UK, week the first...
Oct. 9th, 2017 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pheloniusfriarSadly, at this point, it's all a blur. The week itself turned out to be mostly an intense learning curve amidst a fine bout of jet lag, punctuated by an occasional meal out with a pint here and there (okay, maybe more pints than that). On the Sunday after I arrived (I got there on a Saturday), I found out that there weren't really any breakfast places in the neighbourhood that opened in time for me to go to them on my way to work, so I went to that little shop near me (which was actually surprisingly useful and of fairly good quality... it's on Woodstock Road in a little mall with a dry cleaners place, etc.) and purchased some eggs, milk, vegetables, cheese, ham, pesto, and some apple juice so I could eat before leaving. I had forgotten to buy butter, so the first omelet I had was fried in cheese and pesto. It was good, but probably not so good for me. I bought tea, butter, and bread Monday evening ;). The guy I was working with has to take his child to school so did not get in until 9:30AM or so (quite civilized as far as start times go, imho) and that meant that I needed to be on the 8:40AM Science Transit Shuttle to RAL from Oxford. I pretty much needed to be up at 6:30AM Oxford time to shower, eat, and get to the stop on time. The project was successful! He met me when I got there, so it worked out pretty well and he got me a temporary visitor's pass to enter. I got a proper pass a little later in the week, so I could then let myself in and out of the facility. That also means I can add the Diamond Light Source as another particle accelerator facility I have been to (so far, the list is TRIUMF, Fermilab, and DESY). I didn't have time to try to get a tour (much less go on one), but I do hope to be back in the future and will plan ahead if that happens.
As reported in an earlier post, the food there was pretty hit or miss, with more misses than I would have liked. As such, I started buying ingredients to just cook in my flat and made a lovely vegetable-heavy chicken marinara-inspired sauce that I had with penne and a piece of that bread (which was just Tesco in-store bakery bread, but it was very dense but still quite soft... quite yummy) with butter and some wine (which is sold everywhere along with bottled beer). I did try and check a bunch of things off my "food to do" list while there, so Monday I went to a thali restaurant at the end of George Street and had an enjoyable meal with curry and lots of other yummy, tasty foods (that was a hit). As an aside, it irks me that not more Indian places have thali plates... it is just kind of wrong for one person to go in and order a full plate of one thing (like palak paneer), much less more than one thing, plus rice. Even with a couple of people, having a mixed plate makes for a nicer meal I find, since doing a set of full plates and sharing is best for four people and up. Just my opinion anyway. My other success that week was going into a pub called The White Horse in Oxford on Broad Street (just next to the famous Blackwell's Books, more on that in a later post). It definitely felt the most "British Pub" to me of all the places I'd been to that point, and I understand it was often featured in the show Inspector Morse as a setting for a pint (for example, in the episode "The Dead of Jericho"... I've set the clip to start in the pub, it's only a few seconds, fyi). I got another "food check mark" as well as I ordered Toad In The Hole there (along with a couple of pints). The dish was basically a giant Yorkshire pudding bowl filled with potatoes, peas, sausage, and broccoli with a pot of their onion gravy on the side. I had never had such a Yorkshire pudding presentation before and it was just the right amount of crispy and was fluffy in the right places, absolutely a delightful meal! The ales I had were also delicious and were made locally and poured using hand-driven pumps set into the bar (another first for me). The temperature was absolutely perfect (below room temperatute, but definitely not cold) and the bubbles were small and refreshing and made the brew a tasty and easy to drink experience. I'm now a big fan of properly brewed and served ales, and will have to wait to cross the pond again because I've never had it anywhere else in the world I've been to (and I hear that pubs are endangered in the UK... several were pointed out to me in the UCL area in London as either being torn down to redevelop the area or were bought out by yuppies and turned into wine bars or something... definitely a tragedy because it is unique to there it seems). Note: the fucking terrible meal I had at Browns Brasserie & Bar was on Tuesday I think... definitely before the meal at The White Horse (which I think was Thursday), so the latter event definitely redeemed the possibility of UK restaurants to me. As a final aside on this part of the tale, there is also a White Horse Brewery in Oxfordshire which, gasp, has beers available in The White Horse pub. The brewery's slogan is "We brew beer to drink & what we have left we sell". Lol! They definitely do more traditional tasting beers, which I really appreciated, as so many small breweries are doing IPAs that are overwhelming in their flavours (North American style as one co-worker put it). These were flavourful, but balanced (although they do make IPAs as well... not ones to balk at a market for their products, heh).
