Did you bother tasting that at all?

Monday, when I started writing this post, I was reminded of something a late friend and former coworker once said. We used to go to lunch together frequently, all of us who worked at the Caltech Submillimeter Telescope office in Hilo when it was still on Kilauea Avenue, because it was more or less next door to Cafe 100. Lynn was an electronic technician, a very good one, and I still miss him. A farm kid from Iowa who went into the Navy and became an electronics technician. Later he built himself a trimaran and sailed from the West Coast to Hawaii, missed Hilo by all of about 5 miles and settled here.
One day at lunch I was in a hurry for whatever reason and ate my lunch in about 3 minutes. He said "Did you bother tasting that at all?"

I had such a day last Monday. My office mate of several years Bryan and I went up the mountain to fix some computer problems and run a bunch of tests. At Hale Pohaku, the mid-level facility, where we stop to acclimatize for the altitude I asked one of the cooks about when we were going to have lunch and was told that there was only going to be an early lunch. There went my intention to fix something, get somebody at sea level to change a configuration of computers and get a test going before lunch. We were almost late for the early lunch but got our lunch and ate it fairly quickly and managed to get some stuff done before the person at sea level went to lunch so that I could start my test. We went about the rest of our business up there at UKIRT and got back down to Hilo at a reasonable time. I even got home at a reasonable time, picking up dinner on the way home. As I was both very hungry and very tired I ate that in about 3 minutes as well.

We started having computer problems at one telescope or the other one way or the other 10 days ago. Last night we had the first night at UKIRT when we didn't have any faults in a week. Normally we don't have significant faults more often than every other week at least. We still don't know what happened to cause some of those computer problems, others we're very well aware of.

And as I didn't get around to posting this until now: Congratulations to my supervisor Craig Walther to be RCUH Employee of the Year. He very much deserves that.

To make this a not completely technical post, here's another Etsy Treasury I'm featured in:

'******COLOR OF THE W??NE********' by aytulgift

Formal Ball Gown Pr... CelestialDress... $235.00	Original Burgundy W... MyLilSweetieBo... $19.95
The Rose that Lasts... Steampunkitis $14.00	Medusa .. Opaque Ma... ImpulseCo $6.99
Dark Red Garnet Kan... KanzashiHairFl... $22.00	Chunky Macrame Brac... Mikaylove $11.54
Tie sided Harem Pan... Tribalvibe $34.00	Burgundy Queen Anne... anils $40.00
Bridal Clutch Winte... bellafiore2009 $46.00	Burgundy and light ... hilobeads $45.00
NEW Color- Ruffled ... MesBellesFleur... $11.99	Embroidered flower ... Zigettasstyle $38.00
Turkey Burgundy rub... Scarves2012 $14.00	Burgandy little gir... LilShopofCuten... $12.00
Arm Mittens Glove /... gloveshop $25.00	Ruffle scarf ,Pash... SenasShop $18.90

Treasury tool supported by the dog house

'******COLOR OF THE W??NE********' by aytulgift

Formal Ball Gown Pr... CelestialDress... $235.00	Original Burgundy W... MyLilSweetieBo... $19.95
The Rose that Lasts... Steampunkitis $14.00	Medusa .. Opaque Ma... ImpulseCo $6.99
Dark Red Garnet Kan... KanzashiHairFl... $22.00	Chunky Macrame Brac... Mikaylove $11.54
Tie sided Harem Pan... Tribalvibe $34.00	Burgundy Queen Anne... anils $40.00
Bridal Clutch Winte... bellafiore2009 $46.00	Burgundy and light ... hilobeads $45.00
NEW Color- Ruffled ... MesBellesFleur... $11.99	Embroidered flower ... Zigettasstyle $38.00
Turkey Burgundy rub... Scarves2012 $14.00	Burgandy little gir... LilShopofCuten... $12.00
Arm Mittens Glove /... gloveshop $25.00	Ruffle scarf ,Pash... SenasShop $18.90

Treasury tool supported by the dog house

(and extra spaces removed by me :) )

Not quite a disaster, but that's how the week started ...

