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...