As for productivity, I was able to see every phase of the testing that needed to get done: from changing the wafers, to aligning and setting the height on the probe station, to running the tests and adapting as things went, to making enhancements to the software driving the probe station and running the tests. I finally got a chance (once things were running semi-automated) to do the first real deep dive into the data acquisition code for the system and learned its architecture. Fyi, my job there was to decipher what is needed to test the integrated circuits on the wafers at the lowest level so that I could take just the part that tests the chips and duplicate it on the systems at the company we are partnering with here in Ottawa. Basically the company is a traditional integrated circuit test house whereas the folks at RAL are physicists that have put together their own system and process... the two are inherently incompatible. Again, I need to learn what is being done in the physics labs and turn that into a process that can be run on industry standard equipment (and again, that involves understanding the test software and hardware down to the level of when and how to set each bit, what commands to send, and what measurements to take). By the end of the week, I had a pretty good idea of how to do it and was at least able to start asking precise, and useful questions that could then be answered by the experts on the system. If you want to read up on the ATLAS experiment ITk (inner tracker) upgrade project, there is a good introductory presentation here (PDF). I am learning how to test the ABC130 front-end integrated circuits while they are still on the wafer, before it is diced into individual chips for assembly. Note that because of the unique constraints of building an inner detector, as little material as possible must be used to minimize the chances that particles from collisions will interact with the non-sensor parts of the system. As such, the chips are never packaged: they are glued and wire-bonded onto a thin kapton printed circuit board, which is then glued to a huge silicon sensor where the chips are then bonded directly to the individual channels of the detector. This is a very strange configuration and it's weirding out anyone in the electronics industry we talk to about it ;). One negative comment I have to make about the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is its cafeteria is absolutely atrocious... I will never forget the half fat and grissle pork chop plopped on a plate of grey beans in a flavourless grey "sauce" as long as I live (seriously, we're talking concrete grey here)... and that was the best option they had that day at the 8 or 9 stations they run... although it was still better than that meal I had at Browns (remember, it was in the top 3 worst meals I've ever had... doubly so because of the price).
Finally for this installment, that week I finally managed to finish the book "Antarctica" by Kim Stanley Robinson (of Mars Trilogy fame). Good lard, that man needs to get over himself. It was probably the most pompous and long-winded book of "fiction" I have ever had to slog through... this is a guy who loves to hear his own voice and wanted to make sure that you were exposed to every little bit of data he had and research he had done on the subject of Antarctica. If you poked him with a needle, he would fweeeeeeeee around the room like that gas bag beach ball alien in Dark Star (as an aside, the fact that they managed to give a beach ball that much personality is an amazing cinematic feat, see below). Go ahead, ask me how I felt about reading it over the months it took me... ugh. Here is an actual sentence, one sentence, from page 2 (page 2!)... and I'm not making this up, it is verbatim: "And so there you are riding in the enclosed cab of a giant transport vehicle, still thinking about that girlfriend, ten thousand feet above sea level, in the dark of the long night; and as you sit there looking out the cab windows, the sky gradually lightens to the day's one hour of twilight, shifting in invisible stages from a star-cluttered black pool to a dome of glowing indigo lying close overhead; and in that pure transparent indigo floats the thinnest new moon imaginable, a mere sliver of a crescent, which nevertheless illuminates very clearly the great ocean of ice rolling to the horizon in all directions, the moonlight glittering on the snow, gleaming on the ice, and all of it tinted the same vivid indigo as the sky; everything still and motionless; the clarity of the light unlike anything you've ever seen, like nothing on Earth, and you are all alone in it, the only witness, the sole inhabitant of the planet it seems; and the uncanny beauty of the scene rises in you and clamps your chest tight, and your heart breaks then simply because it is squeezed so hard, because the world is so spacious and pure and beautiful, and because moments like this one are so transient —impossible to imagine beforehand, impossible to remember afterward, and never to be returned to, never ever." There are 651 pages of that and I'm glad there is nothing high for me to jump off right now. As with his other books, it is technically brilliant and researched in a manner that only Robinson can and does (he, in fact, spent a season in Antarctica in 1995 as part of the National Science Foundation's "U.S. Antarctic Program's Artists and Writers' Program and you really do get to see the sense of wonder he felt at being in such an alien place on our own planet). Where it falls down heavily (writing style aside) is that the characters are completely forgettable, if not unbearably annoying (and not because that's part of their character, they're just badly written). If this had been presented as the diary of a "personal journey" (a work of non-fiction), I am sure I would have enjoyed it much more, but trying to hammer every bit of knowledge and feeling he had into a thinly hung together plot with hollow characters did his experience there a great disservice... it was also one of the "whitest" books I've read in a while (and that is not a snow reference). I don't know if he needed a better editor or what, but this book is definitely never going to cycle into my "hmmm, I should read that again" pile (his Mars trilogy does fall into that category, so... it was because them that I persevered on this one). After that, I turned to Becky Chambers' book "the long way to a small angry planet" which proved a wonderful palate cleanser and was as much of a page-turner as Antarctica was a page-dragger (I'm still glad I read it because it's interesting seeing other people's visions of such a strange place, but ... 'nuf said). More on that later as I think I need to wrap this up now. Thanksgiving dinner is nearing completion and I should get back to it... yes, I picked up my car yesterday evening after my flight (it was parked at Carleton while I was gone because they were paving where I live... it's done now), went to the grocery store and wine shop on my way home, and am making a big dinner today (well, okay, Beep and Happy are doing the vegetable stuff and I'm doing the meats... a cured pork shoulder steamed in apple cider to be served with pineapple, a Quebecois meat tourtiere, and a pre-cooked chicken since they were out of turkeys at the grocery store I went to).
