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`Breakfast' of waffles with strawberries and bananas at four in the afternoon yesteday. We left for work at 4:30pm and didn't get there until 6, the hour turning our usual contra-commute into a regular rush-hour one. Upon arrival we were openly mocked for having taken fifteen hours off of work.
Late nights at the lab. Communal dinners with the commissioners in the control room. Someone goes out and gets some local Livingston fare. Popeyes chicken. (Gerard asked me, "You do know Popeyes, right? ... I had a friend who thought it was "Pope-YES" chicken!") Wayne's barbecue, domino's pizza. One night we went out to a place in Walker for catfish dinners. Stefan's rental car is an SUV sort of thing. There were six of us, though, so Rana climbed into the cargo area in the back.
At 2am we're aligning an optical spectrum analyzer at the IFO-REFL port. Hooking up scopes to collect data. Importing it to Matlab. 3am, we're in the pre-stabilized laser enclosure, all dressed up in white jackets and hats, the optics-worker equivalent of a surgeon's scrubs. Tuning the phase of the FSS local oscillator. Measuring the transfer function of the frequency stabilization servo. It seems almost like a star trek cliche of science when Rana shouts out of the PSL, "It's Oscillating!" and Valera scrambles to the console to turn down the gain. (Hell, we have photon calibrators!)
We have plenty of commissioners these days. Rana, Stefan, Hartmut, Valera, Kate, and me. So mostly Rana and Stefan sit at the operators consoles. Sometimes one of us runs out into the Large Vacuum Equipment Area to adjust something. I plug in a camera at the Dark Port. Push on a table to test for scattering. Otherwise I putter away at my laptop. Reading Siegman, writing out scattering matrices. Contemplate my thesis.
Engage the Thermal Compensation System!
The output of the machine is directed to speakers in the control room, turning our audio band signals into real audio, the whistles and pops and whines and rumbles conveying to all the health and the state of the Machine. A sort of stethoscope. When the machine is happy, it is just white noise. But now when it is just being coaxed back into life after a two-month laser- and magnet-replacing operation, it is full of noises decidedly ungaussian.
4:30 there's an earthquake somewhere in the world, sends out optics swinging. We declare it's time to go home.
tf, 5am: mañana
rana: Vaya con dios
Late nights at the lab. Communal dinners with the commissioners in the control room. Someone goes out and gets some local Livingston fare. Popeyes chicken. (Gerard asked me, "You do know Popeyes, right? ... I had a friend who thought it was "Pope-YES" chicken!") Wayne's barbecue, domino's pizza. One night we went out to a place in Walker for catfish dinners. Stefan's rental car is an SUV sort of thing. There were six of us, though, so Rana climbed into the cargo area in the back.
At 2am we're aligning an optical spectrum analyzer at the IFO-REFL port. Hooking up scopes to collect data. Importing it to Matlab. 3am, we're in the pre-stabilized laser enclosure, all dressed up in white jackets and hats, the optics-worker equivalent of a surgeon's scrubs. Tuning the phase of the FSS local oscillator. Measuring the transfer function of the frequency stabilization servo. It seems almost like a star trek cliche of science when Rana shouts out of the PSL, "It's Oscillating!" and Valera scrambles to the console to turn down the gain. (Hell, we have photon calibrators!)
We have plenty of commissioners these days. Rana, Stefan, Hartmut, Valera, Kate, and me. So mostly Rana and Stefan sit at the operators consoles. Sometimes one of us runs out into the Large Vacuum Equipment Area to adjust something. I plug in a camera at the Dark Port. Push on a table to test for scattering. Otherwise I putter away at my laptop. Reading Siegman, writing out scattering matrices. Contemplate my thesis.
Engage the Thermal Compensation System!
The output of the machine is directed to speakers in the control room, turning our audio band signals into real audio, the whistles and pops and whines and rumbles conveying to all the health and the state of the Machine. A sort of stethoscope. When the machine is happy, it is just white noise. But now when it is just being coaxed back into life after a two-month laser- and magnet-replacing operation, it is full of noises decidedly ungaussian.
4:30 there's an earthquake somewhere in the world, sends out optics swinging. We declare it's time to go home.
tf, 5am: mañana
rana: Vaya con dios
