Ah, yes, the kids are back to school.

The first thing I heard this morning was some 16 year old girl saying "She wants us to call her Professor. I think that's stupid."

Five things I've seen or heard in the past 48 hours.

1- On a styrofoam container on my desk: "NO; He is supposed to call me."

2- Exchange between a customer and an employee at the Cremiere in Place Ville Marie.

Customer: "What is that?"

Employee: "It's like a Blizzard."

Customer: "Really? But I don't want that!"

3- A man shaving on the 11:30 train home.             

4- Scribbled in purple on a sheet of paper on my desk: 

"I anm

space -go

U bar"

5- My dad: "I'm on 'how to pickle garlic dot com'. Apparently it's normal for the garlic to turn blue."

Back to working on my Muon Asymmetry poster.

CRAQ Presentation yesterday, then a bar.

I really need to get this sleep schedule thing down. My presentation (Optical Transients via Cherenkov Telescopes) went over pretty well. I wasn't totally unclear, which is nice. Afterwards, we went to a brewpub (Amene a Boire). The food was so-so, but the beer was pretty good. Had a white that had some banana flavoring (which is ambitious for me). I'd go again, but only post-meal. Also, the fourth floor only has 4 kinds of beer for sale, as opposed to several others sold on lower levels.

I'm back there this morning. There'll be a few presentations on interstellar medium, if memory serves. 

Conferences aside, I've still got a timestamp discrepancy between the QDC and TDC data, which means that I can only use the TDC or QDC data sets independently, which is really starting to become troublesome. I think that one of the two DAQ cards is a little bit slower (a few tens of nanoseconds) so if two muons come in in a short time period, one of the cards is only seeing one of them because it's still busy getting data from the first one. 

Presentation t'morroe.

Tomorrow I'm going to talk about my research on optical transients in front of grad students from McGill, UdeM and Universite de Laval. My slides are more or less done, but I'm not as confident in what I know as I'd like to be. There is indeed a supper afterwards I'd like to attend (if not for the company than for all the different in-house brews, http://www.amereaboire.com/). Only trouble is that it's a bit late for my likings, 19:45, and I'd have to public transit it there and back.

Ack! TDC problem.

I just found a huge discrepency between two timestamps that should be almost the same. Gods damn.

Pure Genius.

Thank you, XKCD...

Loving the new 'scope.

I can make out cloud patterns on Jupiter and if it was oriented the right way, I'm pretty sure I could see the Great Red Spot. Still getting used to the Equatorial Mounting system (AKA GEM), though. That aside, observing conditions tonight are rather poor, and so now I am looking for other things to do. Looking up beer recipes. Trying to figure out how I'm going to get the apple chunks out of my fermenter. 

I've also got two presentations to get ready. One for the end of the week, another for sometime during the next. Plenty of work to keep me busy...

Netbook Blues

My poor netbook. It was not designed to be running FPGA development software, and yet, it tries do diligently to do so. It is all in vain, however, as simply attempting to compile the software takes on the order of an hour (at which point it fails anyway). 

Perhaps it is time for an upgrade... Something with a standard resolution at least. I must admit I'm fed up of this absurd screen resolution that keeps chopping pages and windows off halfway.

BSOD'd!

I got myself a telescope on Saturday. A 5" Newtonian on a EQ3 mount. I like the size, and I think I could computerize the mount easily enough. Ideally, I'd use an FPGA board (with onboard RAM and an LCD) running some software to trigger pulses in stepper motors connected to the RA and DEC controls. I think the only tricky part would be the memory interface (i.e., exactly what I'm working on now for my detector).

On another note, It's really warm in here and I at some point, my computer at home came out of sleep. This is scary because now it can BSOD at any time. The heat has really been getting to it. I had to open up the side panel to keep it from locking up.

I love you, Summer, but if you break the God Computer I will end you.

Sinking Ice and Meteor Showers

So, I saw GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra last night and thought I'd make a few comments.

<spoilers>
Firstly, Christopher Eccleston makes a great supervillain. And the idea that he used NATO's money to develop weapons he'd then steal was pretty clever. Not necessarily original, but today, it's almost impossible to do something that doesn't come off as cliche.

The underwater battle was pretty neat. I can't think of another movie that's done this before and it got away from doing something similar with space/airships and tanks. The last time I'd seen something original to that extent was in Swordfish when they hoist up the bus with the helicopter. The only beef I have with this scene is that when the self destruct mechanism for the enemy base goes off, not only do we see ice sinking, but one of the characters says something along the lines of "The Joes will be killed by a million tons of steel and ice". Ice floats! The writers only needed to leave out those last two words and I could have let the science go.

Accelerator suits, Mach 5 or 6 STOL aircraft piloted via neural interfaces and Celtic voice commands (also, why does the redhead know Celtic and not tie her hair up anyway?), nanomites to turn your burnt face into something metallic, and don't even get me started on the H2 chase, I could have gotten past all of this (hey, it's the future). But sinking ice? This is pretty basic. 
</spoilers>

Subsequently, after the film, the Perseid Meteor Shower was at its peak, so I tried to find a good spot to observe from (not obvious because of the trees in my backyard and the street lights every 12cm in the front, but I saw a couple events before I hit the sack, and this was the lead in to the funniest thing I've heard this week.

Having gone to bed in the wee hours of the morning, I needed a stiff drink and stopped at the Second Cup on McGill College rather than the Trottier Cafeteria (which doesn't sell Starbucks coffee anymore and "Seattle's Best' is less than awesome). When it was my turn, I asked for a large coffee and the return question was "What kind?" to which I responded "Something dark." She took one look at me and called out to the guy who was making drinks "One large battery acid to go". 

I think it was the greatest coffee of my life.

OK, back to work.

Bad PMT

It would seem as though one of my photomultiplier tubes has konked out on me.

Also, I learned today that I have a presentation to give in 17 days in
front of new grad students from 2 universities about optical
transients and FPGAs. Oh boy.

Thank you, Andrew.

Quote of the day: MIR is being attacked by PHYSICS!

I just saw an old lady smack a guy my age with her cane.
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Experiment running.

So the muon experiment is almost off the ground. At this point, I've
only got to figure out why one of my signals seems lumpy (for lack of
a better term) albeit this may simply be due to the characteristics of
the photomultiplier tube.