This week has been a very good work week. At the very end of last year I managed to get a new prototype together, which didn't seem to want to work, and on Monday I found the component that was causing the problems. I've got a short term work around, and I'm now actually making progress, and proving that most of what I've done is going to work.
Given that this is the cumulation of a years work, I'm glad that it seems to be getting in line and working out who is the boss in the lab.
Today was spent in a training course on how to use the Volocity software. Actually, it was scratching the surface of how to use it. Software training goes on for the rest of the week, and then the rest of the training programme continues for the entire month (With one day down in Beaconsfield, and a week and a half over in Wales.) It is really quite impressive how organised it all is.
Generally feeling quite enthusiastic about it all :)
The escape tunnel worked, I got out of Malvern Instrument and they didn't even try to nail my feet to the floor. Rockin!
I was rather aiming to get the early train in this morning, but last night emperor and atreic invited us over for dinner. Still we left at a reasonable time, and I sorted out bits and pieces to take in with me. Then I remembered I'd been leant Tesis by a work colleague, so watched it before retiring to bed for at least a few hours.
There is a bit of a tradition that cakes are brought in on your birthday, so I decided that I was going to extend this to my final day, so there was a detour to the supermarket to get a giant pile of cakes. This meant I arrived rather late, and was confused by the lack of people in the area I normally sit in. Investigation revealed that I was supposed to in a meeting with them, to do a CV sift for "Me Mk. 2" (... or perhaps "John Mk. 3" Not sure which.... )
In some ways that felt like some odd, rather meta form of navel gazing. But it used up the morning nicely. Lunch was a massive lard-fest from the greasy spoon nearby. They do a rather excellent baguette with about three fried breakfasts shoved inside. I was very happy eating my way though that (And I'm still pretty much full from it) Ace :)
There were some rushed handover meetings throughout the afternoon, as I gave various bits and pieces of work over to R and J, as well as a massive flinging of mails around the place. I was in danger of wearing out the forward button on the mail client.
Other than that I went to see people around the factory and say cheerio to them, which felt a little strange. Still, hopefully there will be a few of them that I keep in reasonable contact with. The pile of cakes in the kitchen went down rather well too :)
Today was a slightly odd day at work, since there was a couple of guys over from CCL, to do a bit of a sales pitch on a particular technique that one of them (Roger) is very very good at. I used to work a lot with Roger, and so it was odd getting the sales pitch, and even more odd being seen as someone who would be quite good at thinking about which ideas would be suitable for taking further with Bayesian inference.
The meeting started strangely, as I asked Roger when I should be back for content that I hadn't seen before, and then left for the first hour. I came back in a well timed fashion, to see a new "live" demo, which was great for visualising the power of the technique.
Anyhow, the main point is that it was odd seeing people again, but it also makes me think that it was probably good moving away from CCL a little bit. I was getting a little stuck there, and certainly seen as someone who was quite junior, whereas at Malvern I seem to be given a bit more room to work on things.
So far this week I have been living from a B&B in Stansted. It is all very nice, but has extremely small doors, (I've got to duck quite a bit getting through a couple of them) and has a strange decoration on the wall above my bed. If H R Geiger was also into flower arranging, it might be the sort of thing that he would make. Also, the toilet appears to be posessed by a angry robotic demon of pain and fury. Luckilly its got an off switch, so can be placated (The benefit of robotic demons that need a mains connection)
Anyhow, most of today I spent designing telescopes of various types, and then a 75mm camera lens. Much fun, and very useful. Unfortunately I can't practice in the evenings, since I can't get a copy of the software to run on this machine.
cheerful