Entries tagged with laser

Crossposts: https://kareina.livejournal.com/509742.html

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A very busy Wednesday

I wound up staying up too late again last night. Right as I was ready to put down the computer and do yoga I was suddenly inspired to copy some more of my journal posts from on line and into Scrivener. Sure, there may be a way to just import them, but I am having fun taking them in one at a time and glancing at them as I do, adding key words, and, where I had had links, making certain to copy in the link address as well. I now have all of my entries for this calendar year in Scrivener (and am typing this one here in the first place, and then will post it when done. But by the time I got the last of this year’s posts copied it was around 01:30, and there was yoga still to do before bed. Oops. So I didn’t wake up till after 08:00, which was fine, since the plan for today was to work from home till my 11:00 meeting with my advisor in Durham, which still gave me some hours to accomplish stuff before the meeting. And then a bit more, as she wound up not being available till 11:30 after all. As soon as the meeting was over I grabbed a quick bite to eat and hurried in to Uni, where I met our new post doc and my boss’s nephew and took them to the lab and ran a laser experiment. The boy is 15 years old, and he is spending the week following his aunt and as many of her colleagues as will make time for him around and getting a picture of what it is like to work at a university. He will need to write up a report of his time here, and I suspect that his teacher will wonder just how many different businesses he went to, given how many different people she has found to share parts of their day with him.

However, taking time to explain what was happening as I set up the experiment meant that the experiment didn’t finish running till 16:15, so I was late to Parkour (which starts at 16:00). Johan met me there, so we did some acroyoga and some of the vaulting exercises of the Parkour session. When that was over I had just time to walk past the store and pick up a few groceries and head home, where I had almost 10 minutes to relax before time to go to the Herrskaps dance class, which was, as always much fun. We had live music this time, since it was the last class of the term, and that was nice. One of tonight’s dances was called “Den 57de Januarii 1762” (The 57th of January, 1762), which I think would be a perfect name for the dance book that they are going to publish of these dances.

Crossposts: https://kareina.livejournal.com/498032.html

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it begins to feel real

I spent more than two hours after work today just doing admin sorts of tasks as a new PhD student at Durham. The department secretary sent me the "Post Graduate Research Handbook", and I have gone through there, took care of the quick and easy tasks that it assigned (like putting my "annual progress review" on the calendar for September), and starting on more complicated tasks (like filling in my profile for the department web page). That last task turns out to be harder than I would have expected, since one can only log in and access that server from an on-campus computer. Therefore I checked the Durham IT page to find what VPN they recommend, and found out that, unlike LTU, where any staff or post grad student may download and install a VPN connection to permit them to work remotely, at Durham one must fill in a form explaining to IT exactly why you need VPN, and one must supply the name of a "sponsor". So I sent my supervisor a note warning her I would list her as a sponsor, and explained to IT that as a long distance student who is required to access the department server to create and maintain my profile, and as a research student who needs access to library databases and publications, that I actually do need that VPN connection. I further explained that I have used them before, that I have spent eight years in academia between my first PhD and enrolling for this one.

Now, I just need to put in the hours doing the research, too. I often find it easier to focus on these sorts of admin tasks, as they tend to be smaller, easier to define, and often kinda fun.

I met Ellinor after work today for acroyoga. First we discussed a dream we have to find more people to do acroyoga with. We are going to approach the uni gym about getting regular sessions going there, with us as the leaders. Perhaps every other Thursday evening. If all goes well we will find plenty more people who want to play, and we won't always be dependent on the other having free time and energy and good health at the same time as we have. Then we went to the gym to do "20 or 30 minutes" of acroyoga. 53 very enjoyable minutes later she went off to Phire training, and I went home to get some dinner and empty my Durham in-box. I had been half expecting today's acroyoga to be difficult, since I did no exercise all weekend (other than very short yoga sessions each day), since I had come home from Umeå with a runny nose. But by Monday evening I was feeling good enough that I did a quick 15 minute workout before yoga, and today our session just felt easy.

I love how solid of a base she has become. When I am in that airplane pose, supported only by her feet under my hips I feel as comfortable as if I were laying on the floor. These days the "spiny thingie" (as we call it), where I go from hanging upside from her feet like a bat, to being balanced in a backwards airplane, with my hips on her feet and my feet in the air over her head, then back around to hanging like a bat again, feels easy. I remember how difficult it was when first we tried it, and now I never feel like she could drop me.

Work today was doing sphalerite analyses with one of our PhD students. She will be in the lab again tomorrow, but I have that doc appointment at 08:30, so am not certain what time I will make it. Therefore she will try turning on the machine on her own (I let her drive today). With luck the written instructions I have prepared (long since), plus having seen me do it both yesterday and a few times since Christmas will be enough. I think I may be more nervous about someone else using my lab when I am not there than I am what the doc will say. That said, I did ask Ellinor to come with me to the appointment, for moral support, and on the off chance that it would be useful to have a native Swedish speaker along. Of course, it will be fine, there will be no problems, and I will be able to head off to Durham on Friday with no complications.

