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August 2005 Archives
Want to know what's playing on the Audiotron? Well, it is: [Audiotron is off] This is a server-side include that will give you the title and artist of whatever I'm listening to at home, if the Audiotron is on. It is replicated at the bottom of this page as well. Woo... Mouser: We spent most of the weekend reorganizing the network in the house. Chris: You're a huge geek. Mouser: Oh yeah? Well maybe I'll just whip up a Visio network topology diagram. Chris: See my previous message. Mouser:  That Chris... he knows a thing or two. The past two weeks have been spent teaching IAEA inspectors how to use neutron detectors. My two students were named Zbigniew (zBEAK-nee-ev) and Gytis (GEE-tis) from Poland and Lithuania, respectively. They were really great to work with and it was interesting to hear their stories from inspections all over the world. We were running short on calculators in the laboratory that weren't out of batteries, and no one knew how to operate the lone RPN calculator we had. I figured that of everyone there, the Polish guy should know how to use it. So I taught Zbig how to use an HP calculator and he took to it so strongly that by the end of class he was asking me where he could buy one. I also met a guy called Paulus from Namibia who had done his graduate work in Shanghai. We bandied about in Mandarin for a bit, at which point it became clear that my Chinese ability had really deteriorated. Getting some international perspectives on... everyting... was really interesting and only fueled my desire to get my travel on. When not teaching at the IAEA school... let's see... Robin and Meg left this morning to drive back to southern California and are no longer my transient roommates. Bob and Cari are in the process of moving in. Bob and I spent a few hours on Thursday getting his 50 gallon saltwater fishtank moved over.  This was somehow achieved without spilling any significant quantity of water or killing any fish. It looks really good in the dining room. Tool quit at work, which I see as a huge loss to the team. He was the go-to guy for a lot of quick embedded systems work and he really knew his stuff. There is some chance that he'll become and offsite contract employee, but who knows. The up-side is that I get to inherit his lab and all of his gear. Sweet. Arrived home this evening to find... the missing box of arcade stuff! It's the "hardware" box, which includes all the cams, bolts, washers, and screws along with the monitor mounting brackets and the coin door. There was a hand-written note on the box which said, "Shipper ok'd to deliver." I can only assume this means that the box was found and they called SlikStik to return it and SlikStik said to go ahead and send it on to me. Anyway it's all in good condition so that's a relief. No word yet from SlikStik on the re-shipment of the rest of the cabinet... They were supposed to send me an email last week saying they had sent it off. I'll call tomorrow to get futher details. Also arriving today were the matching Linksys WRT54G wireless routers. They're very hackable and support some interesting configurations. I'll be using one to replace my current access point. Bob is going to configure the other as a bridge and use it to support the wired network in his room. We've currently got Bob's old one supporting the wired network in the living room. So the media server, xbox, and audiotron are all wired into a WRT54G which talks to the access point. The new hardware will allow for some significant speed and security improvements on the network. All three wireless nodes are now 802.11/g compatible so that's a 5x increase in bandwidth. Also, the bridges are 100bT compatible, so the wired network in the arcade room will be an order of magnitude faster. And we'll be adding MAC filtering and WEP, so you can't see what pr0n I'm downloading from down the block. Nije lako bubamarcu I just got my passport renewed and received my cancelled old passport this morning. In it was a piece of paper with the above children's song written on it. It's in Croatian and it concerns bumblebees. As Svicha explains, "zum" is the Croatian onomatopoeia for the sound a bee makes, equivalent to the English "buzz." Anyway, this appeared in my passport during my 1998 to Portugal, where I attended the International Conference of Physics Students in Coimbra. Students from all over the world came together and had a big party (with SCIENCE!!, time permitting). One of them was a woman from Croatia named Svicha who taught me the above song. And yes, I know the tune and proper pronunciation. Along with the really humorous 1996-vintage photo of me with massive hair and the song du Hrvatska, the passport contains several interesting stamps: Gatwick 18 July 1996—travelling to Reading, England, for a conferece, my first trip to Europe. Gatwick 20 March 1997—travelling to England to do my undergraduate research at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Abingdon. Boston 4 September 1999—way out of order, this was on my way home from Ireland! I guess they just take any available spot in the passport. Lisboa 