As reported in an earlier post, the food there was pretty hit or miss, with more misses than I would have liked. As such, I started buying ingredients to just cook in my flat and made a lovely vegetable-heavy chicken marinara-inspired sauce that I had with penne and a piece of that bread (which was just Tesco in-store bakery bread, but it was very dense but still quite soft... quite yummy) with butter and some wine (which is sold everywhere along with bottled beer). I did try and check a bunch of things off my "food to do" list while there, so Monday I went to a thali restaurant at the end of George Street and had an enjoyable meal with curry and lots of other yummy, tasty foods (that was a hit). As an aside, it irks me that not more Indian places have thali plates... it is just kind of wrong for one person to go in and order a full plate of one thing (like palak paneer), much less more than one thing, plus rice. Even with a couple of people, having a mixed plate makes for a nicer meal I find, since doing a set of full plates and sharing is best for four people and up. Just my opinion anyway. My other success that week was going into a pub called The White Horse in Oxford on Broad Street (just next to the famous Blackwell's Books, more on that in a later post). It definitely felt the most "British Pub" to me of all the places I'd been to that point, and I understand it was often featured in the show Inspector Morse as a setting for a pint (for example, in the episode "The Dead of Jericho"... I've set the clip to start in the pub, it's only a few seconds, fyi). I got another "food check mark" as well as I ordered Toad In The Hole there (along with a couple of pints). The dish was basically a giant Yorkshire pudding bowl filled with potatoes, peas, sausage, and broccoli with a pot of their onion gravy on the side. I had never had such a Yorkshire pudding presentation before and it was just the right amount of crispy and was fluffy in the right places, absolutely a delightful meal! The ales I had were also delicious and were made locally and poured using hand-driven pumps set into the bar (another first for me). The temperature was absolutely perfect (below room temperatute, but definitely not cold) and the bubbles were small and refreshing and made the brew a tasty and easy to drink experience. I'm now a big fan of properly brewed and served ales, and will have to wait to cross the pond again because I've never had it anywhere else in the world I've been to (and I hear that pubs are endangered in the UK... several were pointed out to me in the UCL area in London as either being torn down to redevelop the area or were bought out by yuppies and turned into wine bars or something... definitely a tragedy because it is unique to there it seems). Note: the fucking terrible meal I had at Browns Brasserie & Bar was on Tuesday I think... definitely before the meal at The White Horse (which I think was Thursday), so the latter event definitely redeemed the possibility of UK restaurants to me. As a final aside on this part of the tale, there is also a White Horse Brewery in Oxfordshire which, gasp, has beers available in The White Horse pub. The brewery's slogan is "We brew beer to drink & what we have left we sell". Lol! They definitely do more traditional tasting beers, which I really appreciated, as so many small breweries are doing IPAs that are overwhelming in their flavours (North American style as one co-worker put it). These were flavourful, but balanced (although they do make IPAs as well... not ones to balk at a market for their products, heh).