Crossposts: https://kareina.livejournal.com/496969.html

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inspiring trip

I am just back from a quick trip to Umeå, where I met with the head of their Archaeology department and some of his students and colleagues. I sent them an email in December to introduce myself, since they are the most local archaeology department, and he invited me to drop by some time, so I did.

I arrived on Thursday evening, just on time to head to the lokal, the basement apartment that the Uma group rents (cheap) for their meetings and to store the group stuff for their regular Thursday gathering. Had a good time hanging out there with folk, and helped my minion with fitting on his costume in progress, before I followed him back to his place to do yoga (together, it is so nice to have company for yoga!) and get some sleep. This morning he and I hung out and cooked breakfast together and then his girlfriend L. arrived for a short visit before it was time for me to head over to the Archaeology Department. It was really good to see everyone, I wish that it didn't take so long to travel between places (three hours by car, or four by bus to get to Umeå from here--I took the bus, even though it is longer, because one can relax, and it costs about the same as petrol would have if only one is going).

The Archaeologists showed me their NIR equipment and some of their results. That is a technique I knew nothing about, and find it fascinating. They were able to distinguish a couple of different types of quartzite and a couple of different types of quartz from one of their finds. He suggests that if I am interested I could use their NIR technique on my soapstone before doing spot analyses, and they are interested in using my laser lab, so it was a good visit. I especially enjoyed the photos his student, Claudia, showed me of her work studying the walls at Carcasone. There is just so much really cool and fascinating stuff to do in the intersection between archaeology and geology! I am so delighted that I decided to start down this path. (Do feel free to remind me of this later, when/if I hit difficult or stressfull parts of the project.)

He also made a comment that has inspired me for a possible experimental archaeology component to my research. While we were discussing the differences between the two quartzites in their study above he commented that it could be due to changes as a result of use, rather than differences in the original rock--that if one heats a stone in a hearth every day, some changes are bound to happen. Therefore it could be fun to get my hands on some soapstone and make a vessel or baking stone, analyze it when it is new, then use it for cooking or baking (I love to bake, which is why latter crossed my mind) in a fire on a regular basis, keeping careful records of when, how long, etc., and then periodically re-analyze it, to see what, if any, changes wind up being visible, and if any, how long it took before they were noticeable. However, given how the small analysis chamber of the laser is, a baking stone wouldn't lend itself well to this idea, unless we were only using the NIR for its analysis...

After my meeting I met with friend Aron, who used to live in Luleå and sung in the student choir with me, and he joined me for waiting for the bus (I had about an hour with him), which was really nice.

Looking forward to my visit to Durham only one more week. Now I just need to remember to take with me things that I forgot to bring with me to Umeå (like the extra battery for recharging the phone while traveling).

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a nice end to a productive week at work

I am home from a delightful evening at Frostheim. There were six of us this week. Both of my apprentices, the husband of my senior apprentice, two of the other students, and myself. While there I managed to help one of the boys cut a rectangle of lovely blue wool into a fantasy pirate cloak with collar, taught one of my apprentices to do nålbinding with the beautiful stone needle

lord_kjar made for her (she is also a geologist), made a wool rim for the Lucia crown that she will be wearing for our choir Lucia performance next week, and had a delightful time visiting with people.

After the meeting I did some grocery shopping and after I got home participated in an unexpected defrosting of one of the downstairs freezers when we discovered that its door no longer shut properly due to one of the drawers not having been put back properly last time it was opened, which caused huge amounts of ice to build up between the drawers and the door. oops. Luckily the contents all fit into the other freezers (well, except for the 3 plastic bottles of ice, which we don't actually need till the next time we want to take food along in an ice chest.

Work this week has been good, but long. This was the week that one of the guys from the company that sold us the ICP-MS was here to do training and troubleshooting of the issues we had been having with the system. We discovered several things that, together, seem to explain why we were getting such low signal. There were some small leaks in the tubing connecting the Laser to the ICP-MS. Fixing those, however, didn't bring the signal back up to where it should be. Then we noticed that the laser isn't actually firing at full strength anymore. It used to be that when we asked for 7 J/cm^2 we actually got that much energy reported. However, these days that setting gives only just over 4 J/cm^2. So we tried putting the request in terms of % laser energy, and discovered that to get 7 J/cm^2 out of it we need to ask it for about 60% power. Doing this, AND all of the minor changes to default settings that he made while he was here, and now the laser and ICP-MS are playing nicely together again--the signal strength is as good as it was some months ago before we first started having issues.

We even switched back and forth between solutions mode and laser ablation mode, and each time we got the signal back to where it should be straight away. I am hopeful that it will still have good signal on Monday when the service/training guy isn't here anymore. Wish me luck.