9 August 1998—arriving in Lisbon for the ICPS (here's some pictures). Helsinki 14 August 1999—arriving in Finland for the 1999 ICPS. This was the beginning of a month spent all over western Europe. Pictures of the entire trip are here. And that's it for the contents of that passport. It lasted me throughout the second half of college and all of graduate school. I had an earlier passport during highschool to support my trip to Barbados and Puerto Rico, but I have no idea what ever became of it. Now we're on to Passport 3.0, which should see a dramatic increase in the frequency of use and the general exoticness of the destinations. The passport is currently in Washington DC, where it is having a multi-entry visa for Russia applied. Woo! For work I need to interface a Crossbow three-axis accelerometer to our usual data collection instrument which, unfortuantely, only has a single pulse counter channel available. So I'm designing a circuit that takes three AC voltages with a DC offset and turns them into a single frequency modulated square wave. Obviously I'm losing some information; I have to translate the voltages to being zero-centered, then rectify them, sum them, amplify the result, then offset again. The amplitude of the resulting signal is basically the amplitude of vibration in all three axes summed together. This signal becomes the frequency modulation input on the Maxim MAX038 function generator IC. The output from the MAX038 is a frequency modulated square wave that varies by +/- 70% from its center frequency, which I haven't yet chosen. Anyway the point of this story is that all of this signal conditioning was done in analog electronics, with op-amps-a-plenty. And I'm really not an analog guy. I had a schematic all done and was pretty happy with it, then I showed it to Kiril (KEER-eel)--our Bulgarian analog electronics guru down in the lab. He was very nice about it, but was able to make a few simplifications. For instance, within moments of looking at the schematic, he was able to draw a circle around an opamp and four resistors and point out that the functionality of this block could be replaced by a single capacitor and resistor. Somehow I had decided it would be a good idea to use a full difference amplifier and a reference voltage source to remove the DC offset. RC circuit. Yeah. Robin, Meg, Bob, and I all just watched Reign of Fire. We were all amazed at the extent to which it sucked less than we were expecting. My theory is that this is a result of Matthew McConaughey being ugly throughout the entire movie. Don't get me wrong, it's not a good movie... but it's way better than most dumb action films. The picture from the previous entry was taken from my bedroom window. After uploading it and making the journal post, I went outside and tried to get as close to the deer as I could without scaring them off.  Click for gallery I was able to make my way all the way to the back fence, about 30' from the deer, without them getting spooked. There were two bucks, both with very full antlers, and the one doe who always seemed to be blocked by a bush so I didn't get any new photos of her. Got some good shots at close range with the 300mm f/4L. The light was still low (it was early morning), but the image stabalizer worked its magic. Check the gallery. This morning:  Bob moved his Xbox over today. It's modded. Despite a wealth of Xbox games, I spent about 4 hours tonight playing Chrono Trigger for the SNES emulated on his Xbox. Some of the Xbox games look really nice, but the best feature of the Xbox is the fact that it's a computer and can have software like this emulator added to it. If this capability came with the machine out-of-the-box, I'd have bought one long ago. By keeping your machines closed and forcing game producers to pay a hefty licensing fee, you're keeping a wealth of free applications and games from being written for your system. The availability of this software would make your machine more appealing to own. And who knows, maybe I'd be inclined to buy a few more games if the games available were a little less... i dunno... lowest-common-denominator. I've got a PS2, which I use largely as a DVD player. Bob has an Xbox, which he uses as a DVD player and an emulator. The games that you're licensing mostly suck, and they're not worth the money. I suppose I'm out on the fringe here... obviously the underpriced hardware/overpriced software model is working fine and has for a couple decades now, so somewhere out there are a majority of gamers who think BMX XXX rules. I guess I'm just frustrated that I see the capacity in the hardware to be so much more than it is, but it's hamstrung by greedy, short-sighted people. One of the ladies at the arcade cabinet place sent me a phone number I could call. Odd that the company is in New Jersey and the phone number was for Florida... and that it was disconnected.... 914: Florida. 