Just as well I've spent a total of less than about half an hour outside since I arrived here - it's bl***y freezing here. There was snow on the ground on the day we arrived, but the following day it had all pretty much melted as the temperature got a smidgen above freezing, now it is clear skies and all the puddles have frozen (but no more snowfall).
Boy am I glad I live in Wellington with such a mild climate!
The experiments haven't gone as well this time as last; although we are managing to iron out some of the problems and more importantly, understand some of the issues with regards to interpreting the results (or the artefacts, as the case may be).
Each time we come here they have made some improvement or other to the beamline. This time we don't have to change detectors to change the kind of measurement we do (reflectivity or diffraction).
The latest problem we are having is a computer one: the network between the computer that we are doing the analysis on, and the computer that has all the data stored on it, is getting rather flaky. Not only is this really annoying, it's affecting our ability to do the experiments. If we can't analyse the data, we don't know if it's good (yay) or bad (so we know to go back and repeat things).
All in all we have had to deal with a lot of frustrating things and it's taking its toll on the group dynamics... anyway we are in the home stretch now, only 3 nights and 2 days to go.
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