Before what happened (or I knew about it) what I posted in the last two posts there was something that affected my weekend rather adversely. Saturday late morning I emailed the telescope system specialist at JCMT that one of the data disks was rather full. As I know very little about what can be deleted from these disks when that's all I could do at the time. The email I used to get from a cron job (automatic procedure) didn't happen either. A bit after midnight I reopened an old fault entitled "No space left on device" - after responding to a new fault that had been filed that night. A long email exchange followed, partly that night, partly the following days. Disk space got sorted out and for all I remember no telescope time was lost due to this. A bunch of people (me included) spent a bunch of time, partly due to confusion of what had happened - and it disrupted the weekend for all of us. It wasn't a real disaster but if we hadn't paid attention, for telescope productivity it could have been.

In more recent news, we just got an update from the UKIRT Board who issued a statement in response to the STFC - the UKIRT Board met in Edinburgh at the ATC at the same time this all happened. You can find the statement on the JAC homepage http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/ - or directly here:http://www.jach.hawaii.edu/UKIRT/news/Statement_from_the_UKIRT_Board.pdf

Note: The tags to this and previous posts aren't in the order I put them. They apparently get sorted alphabetically and I have no control over that.

Another treasury from the Lampwork Etc. Etsy Team follows:

'Handmade on A Sunday' by rosebud101

In all honesty, I don't know if these beautiful items were all made on a Sunday, but I do know that each one was handmade by the artist. Isn't that a nice thing to know?

Upcycled Sweater Co... gailjoseph $125.00	Abstract Hammered R... silverriverjew... $47.00
Naos Glass - Lily P... Na0sGlass $15.00	Blue Boro Bubble Im... MagpieGlasswor... $10.00
Shattered Rainbow D... LeslieDanaDesi... $24.00	Lampwork Glass Bead... MitosisGlass $23.00
Bead Hog - SRA Gell... Gelly $50.00	Loribeads - Freedom... loribeads $12.00
Pink Floral Snail L... nlcbeads $25.00	Hand Painted Card, ... KayTStudio $1.50
White, red and gree... hilobeads $20.00	Copper Hammered Hea... lhughesdesigns... $35.00
Handmade murrini CO... ErikaNooteboom $5.50	Watermelons - lampw... DesignsbyKUrat... $24.00
Handmade Lampwork G... rosebud101 $30.00	Purple Floral Handm... SolarFlareCrea... $40.00

Treasury tool supported by the dog house

- reformatted by the blog author.

Been a while ... - the real death of UKIRT? and JCMT?

... and I'm afraid the sequel(s) to "adventures in plumbing" will have to wait. And I intend to post disasters chronologically backwards here (none of which involve immediate family). Right now I feel like I've been hit with a mental baseball bat. We had a staff meeting this morning where the Chief Executive of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) announced that the STFC will only continue funding UKIRT until September of 2013 and JCMT until September of 2014. It makes no sense to me at all to close either, and especially not to close UKIRT a year before JCMT as UKIRT has no more funding already and piggybacks on JCMT's funding (yes, 2 telescopes for the price of 1 - out director Gary Davis came up with that and it's working out great - so far. Where "so far" is longer than UKIRT is to remain open from now by the STFC's planning). You can read the press release here: http://www.stfc.ac.uk/News%20and%20Events/39092.aspx As just about always, another Etsy treasury included, woth a lot of lampwork - and I absolutely love that blue cat: (and you won't believe how many spaces I deleted out of that generated (not my script) html code - it may help that I sortof speak html though)

'Blue & Brown' by nlcbeads

No fantastic description, letting the wonderful collection speak for itself!

Upcycled Sweater Co... gailjoseph $125.00	European Charm Bead... AmySimsDesigns $15.00
Handmade Flower Pow... PrimaDonnaBead... $40.20	Horse head lampwork... ArsonStudios $20.00
Aqua Spiral Pool La... ninaeagle $15.00	Mini Spacers Denm G... rosebud101 $10.00
Mixed natural color... hilobeads $18.00	Cat Handmade Lampwo... TeriPersing $12.00
Beer Bottle Beads -... ArsonStudios $15.00	Cellini spiral neck... amusebeads $148.00
FORGET-ME-NOT - Fla... FlamingFoolsLa... $10.00	Beaded Bracelet wit... beadbijoux $85.00
Marbled Latte - Han... MysticCaravan2 $14.00	Tidepools - Lampwor... GlassGalore $12.00
Brown Dog Lampwork ... maybeads $16.00	Glass Lampwork Bead... MitosisGlass $26.00

Treasury tool supported by the dog house