913: Jersey. Anyway, got ahold of her today and she was really nice. They got a shipment of arcade cabinet parts in today and they're just waiting on the coin door, which should arrive this week. Once it's all there they'll ship it right away. And the shipping time on the last one (theoretically) was a week. So I should have it late next week or early the week after. Woo! Just for the record, I ordered this thing in mid June. Over the next two weeks N-1 is putting on another school, this time for new IAEA inspectors. I'm helping teach again, specifically on the HLNCC (high level neutron coincidence counter) instrument. Today was the first day of classes and it was mostly taken up with logistical crap. For one thing, the inspectors all had to get their visitor badges (with one exception, they are all foreign nationals, which makes the whole process that much more involved). We were waiting around in the conference room for them to get back from the badge office for about two hours. This as a result of, and I quote, "the Oracle being down." This refers to the Oracle database that controls damn near everything at LANL, including the badge readers. Of course, the CEO of Oracle didn't get to be fabulously rich by making a crappy product... it's the people at the lab who administer the Oracle database that suck. Anyway, this left me with a lot of time to talk with the other instructors. The guy in charge of everthing is called Dave, and his claim to fame is that he was the masters-class national champion power lifter a couple years ago. This earns him the title, "World's Strongest Man." ...and he looks it. He was talking about how he had recently blown out his knee and would no longer be able to do squats, thus precluding him from the power lifting event. So he is reconditioning his body to be "tuned for bench pressing." This should allow him to increase his maximum bench press weight from <clears throat> 402 pounds to somewhere above 450 pounds. Yowzer. And here's today's interesting World's Strongest Man Factoid: competition bench pressers wear special shirts that allow them to press more weight by storing energy in the fabric. The shirts are very tight when the arms are extended fully, and only tighten more against your body as you lower the bar down to your chest. When you go to push the bar back up, the fabric is actually being brought to a lower internal energy state and thus is contributing energy to your press. Dave says that with no shirt he can only bench about 340 pounds. With a "regulation" shirt (for the "federation" (?) that he is in) he can do 402 pounds. With a triple-ply denim shirt, he can bench about 450. So the choice of shirt can add 100 pounds to your bench! This came as some surprise to me. Pardon me, I'm off to manufacture a 15-ply kevlar shirt with which I hope to throw a Volkswagen a whole half-block. ...and I will turn you into a sea of fire! Use AIM? Read this. I kept finding these irritating popups from something called "Viewpoint Media Player" that weren't associated with a browzer window. I found a process that was called something like "viewpoint manager" and killed it; this took out the popups, but it was coming back up when I rebooted my machine. Did a websearch for it and found the above website. Ad-aware doesn't catch this one. But it is easily uninstalled from the control panel. So I drove down to Santa Fe anyway. The two non-missing boxes were there at the Yellow dock. One box was enormous and contained the two side panels for the cabinet. The other box was smaller but much heavier. It appeared to have the bulk of the remaining MDF pieces in it. Unfortunately, the side-panels box had a bigass tear in it, through which I could see the heavily scratched outer surface of a side panel. The other box had a smaller hole in it, and the piece inside wasn't damaged enough that I'd care. But I couldn't accept the shipment with such visible damage on the side panel, so I had to refuse the whole thing. Now they'll ship it back to the vendor, who will file a claim with Yellow to get their money back, and will probably only then start making me a replacement. And these things turn around in a month, btw. So frustrating! Let's see... still no sign of arcade cabinet box #3. Boxes #1 and #2 showed up in Santa Fe today, but they didn't call to schedule a drop-off because.... wait for it... they only deliver to Los Alamos on Tuesday and Thursday. (??!?). What kind of half-assed outfit are they running here? The sort-of good news is that the missing package is the lightest of the three. The ones they have total 155 pounds, which I think means that they must have the largest cabinet pieces. But I have no idea what parts are missing. And knowing that some of it isn't there means that it probably isn't worth me driving down to Santa Fe to pick up what is there. Forecasts for the bulk of NM and CO indicate rain all day everyday this weekend, and significant chances for thunderstorms. So I won't be going climbing with Robin. No alternate plans have materialized yet... One of the talks I went to today was by the "Tamper Indicating Devices" people at the lab. TIDs are physical seals that are placed on some container to prevent you from getting inside without the owner knowing you've been there (think: glorified plastic cable-tie). We use TIDs a lot in the safeguards industry, mostly to ensure that the host country isn't messing with our unattended monitoring equipment in our absence. Anyway, one of the jobs of the LANL TID people is to test how reliable these devices are. And they do this by attempting to bypass them using any and all means available. Usually, getting past a TID involves breaking something that can't be fixed [easily]. The TID squad includes at least one guy who used to work at an auto body repair place, because they can make damaged metal look shiny and new. It also includes a guy formerly from the model train community, because they can make wood look like metal, dress material to look like something it's not, etc. Their work is totally sweet. They showed us some really fancy TIDs that they had bypassed and you couldn't tell they were broken at all. I was very impressed. ...and the guy from the auto shop sorta looked like, ya know, if you needed a stereo... he could hook you up. Tons of lightning tonight. I tried to get out and photograph some of it, but by the time I got set up out by the end of the airport runway, the lightning had largely stopped. Maybe next time. In other news... I had a phone message from the arcade cabinet folks saying that something was wrong with my email, as both of their attemps had bounced. Not sure what that's all about; I've been receiving mail constantly for the last few days. They went on to say that the cabinet parts had been found and would be delivered soon, and that I could use the same tracking number. So I go online and look at the tracking info and nothing has changed. Hasn't been updated since the 8th. I call yellow and ask them, and they tell me that 2 of the 3 boxes have been found and are en route. The third one is lost. Somehow I'm not sure why the vendor and I are getting different signals from the shipper. But I'm pretty sure that I'm really freakin annoyed. I'm sure that since 2 of the boxes were found the vendor will want me to just wait around and hope the third box magically reappears. merton ferton... When I got home there were about 10 hummingbirds fighting over feeder rights and it just happened to be that brief period of the day when the sun is falling on the feeder.  woooo arty I spent about half an hour standing right next to the feeder with a couple different lenses, trying different exposure options, etc. Mostly experimenting with shutter speeds and backgrounds. Took about 200 pictures, 40 of which I like. I've uploaded them to the Broad Tailed Hummingbird and Rufous Hummingbird galleries. Have a look at the later images in the gallery; there's old stuff at the beginning of each one. I think you'll be hearing a lot from me on this topic. But here is today's load: The Moscow trip went from being a sure thing in mid-September to being nebulously defined for October or November. This on account of the sponsors at RosAtom (sort of the Russian atomic energy agency) all being on vacation during the planned September meeting time. The Kazakhstan trip, on the other hand, went from being nebulously defined to being "relatively certain" to occur during the last two weeks of October. I'm not sure how much I should believe this, as this is the same trip that was originally scheduled for March, then May, then August, then September. So we'll see. But I got my new passport photos taken and paperwork submitted, as well as my multi-entry visa application filed for Russia. Got my initial bloodwork taken care of; you can't get a multi-entry visa to Russia without an AIDS test. Which is odd, considering you can get as many single-entry visas as you want without an AIDS test... Speaking of needles... I have to get a bunch of fancy vaccinations for these trips, and Occ. Med. won't do the clinic work until they have something from travel confirming that I am actually going. Which makes no sense, given that the Hep A/B/C vaccination is a several month series and I'm not likely to get my travel approved by the lab until the week before or so. Nice work, lab. A fun fact: "Expect to spend about $100/day on food in Moscow." Luckily, the lab per diem for Moscow is ~$100. There is some chance that I'll be going to Moscow alone, which would be quite an adventure. There is a reasonably high chance that Kazakhstan will be an adventure regardless of how many people they send with me. Tomorrow I do the Kazakhstan visa app. So my MAME cabinet was supposed to arrive today. It shipped a week ago and I've been watching the tracking page dilligently. Sadly, the freight company they chose to ship their product with, Yellow Transportation Inc., has a really terrible online tracking system. It gives very little information. It did, however, tell me that it would arrive today. Bob, who had the day off, was nice enough to hang out at my place watching movies and surfing the web waiting for the truck that never came. When it became 9:00pm, I checked the tracking page and found this: 
All short? WTF?Perhaps this is a code for "not there." I called Yellow to get the details on exactly how short it all was and they told me this: "OK, 'all short' indicates that they can't find it. It didn't arrive on the truck like they were expecting." Eh? So apparently their banner should look like this: 
Thanks, Yellow...I'm changing my favorite color.
