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Description
Sorry for being so quiet all the time these days, but working more or less full time does tend to eat up your time and motivation for photography and dA. I'm still alive, by all means, and still take the occasional pic or two (though rarely of trains), but usually can't motivate myself to actually upload them.

This here is not very interesting in terms of photography, but it nicely shows my progress on our SQUID lab.

Some of you may remember these pics of the same location:

By now, all the junk... I mean, equipment from another group has been removed, making us the sole users of this lab. The walls have been painted, the damaged sunblinds repaired yet again, the floor was completely redone, new furniture (not visible here) such as cabinets and an extra long lab table have been custom made for us by the university's own carpenter's shop, the list of improvements pretty much includes everything in the room. I managed to replace the old Windows 98 box that controlled the SQUID with a contemporary Windows 7 PC, thanks to the fact that it still had PCI slots, and thanks to National Instruments still providing Windows 7 drivers for a 10 year old PCI-GPIB interface card. I also went to the trouble of laying a patch cable to connect the PC to the switch in the room next door, as this lab, for reasons unknown, was not equipped with fiber optic ports like all the other rooms in the building. We assume that some large piece of immovable equipment may have blocked the path of installation back in the day.

As you can see, our 20 year old US-made box is happy as can be, with other invisible improvements such as the replacement of dry rotted seals and pumping of the insulating vacuum giving even better performance. And yes, I even went to the trouble of replacing the lousy 4:3 flatscreen with something larger and more modern, giving us more real estate to look at fresh results. And thanks to the internet connection, we can now remote control just about all aspects of the machine, which means that we don't have to run up and down between fourth and second floor just to adjust some parameters. Even better, measurements during the weekend can now also be monitored and adjusted, something that was impossible before. How luxurious is that?

So yeah, if this thing didn't turn out to be my pet project at work, and wouldn't know what did.

Description
Sorry for being so quiet all the time these days, but working more or less full time does tend to eat up your time and motivation for photography and dA. I'm still alive, by all means, and still take the occasional pic or two (though rarely of trains), but usually can't motivate myself to actually upload them.

This here is not very interesting in terms of photography, but it nicely shows my progress on our SQUID lab.

Some of you may remember these pics of the same location:

By now, all the junk... I mean, equipment from another group has been removed, making us the sole users of this lab. The walls have been painted, the damaged sunblinds repaired yet again, the floor was completely redone, new furniture (not visible here) such as cabinets and an extra long lab table have been custom made for us by the university's own carpenter's shop, the list of improvements pretty much includes everything in the room. I managed to replace the old Windows 98 box that controlled the SQUID with a contemporary Windows 7 PC, thanks to the fact that it still had PCI slots, and thanks to National Instruments still providing Windows 7 drivers for a 10 year old PCI-GPIB interface card. I also went to the trouble of laying a patch cable to connect the PC to the switch in the room next door, as this lab, for reasons unknown, was not equipped with fiber optic ports like all the other rooms in the building. We assume that some large piece of immovable equipment may have blocked the path of installation back in the day.

As you can see, our 20 year old US-made box is happy as can be, with other invisible improvements such as the replacement of dry rotted seals and pumping of the insulating vacuum giving even better performance. And yes, I even went to the trouble of replacing the lousy 4:3 flatscreen with something larger and more modern, giving us more real estate to look at fresh results. And thanks to the internet connection, we can now remote control just about all aspects of the machine, which means that we don't have to run up and down between fourth and second floor just to adjust some parameters. Even better, measurements during the weekend can now also be monitored and adjusted, something that was impossible before. How luxurious is that?

So yeah, if this thing didn't turn out to be my pet project at work, and wouldn't know what did.