As for productivity, I was able to see every phase of the testing that needed to get done: from changing the wafers, to aligning and setting the height on the probe station, to running the tests and adapting as things went, to making enhancements to the software driving the probe station and running the tests. I finally got a chance (once things were running semi-automated) to do the first real deep dive into the data acquisition code for the system and learned its architecture. Fyi, my job there was to decipher what is needed to test the integrated circuits on the wafers at the lowest level so that I could take just the part that tests the chips and duplicate it on the systems at the company we are partnering with here in Ottawa. Basically the company is a traditional integrated circuit test house whereas the folks at RAL are physicists that have put together their own system and process... the two are inherently incompatible. Again, I need to learn what is being done in the physics labs and turn that into a process that can be run on industry standard equipment (and again, that involves understanding the test software and hardware down to the level of when and how to set each bit, what commands to send, and what measurements to take). By the end of the week, I had a pretty good idea of how to do it and was at least able to start asking precise, and useful questions that could then be answered by the experts on the system. If you want to read up on the ATLAS experiment ITk (inner tracker) upgrade project, there is a good introductory presentation here (PDF). I am learning how to test the ABC130 front-end integrated circuits while they are still on the wafer, before it is diced into individual chips for assembly. Note that because of the unique constraints of building an inner detector, as little material as possible must be used to minimize the chances that particles from collisions will interact with the non-sensor parts of the system. As such, the chips are never packaged: they are glued and wire-bonded onto a thin kapton printed circuit board, which is then glued to a huge silicon sensor where the chips are then bonded directly to the individual channels of the detector. This is a very strange configuration and it's weirding out anyone in the electronics industry we talk to about it ;). One negative comment I have to make about the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is its cafeteria is absolutely atrocious... I will never forget the half fat and grissle pork chop plopped on a plate of grey beans in a flavourless grey "sauce" as long as I live (seriously, we're talking concrete grey here)... and that was the best option they had that day at the 8 or 9 stations they run... although it was still better than that meal I had at Browns (remember, it was in the top 3 worst meals I've ever had... doubly so because of the price).
Finally for this installment, that week I finally managed to finish the book "Antarctica" by Kim Stanley Robinson (of Mars Trilogy fame). Good lard, that man needs to get over himself. It was probably the most pompous and long-winded book of "fiction" I have ever had to slog through... this is a guy who loves to hear his own voice and wanted to make sure that you were exposed to every little bit of data he had and research he had done on the subject of Antarctica. If you poked him with a needle, he would fweeeeeeeee around the room like that gas bag beach ball alien in Dark Star (as an aside, the fact that they managed to give a beach ball that much personality is an amazing cinematic feat, see below). Go ahead, ask me how I felt about reading it over the months it took me... ugh. Here is an actual sentence, one sentence, from page 2 (page 2!)... and I'm not making this up, it is verbatim: "And so there you are riding in the enclosed cab of a giant transport vehicle, still thinking about that girlfriend, ten thousand feet above sea level, in the dark of the long night; and as you sit there looking out the cab windows, the sky gradually lightens to the day's one hour of twilight, shifting in invisible stages from a star-cluttered black pool to a dome of glowing indigo lying close overhead; and in that pure transparent indigo floats the thinnest new moon imaginable, a mere sliver of a crescent, which nevertheless illuminates very clearly the great ocean of ice rolling to the horizon in all directions, the moonlight glittering on the snow, gleaming on the ice, and all of it tinted the same vivid indigo as the sky; everything still and motionless; the clarity of the light unlike anything you've ever seen, like nothing on Earth, and you are all alone in it, the only witness, the sole inhabitant of the planet it seems; and the uncanny beauty of the scene rises in you and clamps your chest tight, and your heart breaks then simply because it is squeezed so hard, because the world is so spacious and pure and beautiful, and because moments like this one are so transient —impossible to imagine beforehand, impossible to remember afterward, and never to be returned to, never ever." There are 651 pages of that and I'm glad there is nothing high for me to jump off right now. As with his other books, it is technically brilliant and researched in a manner that only Robinson can and does (he, in fact, spent a season in Antarctica in 1995 as part of the National Science Foundation's "U.S. Antarctic Program's Artists and Writers' Program and you really do get to see the sense of wonder he felt at being in such an alien place on our own planet). Where it falls down heavily (writing style aside) is that the characters are completely forgettable, if not unbearably annoying (and not because that's part of their character, they're just badly written). If this had been presented as the diary of a "personal journey" (a work of non-fiction), I am sure I would have enjoyed it much more, but trying to hammer every bit of knowledge and feeling he had into a thinly hung together plot with hollow characters did his experience there a great disservice... it was also one of the "whitest" books I've read in a while (and that is not a snow reference). I don't know if he needed a better editor or what, but this book is definitely never going to cycle into my "hmmm, I should read that again" pile (his Mars trilogy does fall into that category, so... it was because them that I persevered on this one). After that, I turned to Becky Chambers' book "the long way to a small angry planet" which proved a wonderful palate cleanser and was as much of a page-turner as Antarctica was a page-dragger (I'm still glad I read it because it's interesting seeing other people's visions of such a strange place, but ... 'nuf said). More on that later as I think I need to wrap this up now. Thanksgiving dinner is nearing completion and I should get back to it... yes, I picked up my car yesterday evening after my flight (it was parked at Carleton while I was gone because they were paving where I live... it's done now), went to the grocery store and wine shop on my way home, and am making a big dinner today (well, okay, Beep and Happy are doing the vegetable stuff and I'm doing the meats... a cured pork shoulder steamed in apple cider to be served with pineapple, a Quebecois meat tourtiere, and a pre-cooked chicken since they were out of turkeys at the grocery store I went to).