Grumpy. So Robin and I drove up to the south end of the Sawatch range in Colorado in an attempt to climb Tabeguache and Shavano. The book said that the trailhead we wanted was posted with a sign asking hikers not to use a particular route. We were planning on using the same trailhead but a different route. In the morning we drove around looking for the sign and couldn't find any signs at all. But we did find a trailhead with two sign posts, and assumed this to be the right place. The hike proceeded well until we got to the ridgeline above the first saddle, which was really loose rock and class 3 difficulty. The guide book indicated that the route would be easy class 2. Once above the class 3 bits we made our way over to the summit via a second saddle which seemed longer than it had looked on the map in the book (which we did not bring with us). Robin got to the summit about 10 minutes before me, and when I was approaching it I found him sitting there laughing. The following conversation ensued: R: "Let me ask you a question, what peak do you think we're climbing?" M: "This isn't Tabeguache? What is this?" R: "I'll let you find out from the summit register." M: "Am I going to be pissed?" R: "No." M: "Is this Shavano?" (Robin is laughing) R: "No." M: "And it's not Tabeguache?" R: "No." M: "Am I going to get a 14er for this hike?" R: "No." M: "Are we in Colorado?" (more laughing) Anyway, it turns out the trailhead we started at was one valley up from the one we wanted (the trailhead we were looking for had been removed entirely and there was no sign of a sign). Consequently, we were one ridge north of Tabeguache--on the centennial 13er North Carbonate (13,870'). All of the small (and large) inconsistancies between what we had climbed and seen vs. the guidebook became much more understandable. The list-driven peakbagger in me was somewhat disappointed at the lack of a 14er, but the hike was still great and we had good weather luck. Not at all a day wasted. And hey, my first centennial 13er! Oops... we felt a little dumb. But on the way out we made an inspection of the correct trailhead and found it to be totally invisible. So it was hardly our fault. But, then again, a map might have come in handy there... So Robin and Meg are back in town for a few weeks. And Robin and I can't be in the same town for long without formulating ill-conceived mountaineering trips. Even though I'm hosting the cooking club on Sunday and need to clean the entire house and make a bunch of fancy food, I'm going to go to Colorado tonight with Robin and we're going to attempt to summit something. It might be Shavano and Tabeguache. Maybe Redcloud and Sunshine. But since it's us climbing together, it'll almost certainly include some combination of horrible weather and/or gas. More or this when I return Saturday night. While handling plutonium and uranium today, I got into a discussion with some of the students about the recent discovery of a large object in the Kuiper belt and whether or not it should be considered a planet. I won't bore you with the details of why this body (and Pluto) are really sorry excuses for planets... But we did notice that the name for this body is still a secret. However, we feel that the name is obvious and unavoidable. Treat this like an SAT question: Uranium, Neptunium, Plutonium, Americium :: Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, ???? One of the big things my group does is teach technicians from around the world how to do effective non-destructive assay of nuclear material. We hold week-long "schools" in how to set up, calibrate, and use modern detector technologies from across the spectrum of NDA techniques. The students are usually either IAEA inspectors (the "weapons inspectors" of Iraq fame, for instance) or members of the DOE complex who do radiation measurements on a regular basis. This week we're teaching a class on neutron techniques for members of the DOE complex. This includes active well coincidence counters, multiplicity counters, and shufflers. What makes these classes so useful is the fact that Los Alamos can provide top-notch experts on the techniques involved as well as, in many cases, the people who designed the actual instruments being used. More importantly, though, is the opportunity to use the instruments on actual nuclear material. Buried within endless layers of physical and administrative security, we allow the students to do