Finally, my Astrofluids presentation will be done today, two weeks late. I'm happy to get it out of the way, it was somewhat time consuming to review for it every week, but in two hours, it'll be done. 

That aside, the DQM reports are becoming faster to do, as expected, so now it only eats up about 3 hours of time. I expect that I can get this down to two. 

Tonight, I have the night off and I think I'm going to run to Microbytes for a male-to-female RS-232 adapter for my FPGA project; Maybe tomorrow I can throw together some working code, which will be exciting. 

That aside, I've discovered that assuming all my neighbor's deck lights are off, I can observe an interesting part of the sky (Mars and Orion) from my back porch, assuming that I can align the telescope correctly. This is tricky because there's a tree in the way of Polaris, so I'm going to have to hope that I can orient the base North by eye (using the house as a reference). 

I just saw a guy go by carrying a harp.
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Last labs today.

Today is the last of the 8:30AM labs (and soon the 2:00PM labs), which is too bad. I really had a good time with the students. I'm now drinking my morning coffee and working on a weird compilation error I'm getting on my FPGA  project. It would seem as though the compiler thinks that one of my pins is a clock pin, which isn't true, and it's complaining about it. 

Once that is done, I'm ready to test the interface at low speeds. I bought a USB-Serial adapter so I can plug into the serial out port on the ML402 board. This will allow me to see what is going on as the processor I've placed on the ML402 executes its code. It'll definitely work as a proof-of-concept that all my stuff works, and then *I just need to figure out the Ethernet connection. Of course, compilation errors are rarely referred to as easy to fix.

I am always nervous when I step past a tank of liquid helium only to find that it is hissing loudly.
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Productivity is down.

So there I was, taking a glass out of the cupboard to get a drink, when the cup slipped, breaking into a thousand pieces just as my hand had grabbed it, essentially causing me to slam my hand into broken glass. After what I believe to be the loudest I've ever cursed, ever, I quickly wrapped it in a tshirt, and went to the hospital.

Silly me to get hurt at night. At that point, there was only one doctor the entire hospital, a bunch of parents waiting with their small children and a constant flux of ambulances. I waited in the ER for 9 hours to get 15 minutes worth of stitches. Typing is not nearly as fun as it used to be. I also missed two presentations for AstroFluids that i need to do next week. 

This was Wednesday, a day precceded by a day where I TA'd a lab. It went really well, no major issues (apart from perhaps a poorly phrased question), the only problem was that the other guy I TA with didn't show up for lab section, and so I had to do it alone.  Considering it was my second of the day, though, it didn't go too bad; I just did more running around than usual.

I've purchased a USB to Serial adapter so I can talk to my computer from the FPGA board, I'm currently coding up a peripheral so that I can test it up. In theory, if all goes well, I'll know right away whether or not my peripherals are working right, which means that the last issue to remedy will be the Ethernet. Things are looking good.

C'mon, we're not that bad.

...Usually.




====

On another note, the first DQM report of the season went up yesterday, no major problems there. Unfortunately, however, T4 is acting up, there's something wrong with it's positioner, which places it out of commission until further notice.

Fwd: FROM YANG

Wow, these still happen?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <fmeeberg@planet.nl>
Date: Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 7:29 PM
Subject: FROM YANG
To:

FROM YANG
Greetings, I am Ming Yang writing from Hong Kong. I am writing you because I want you to join me in a business project worth 24.5M Dollars. You will have a share of 50% after we finish.
Please write me back at my private e-mail: yangming.mingyang.yangming@gmail.com

Thanks.
Ming Yang

The rest of the Arizona pictures.

The best from my latest trip have been uploaded to a Google web album because I don't like how Blogger manages photos. 

http://picasaweb.google.ca/Captain.Griffin/ArazonaII

I'm pretty busy at the moment, I need to give a presentation about Point-in-cell simulations in my AstroFluids course. I think it's a bit of a toss up as to how interesting it's going to be. 

Update

I'm crimping power connectors for the LED flashers in the T4 trailer. (On my own), I managed to maneuver the Genie Lift close enough to the crossbeam on T4 to tie up the cables, and then I fed them through the quadrapod arm into the camera box (not an easy feat: I was literally caught elbow deep in the camera box for 15 minutes with no one around to see my epic fail after I had managed to find the other end of the cable I was snaking).

Back to crimping.

Morning of the last Day

Last night was another pretty late one. Andrew and I spent the morning identifying spare cables in the camera box and control trailers so that we could plug the LED flashers into them. We succeeded pretty early on, so then we had to go about attaching them. Unfortunately, we didn't have the tie-wraps we needed to do so, so we instead tackled T1, which already had the flasher system wired up, we just had to see if we could get it to fire using the Charge Injection system on the array. Subsequently, that worked like a dream, and we were able to produce a very pretty oscilloscope trace as can be seen in the attached image. 

Unfortunately, albeit the fact that I have some pretty nice pictures, I'm too time constrained right now to post them, as we have a meeting at 9AM at Base Camp, it's currently 8:18AM and we're 30 minutes away. 

Will try to post them during lunch.

A very long day, indeed.

Today, Andrew and I aligned every mirror facet on T4. It took most of the day, near 5:30 we were done and I drove up to the Ridge for the first time, snapping a nice sunset image. After supper, I drove back down because there are two other people around who are working with something called the Road Laser which looks at atmospheric disturbances, and given that they had the telescopes on, we (Andrew and I) had to man the control room. We wrapped that up at midnight, the day started at 9.

There wasn't much going on in the control room, we were mostly just there to turn off the array if anything went wrong. There was one Gamma-ray Burst Alert (which ordinarily we would slew to and start taking data on) but it was too low on the horizon, so instead, I went outside and took some nice telescope images with my camera. Attached below are the highlights of the day, captions to come when I'm not super sleepy.