I spent the last couple of weeks trying to arrange a cable tray under our RCT racks. It goes for a few meters – maybe 8 – and we are going to lay excess cable in it. I thought this would be easier, but there is a bit of overhead in the whole operation. First I had to get the approval of one of the people who is in charge of the fibers that sit below it. I didn’t want to be in their way. Which is important, since they belong to the Hadronic Calorimeter, which supplies the RCT with slightly over half of its signals. Then I had to ask the technical people who are in charge of installing these things if it was all right. They said sure, we can do this, no problem. However, then it sat for a bit, so I pestered and finally got referred to someone who could do “small jobs” like this to do it. So now it is in. I am happy. Small things like this just make life easier, and now I can install 108 cables on monday, which is a good time to do it.
There is a lot of other equipment around, so I really don’t want to just go ahead and install the cable tray, and then have to rip it out again. I already had some of the cables in, only to have to pull them out again. We had wanted the cables to go another way, but there just isn’t space for it.
The rest of my week I learned how to send a message from one program to another. This was kind of fun – I like to learn new computing tricks. I did however run into a bug with another program that stalled me for a bit, but there turned out to be a work around. What it did is save us from ourselves – forgetting to click a button on one web browser while we ran another program. Now the test program is all self contained – much better.
On the other side of life – it got quite cool the last week. It probably could have snowed in the mountains, but we aren’t getting much rain at all. Its a little worrisome. We really want to ski this winter!
A la prochain…
