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belisarius_534So, what's been going on in the world of Mike?
I had a good trip to Switzerland and the experiments went reasonably well although the different bits of the beamline didn't work perfectly together. Looking at the data now, it might be a nice publishable result. I left some suggestions which they are going to implement for next time. The exchange rate prevented too much shopping (e.g. £4.50 for a cappuccino at the airport...) but I did of course bring back chocolate for C.
At the weekend we headed down Giant's Hole. This was the second choice cave after our recce of the first choice found the entrance climb down to contain a raging torrent after all the rain. Giant's provided plenty of entertainment without too much crawling. Most interesting was the unroped canyon traverse, with one foot either side (alternatively bum on one side, feet on the other) of a deep, narrow drop. Particularly exciting was the narrowing point which short people were going through head first. I was put off by the large drop under my nose so reverted to a feet first approach with additional bum wedging.
Back to the lab this week. The crazy discussions with the boss of a while back seem to have been erased by revisionist history (politicians, huh) so I'm cracking on with research. Today we are fighting with the Bastard, as I like to call the EPR spectrometer with liquid helium attachment. It looks like the delay will be sufficient to postpone things until tomorrow, so I can get to tonight's game without working late.
I had a good trip to Switzerland and the experiments went reasonably well although the different bits of the beamline didn't work perfectly together. Looking at the data now, it might be a nice publishable result. I left some suggestions which they are going to implement for next time. The exchange rate prevented too much shopping (e.g. £4.50 for a cappuccino at the airport...) but I did of course bring back chocolate for C.
At the weekend we headed down Giant's Hole. This was the second choice cave after our recce of the first choice found the entrance climb down to contain a raging torrent after all the rain. Giant's provided plenty of entertainment without too much crawling. Most interesting was the unroped canyon traverse, with one foot either side (alternatively bum on one side, feet on the other) of a deep, narrow drop. Particularly exciting was the narrowing point which short people were going through head first. I was put off by the large drop under my nose so reverted to a feet first approach with additional bum wedging.
Back to the lab this week. The crazy discussions with the boss of a while back seem to have been erased by revisionist history (politicians, huh) so I'm cracking on with research. Today we are fighting with the Bastard, as I like to call the EPR spectrometer with liquid helium attachment. It looks like the delay will be sufficient to postpone things until tomorrow, so I can get to tonight's game without working late.
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Date: 2009-12-08 10:32 pm (UTC)Then bum wedging somewhere with an amusing name.