left yet when the phone rang.

It was the truck driver. He was down by the fountain wanting to know where he was supposed to unload.

I grabbed the prof and the service tech (who has to oversee the unloading, and plug in one of the crates) and another staff guy, and we went and unloaded the truck. 13 crates, weighing between 100kg (225lbs) and 1400kg (3100lbs). Is there such a thing as metric skids? It seems like there are a lot of skids that are just slightly too small for a "standard" pallet jack these days.

We unloaded the first 10 by hand and then I drove the forklift up into the truck to unload the next two and to pull the heaviest one to the back of the truck, which required then driving the truck away from the dock and letting the dock plate drop because with the skid at the back of the truck I couldn't maneuver the forklift out from under the skid completely.

We had the truck driver drive the last skid over to the building it's being stored in. THe biggest box is 9' tall, and we had to find somebody else's building to store it in because none of our doors are tall enough. Eventually we'll have the masons take our building apart so that we can get the last skid in.

Then we moved the other 12 skids off the dock and over to our building. 11 are in my warehouse, and the 12th is inside because it has a high-vacuum pump that has to be plugged in to keep the electron gun that's in the box from dying.

It's been a long afternoon, largely because I'm the only one in my building who can drive a forklift, and it takes the big outside forklift to go from the dock to the building and then the little inside lift to move stuff around in the warehouse, leaving me continuously shifting from forklift to forklift.

We have a professor visiting one of our research groups for the next several months (he's on sabbatical and using that time to collaborate here).

He's looking forward to it because I told him today that I'd help him get his hands dirty at whatever he wanted to try in the labs we've got. Apparently, he's not allowed to do anything hands-on back in his lab because his students are doing it all. I've worked with him before, and I know he's not a klutz and can do a lot of the stuff he's talking about, but we both realize that he's probably going to need a little extra training here and there to make it all work.

He's a polymer guy, but he's got some soft glass materials he wants to polish, and if we are in the foundry this summer, he wants to help there too.

My desk at work, like my whole office, accumulates stuff.

Eventually, I can't find something that I know I just had, and it's time to thin the stuff out (also know as cleaning my office).

This sometimes leads to odd questions, based on what I find.

Today's is: Why do I have a metallic purple paint marker in my pen cup? It was completely dried out, so the question really is moot, but I still wonder where it came from.

My boss decided today that I should buy a new digital camera for work

Our current "state of the art" camera is a CoolPix 2100. She wants to use it for taking pictures in class and decided that I shouldn't have to carry mine around anymore.

Work is getting a Canon Rebel XT (8 MPixel)with the base 18-55mm lens. It's actually about $100 over my initial budget, but, from the reviews, it seems to work better in the macro range than other cameras I could find, and I can eventually put other lenses onto it.

It's cold enough this morning that Madison Public Schools are closed. This is only the 3rd-4th time I remember them closing.

The University, however, is open and holding classes.

Oh, and the -30F windchill can stop at any time now. We've all experienced it, so it can go away now, kthx.

When I came in to work the day after Christmas, all the clocks were stopped at 1:59, so I put in a workorder to have it fixed.

When I came in to work the day after New Years, all the clocks were still stopped at 1:59, and I noticed that they were also stopped at the same time in the building next door. I called teh electric shop and left them voicemail to see what was going on.

Yesterday i ran into the electricians who were working on the problem, and they said that they were tracking it down and it was a campus time signal cable problem somewhere in the tunnels near my building. Around 1:30 this afternoon, the clocks all ran for 6 minutes, and then stopped again, until it was 2:05, when they started up, and, hopefully, will now keep running.

People were starting to complain about not knowing what time it was. I'll admit that I had to keep reminding myself to either look at my cell phone or the clock in the fume hood (we needed a clock with a second hand for timing etchants, and a battery powered clock was the simplest way).

I called Grounds this morning and pointed out that they've never plowed the new sidewalks next to my building (between my building and Mechanical Engineering).

There's currently a jeep with a snowplow bashing it's way through the snow and the underlying ice layer trying to find the sidewalk. Every time they clear a little concrete they adjust their route as they figure out where the sidewalk is.

Apparently the problem I was having yesterday where my disk swap was bogging down my computer was caused by the two disks mutually killing each other, and causing my computer to use 50-60% of it's processing power to deal with hardware interrupts.

One of the drives gives SMART errors ("One of the parameters exceeds allowed values"), had been replaced previously, and is no longer in warranty, so it's going to become refrigerator magnets. The other one doesn't give any error messages, but since it prevents my computer from booting into Windows, it will be going back to Seagate for replacement.

Now all I've got to do is finish rebuilding my backups (on yet another new drive). 30GB copied so far, another 90GB yet to go.