Going to Kyoto

So, my work here is done. We have taken all the data we want with the robot arm. That means I get the next few days off. So I have promptly planned to go to Kyoto to visit Jeff Newmark and explore some of the shrines, temples and castles there. Sadly I will only have about 4 days before I need to get back to KEK to take apart the robot arm and attend the last K2K Collaboration meeting.
If I make it to Jeff’s place I'll probably have some really cool photos to upload tomorrow. If you don't see a post, either I am too busy being a lazy tourist or I have gotten lost on the way to Kyoto. Your guess is as good as mine at this point.

Japanese Fast Food Rocks.

Seriously, if we had more Japanese style fast food joints in Canada, the fast food industry would get a lot of money out of me. Instead of burgers these places sell beef, chicken, pork, or fish with some seasoning and over rice. Instead of fries on the side you get a small salad and miso soup (either with seafood or with vegetables). Iced tea is free! Have a picture of me chowing down some damn good lunch:

Mine-san introduced this place to me, seen here enjoying noe of the seafood dishes:

We need one of those places in the Village dammit.

I need some b33r.

Finally everything is working again! Replaced the laser this morning, and got the DAQ working again. Then the robot arm needed some fixing, which was done sometime in the afternoon. Finally the AC in the electronics hut had a heart attack, but has recovered now. After some more fidgeting with the laser optics we are finally up and running again. Now I'm gonna go get some sleep or something. Right after I frequent that beer vending machine at the dorm. Doesn't quite have the grace of a good bartender or a sexy waitress, but it'll do. It gives us precious beer.

What Keeps Me Awake At Night

It was a cloudy morning three days past. I arrived at the Neutrino Hall (where we are taking data) with my belly full of bacon, . Here I was immediatly assulted with a load of errors that data aqusition system (DAQ) of the detector system was throwing at me. As I grudgetly realized this means I have to actually earn my pay by fixing this thing rather then lazily sitting by whatching the data flow.
For a little while I was totally mystified. Diving though the software I could find nothing to fix (not that I understand any of it). So I wondered off to check out the electronics crates. There is no really good way to express this mess of wires with words, so have some pictures:

The main logic for the near detector.


The main logic racks are in the back, the power supplies are the racks at the right ...


The thick cables go to/fro the PMTs in the 1kt tank. The panel in the back seems to have only one purpose in life: delaying a signal.

After crawling through that for a while and marveling at my ignorance of this system I emailed out a pitiful little plea for help. Help soon eventually arrived in the form of our polish collaborator on the scene (Asia is her name). Later I got more hlep (via email) from one of the guys back in Canada. Finally Mine-san a Japanese collaborator (currently down here from sunny California) arrived at the scene. After a while of screahcing our heads we called in even more help, in the form of one of the experts on the DAQ (Hayato-san his name would be). Hayato-san quickly found out that the DAQ is functioning, but there seems to be trouble with our system. The problem apparently was that our system was telling the DAQ to take more data then it possible could. Here is a picture of the system I am talking about:

You guessed it ... more electronics.

Anyway after some inspection (ie. going awal with an oscilloscope) we found that the problem is with our laser (which generates the light for our data):

Apparently it has gone past it's prime running contiuously for the last month-and a bit. Now my hope for salvation lies in a plasma cartridge which apprently needs exchanging. Well it's either that or I'm running away to Kyoto to visit Jeff.

Good reading.

So yesterday I finished a thick historical novel (The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett). One of the guys that were here for the robot arm setup (Keith) left me the novel. It was a rather enjoyable side step from my usual litirary cusine of Fantasy, Sci-Fi and physics text books. The first half of the book had me enthralled, but the second half got a little repeticious. The end was quite good again though, and it felt good to se the main antagonist hang, altough I would rather much have liked to see him burn.
Along the lines of book I don't usually read: today I read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. And excellent read, and short (took me about 2.5 hrs this evening). Now I feel inclined to read For Whom the Bell Tolls, just to see if it's as good as the song :)

Pussy Galore

A couple of stray kats have decided to make the KEK dorm their home. Here is a picture of me feeding a friendly little balck and wihte cat:

An here is a picture of a rather timid little red and white cat. It must have just gotten into a fight just when I got here, but seems to be recovering well enough now. Still it won't come close to, in fact once when I tried to give it a little more food where it was eating it attacked me when I got close. Tsk tsk.

After giving those two cats a little breakfast I had some curry for breakfast myself:

Rice for breakfast in not such a bad thing, although I still preferr some pancakes.

On Raw Chicken

Now don't look at me funny it was delicious. Of course I forgot my camera to take a picture of the place where we went to eat (stupid me). It was a classical Japaneses grill. One of our Japanese friends took us out for dinner there. He ordered us up some really tasty dishes, one of the best actually was a barbecued chicken with a chunk of really good wassabi. The odd thing was that only an outside layer of the chicken was actually roasted while the inside was raw. It was quite delicious, although I was a bit superstitious about raw meat. Either way I loved the dinner there, too bad I'm all sick now. With that let me go and visit the enterprise.