assays on actual plutonium and uranium items so they get a feeling for exactly how the detectors should perform in the field when assaying these sorts of items. For obvious reasons, the students aren't allowed to handle the special nuclear material. But as an instructor, I am. So this week I have repeatedly gotten to handle sealed uranium and plutonium in respectable quantities. It's really not all that interesting... not warm, or glowing, or dangerous. But on a purely nerdy level it is very exotic and certainly not something that many people get to do. The fact that I am an "instructor" is somewhat humorous... I really didn't know all that much about neutron detectors coming into this class. And I've learned a ton. But I was able to answer a few questions--most of the people taking the class are familiar with the use of the instruments (which I was not) but are not physicists (which I am). I think that after this week I could do the same class again as an instructor and be considerably more confident and useful. The next class is for IAEA inspectors from Vienna, and I'm looking forward to it. I had a great trip, but a sub-par homecoming. My flight out was supposed to be at 4:50pm from Hartford to Newark to Albuquerque, arriving at 9:30pm. I arrived at the airport at about 3:40 and was at the gate, ready to depart, without incident. We got all the way to the part where they let the super-fancy passengers board. When exactly two people had boarded, Newark declared a ground-stop which means that no one can take off en route to Newark until it is lifted. There was precious little information available and as the time went by the passengers of my flight to Newark became increasingly irate. I just sat there charging my laptop and doing some work with Igor Pro. One guy got so pissed that they called in a state trooper to haul him off. The nature of the conflict was that, because the hold was caused by weather, the airline wouldn't put people up in hotels or transfer them to other carriers. Continental is not responsible for "acts of god." At one point, they said that if your connection was after 6:50, you were still OK. Mine was at 6:45. The flight to Newark is only 30 minutes, so we had a fair amount of margin to eat into. I went up and asked them what my options were and they said they could put me on the first flight out the following morning. I told them to go ahead with that and was discovering my cell phone was dead so I couldn't call Nina to come pick me up again when they said that the hold was also keeping planes on the ground at Newark and in fact my plane was delayed. So my options were to fly to Newark and either catch my plane or spend the night in Newark on my coin, or to go back to Nina's and catch a 6:00am flight out. Because I was scheduled to teach a class the following morning at the lab, I elected to gamble on Newark (don't kill me, Nina). The ground hold was lifted at 7:45 and we were allowed to leave. When we arrived on the ground in Newark, they informed us that the hold was actually for volume (the weather was fine), which exposed all the baloney they were telling us back at Hartford for the complete crap it was. We had left so late that I was feeling relatively certain that my connection was thoroughly gone, but much to my surprise it was still on the ground and boarding. I had to run from one end of C terminal to the other, but when I got to gate C93, they were just boarding the first class folks. I felt like the luckiest person in the world. Once on the plane, though, I felt really bored on account of the 2 hours we spent sitting on the tarmac. The enormous volume overload of Newark was still trickling away and there were a ton of planes ahead of us. We were initially placed in some back-woods holding pen for planes before finally being allowed to get into the line of planes that actually move. This line was approximately the entire length of the runway, which I estimate at 3 miles. GAH!!! Anyway, I didn't get to Albuquerque until about midnight. The rental place didn't have a compact for me (again) so they gave me an Impala (again). I got home obscenely late. The arrival home was bittersweet, aside from my being really tired, because one of my sugar gliders died two days before. Losing a pet is no fun. Everyone take a moment and make the crabby sound in honor of Noid, the least happy pet ever. 
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