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  Exactly 922 days after I was first told about its existence, after all that detective work, paperwork, and permit-getting, driving it here, and obtaining a reference sample, we were finally able to record a spectrum with this 1970s radiation source that is pretty much unobtainable these days.

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  I bought something dumb, and I admittedly like it... Now I can finally use up all those pods I kept nabbing from the Radisson because I could never resist free things, even if I couldn't really use them. (I didn't want to remain coffeeless whenever I'm at mom's place or in Budapest.)

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  Our most important cryostat was having vibration issues, despite most of it being an anti-vibration scaffold. Turns out that ice formed in it as we vent it with helium gas from the recovery line, as always. Fewer and fewer people use helium, the line was just full of random gas. Interim solution:

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  Huh, a broken diff pump was not on my bingo card for today. There was too much oil in it, so the backing pump must have vomited some of its oil up the line somehow. Very uncouth. Also, this O-ring is definitely headed to the bin.

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  Getting everything ready to take delivery of a new radiation source today. They have been numbered sequentially since the late 70s. We finally arrive at the obviously amusing number.

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  Does any tech-minded person here have access to the manual for a Philips CM 12 TEM, or can they tell me what magnetic stray fields it can deal with before becoming unusable? I can only find Erwin Sabio's alignment and setup guide so far...

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  After getting that 1.1mil in funding for a new magnet cryostat system, the main question is: Where to put it? Can't put it here; there's sensitive equipment next door! Can't put it there; there's sensitive equipment one floor below! There's sensitive equipment everywhere... Fucking stray fields. x_x

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  It always irritates me so much when I see where our campus is headed in the distant future, with us eventually being evicted from our building complex, to be squished into a renovated 70s tower, but the architects go on about the "master plan" and the "overarching concept" or the entireity of it and how they will create "places of encounter" and all such bullshit while actively pulling apart various branches of research that currently share one building. Gwuh.

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  Two hundred thousand with no breakdowns or accidents. Always got me home, even with marten-severed vacuum lines or a nail in a tire. I think that's kinda neat. This is my third A3, the one I like least, but also the one I had the longest (2019) and put the most mileage on.

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  Major clash between two professors, and I'm just sitting in the middle, thinking "I'm just the guy who keeps shit running." Guess I'll dopamine microdose by repairing a few more busted fiber ports. Even ended up printing a new label for this one after extrapolating what it should say.

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  Time for some early morning maintenance! The opposite of sidetenance.

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  Was getting ready to regenerate the O2 adsorbers in the glovebox. Got everything set up, right gas pressure and flow, but it takes 2.5 hours before it actually starts doing its thing. Setting my phone alarm, I dutifully returned to make sure that when the gas starts flowing, the flow meter is where it should be. I opened up the cabinet to be ready to adjust, being greeted by a lot of hissing.

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  Been misgendered so many times when communicating only via e-mail due to my first name that I finally added he/him to my signature. Should have done that years ago. But it's kinda fun when people expect an Indian lady and are then faced with a Hungarian guy, complete with mean mug and shaved head.

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  Back to the heatwave and over 30°C inside our office... I'll try the British remedy and drink some boiling hot liquid!

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  If you're interested in trains or aircraft, it regularly happens that you're irked by journalists using completely unfitting stock images for their articles. And while I admit that 4 and 5 are next-door neighbors, I think 747 and 757 are somewhat different when it comes to shady gifts from Qatar.

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  The good thing about obsessively grabbing free lab equipment whenever it becomes available: If you need to pretend to need more lab space, you always have some serious-looking machinery to put in there. And nobody but you knows whether any of it works or not.

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  Thank fuck it's Friday... After staying away from sweets for two weeks or so, I managed to microdose myself down to just one (1) sugar cube in my coffee. But I don't think I could go entirely without sugar to offset the intense BITTER.

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  "Yeah, they are giving away UHV parts..." GIVING AWAY UHV PARTS?! Well fuck me sideways! Grab the cart, we're going shopping! Many standard connectors, four-way crosses, viewports, and a tasty pneumatic angle valve, with controller!

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  In the late 90s or early 00s, our building retroactively received fiber connections. Almost all of the terminal boxes suffer from fractured plastic due to overtightened screws. We just co-use this seminar room, but it annoys me so much to see these dangling like this... I've been told that you can't get these boxes anymore, so I'll have to quickly cut something to size to act as a brace.

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  Ever since this video system was set up in 2020, the audio output has been on the weak side, with no discernible way to adjust it (changing the volume in Windows/Zoom didn't do anything). Yesterday, I discovered that the sound bars had their own remotes, still in their original packaging. Gwuh.

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  I've been asked on short notice to do a super duper secret measurement on a sample because someone discovered something super duper significant, or so they think. I joked to my friends that people will be standing around me and my machine, expectantly waiting to see what their sample will do, and I'll tell them that it does absolutely nothing at all. Guess what ended up happening.

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  I'm a co-author of a paper that got accepted in Nature Materials, impact factor of 38 or so. My brain: Eh. I perfectly glued a centering felt strip onto my VSM detection coilset. My brain: Oh YEAH, fuck yeah, look at how nice that is!

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  I'm sure glad that my car waited until after its TÜV to become lopsided in the lights department. Great that we have these fancy LED strips that are not user replaceable in any way, shape, or form, save for throwing the entire light cluster into a landfill due to a 10 Cent part on some PCB.

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  Today was a long, long day with nearly 600 kilometers covered in 7 hours, a lovingly prepared roadside breakfast, and, of course, a successful, incident-free radiation source transport. It took over two years to finally acquire this thing. You really need persistence to work in science...

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  @FurryBeta@shark.community I have yet to decide how to handle this, seeing how the source is many times through its half-life. I will call the person who oversees such things at our uni, and suggest that I hand it off next time we have disposal guys come to pick up one of our "regular" sources.

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  Okay, let's get back to what I was actually planning to do: Prepping everything for responsible source transportation tomorrow. Stickering up the box, and then covering up my stickers, so that nobody calls disaster management if I have an accident with my empty box.

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  I am very cross. In preparation for my upcoming trip to pick up a radiation source, I wanted to grab a dummy source to get my container size right. What I expected: Benign pieces of milled aluminium. What I ended up finding: An actual orphaned source. Who the fuck did this fuckup to me??

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  I guess that's the sound of "I'm eating my tip seals." and "Please do a maintenance."

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  This morning was apparently especially good for efficiency. Some combinations of somewhat lower air temperature and an ever so slightly slower truck in front of me just work wonders for optimized cruising.

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  Yesterday, we had a staff outing and painted some pottery. I made a gay little cup, and while it's fun to do, it's also endlessly frustrating for a perfectionist when nothing ever comes together the way you want it to. Curious to see how bright the colors will be after firing.