24 hours in Melbourne

Howdy there folks, so for those interested in taking a little ride with me on a typical day here at the synchrotron, this is what we got up to...

9 am: hit the road, we don't have to be at the lab until 2 pm this afternoon so spent a nice Friday morning wandering along the promenade at St Kilda. Lunch in some non-descript place next to one of the fantastical bakeries with a 7-tier cake in the window that was obviously a 'photo opportunity' given the number of people who stopped to take pictures of it.

Drove back to the motel to pick up our stuff, then to the supermarket to stock up on food for the next few days' worth of lunches (and whatever meal it is that you have at 3 am). Sandwiches, yum.

2 pm: off to the lab, put our stuff in the fridge, head over to the beamline and discuss with the beamline scientist what it is we want to try to do. Some of it is feasible and some isn't, but we'll try our best anyway. Get introduced to a bunch of new equipment and a crash course on how to set it up when we change experiments tomorrow, since it's Saturday and she doesn't want to come in. (What a slacker!)

4.45 pm: we put our first sample on, the test scan looks ok so we try tweaking a few parameters, then collect some 'real' data. One sample down, 71 to go!

6.30 pm: the others (whose experiments start tomorrow) head off for dinner and promise to bring back some pizza for us.

Some of the samples give good spectra and others are just background noise. Some are really quite puzzling. But this is not the time for wondering why; because we are just here to collect the best data that we can and worry about the analysis later.

7.30 pm: pizza arrives, meatlovers, mmmmmmm.

At the supermarket we also got some party mix lollies and chocolate to help us through the night.

12 am: need some more chocolate. 35 samples down, 37 to go plus a new in situ experiment we thought we'd try, since we have extra time. Log in to facebook for the 10th time in the last 4 hours; nothing much has changed. That's because no sane person is awake in NZ right now. Mind you it is Friday night, so they could be...

Searching for some standard diffraction patterns to try and match our peaks. I have a suite of online tools for this; one of my favourite diffraction pattern databases is Mincryst - the first option it presents you with is English or Russian. But it tells us everything we need to know.

2 am: time to take a nap for an hour...

3 am: a little bit better. I only have to last until 9 am or so, when the others will be getting back. 15 more samples to go plus a time series.

4.30 am: bored but functional.

6.30 am: just spent the last 2 hours playing quizzes on facebook... with every sample chugging away for ten minutes, I'm open to suggestions on how to spend the time! Maybe I'll go and make a sandwich.

8.15 am: the others just arrived, we're still waiting for the beam fill to finish before putting our last couple of samples on.

9.07 am: all done for today - back to the motel for some much-needed slee...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz