It's 3am and I Want To.....

well you might know the rest of that song by O.A.R., but if you don't it goes

....go to bed.

The question was raised, "What the hell are you doing working from midnight - 8am" It was also mentioned by many that they were happy to see this silly owl shift crap almost over. I need to address both of those.

So first of all, Jason and I are graduate students with Indiana University and working towards our PhD's in Physics. We finished our course work at IU (that was tons of fun) and now we are living in Chicago and working at Fermi Lab on the research portion of our degrees. Part of "getting your degree" assuming that happens for little Leah here is that you have to do a round of what is called Data Aquisition shifts, known as DAQ shifts. Supposedly all graduate students have to do these to graduate (I don't know how true that actually is...but that's neither here nor there, it's a must for IU grad students). So what does one do on a DAQ shift. If there is a data flowing you monitor the, you guessed it, the Data AQuistion system and make sure that the data goes from the proton collision point through our computers and out the other end. The schedule for a DAQ shifter is one week on then two weeks off. You do this for 6 shifts. Since the detector has to be monitored for 24 hours a day, you have three different time slots, 8am-4pm, 4pm-midnight, midnight-8m. Then the shifts go

week 1 : 8am-4pm
week 4 : 4pm-midnight
week 7 : midnight-8am
week 10: 8am-4pm
week 13 : 4pm-midnight
week 16 : midnight-8am

Add into the mix of never quite having a set schedule is that Jason and I are BOTH doing these shifts but not during the same week or the same time slot in back to back weeks. So our schedule gets really screwed up since we like to run toghether, we try to keep our wok schedule together. So our schedule looks something like this :

week 1 : 8am-4pm
week 2 : midnight-8am
week 3 : no shifts
week 4 :4pm-midnight
week 5 :8am -4pm
week 6 : no shifts
.
.
.

and so on until we are done (I am done on July 23nd and Jason is done August 27th) Right now we are in 'week 2' (even though this is the 3rd DAQ shift for me, but Jason just started last week).

To make matters more fun, currently we are in a shut down. That means NO DATA. So I am monitoring NOTHING. When there is a shut down the DAQ shifter still has to be here because by D-Zero (that's the name of our experiment) law there always has to be two people on site....the DAQ shifter is one of those people.

So I should be able to get a lot of work done on these shifts, but my analysis is being very stagnent and ooooh it is frustrating me. I have to be good at fucking something and lots of times, I realize it's not going to be high energy physics. Which is fine and good, I just have to figure out what I am going to do after I'm done......

So with my analysis I have some code that fits a lifetime and it's slow, and apparently sucks because it's not doing a good job of fitting. So I'll change a paramenter and then run it again, and wait 30 minutes and when it's still crap I'll try changing something else and running it. So what to do during the time it's running? I have read just about everything there is to read on the internet (honestly if I click on one more link I fear that it will say, "Sorry you have reached the end...there is nothing left to surf"), I read my book and tonight I was able to make that cool little runners icon in the address bar for this site.

Looks like my code has finished runnning, and yep, it still looks like crap. Maybe it's time to shoot an e-mail off to someone that knows what they are doing and see if they can help me. If I have learned anything as a graduate student, it's how to ask for help.

*******************

Editors note : The ONLY good thing about these shifts is at 5am it's really beautiful outside. Of course this is just a fleeting glimpse for me as I run from 3 stories below ground upstairs for a bathroom break.......but still....nice to look at....