The last month of December has been a perfect fit to the year that preceded it: frenzied activity, not enough time to fit it all in. This year has sped by like a blur. Fast-forward to the conclusion: we are now in Minnesota enjoying the holidays with friends and family - and it seems like we were doing this just a week ago! It all seems so familiar. I hope time doesn't start running any faster!
On the work front, I last wrote that we first saw collisions at injection energy, and that they had successfully ramped the energy up to 1.18TeV per beam, a new world's record. In fact, here is the breakdown of milestones achieved from the LHC chief spokesperson Steve Myer, in suitably obtuse geekspeak.
Nov 20 - Each beam circulating. Key beam instrumentation working.
Nov 23 - First collisions at 450 GeV. First ramp (reached 560 GeV).
Nov 26 - Magnetic cycling established (reproducibility).
Nov 27 - Energy matching.
Nov 29 - Ramp to 1.18 TeV.
Nov 30 - Experiment solenoids on.
Dec 04 - Aperture measurement campaign finished. LHCb and ALICE dipoles on.
Dec 05 - Machine protection (Injection, Beam dump, Collimators) ready for safe operation with pilots.
Dec 06 - First collisions with STABLE BEAMS, 4 on 4 pilots at 450 GeV, rates around 1Hz.
Dec 08 - Ramp colliding bunches to 1.18 TeV
Dec 11 - Collisions with STABLE BEAMS, 4 on 4 at 450 GeV, > 1010 per bunch, rates around 10Hz.
Dec 13 - Ramp 2 bunches per beam to 1.18 TeV. Collisions for 90mins.
Dec 14 - Collisions with STABLE BEAMS, 16 on 16 at 450 GeV, > 1010 per bunch, rates around 50Hz.
Dec 16 - Ramp 4 on 4 to 1.18 TeV. Squeeze to 7 m.
For details, check out the latest CERN press release re: the LHC.
On a personal front, I was distracted from the main goings on, first by an achievement awards ceremony on the 7th that yours truly was invited to participate in - it meant I had to create a rather large poster summarizing my work - how exactly do you make writing software exciting to other people?
...then G's first birthday party on the 12th,
...and then by preparations to return home on the 15th.
There was a certain minor incident with a lost passport before our departure, but I will save that for another blog entry...
Meanwhile, a personal retrospective on 2009:
Regarding the family, the two major developments we dealt with were
1. watching G develop a (rather delightful) personality as she completed her first year.
2. being hit with the diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) for B.As regards the first point, there's not much to say; if a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth? :) As evidence I present to the jury exhibits A and B:
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
(One of the shorter videos we have of her on dropshots.)
(Click on this picture for a larger version - it turned out smaller than I expected...)As regards the second point, we started noticing odd behaviors from B more and more as the year progressed, a regression from capabilities we thought he had attained, like saying a few words. Finally on July 31 a woman from Canada that moved here to do research on autism at the University of Geneva assessed B and gave him his dual diagnosis.
(Up to this point I haven't written much about it, because the topic is so huge I didn't know where to begin. It doesn't lend itself either to cute anecdotes or definitive statements, so it's not good blog material.) K seemed almost relieved on some level to have what we were observing named and recognized by someone else, but at the same time the idea of dealing with ASD over and above the DS raised the challenge from daunting to overwhelming.
We started educating ourself on the controversies surrounding autism, the question about vaccinations, the DAN! movement in the U.S., and the behavioral versus the biomedical approach to treatment. One thing seemed clear: even before the official diagnosis we recognized that Benjamin seemed to have reactions to certain foods, chiefly those that contained milk proteins and gluten. (The biomedical approach to autism seems to have an explanation for this.) When we took him off of these substances we could see a marked difference in his behavior. However, his symptoms did not go away completely, and the his GI system troubles seemed more complicated than just implementing a "GFCF" diet.
Regardless of what autism is, we simply pursued the very evident issues of his poor digestion, loose stools, and his apparent sensitivities to certain foods. This meant an explosion of medical appointments in the fall, lab tests here as well as samples sent back to the U.S. Fedex overnight. The results pointed to excesses of certain metals and a deficiency of certain amino acids, and also a potential yeast infection.
He had an EEG sleep test that failed after 15 minutes - he pulled the cap off.
On the positive side, he finally started taking his own free steps shortly after his 3rd birthday in September. Since his gait was uneven one of the several pediatricians we consulted with ordered an x-ray of his hip, which turned out normal.
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
Compound all this with a change in our health plan! It was difficult enough getting our old insurance company to pay foreign claims - not because they wouldn't cover them but because of the logistics of the system; translating languages, converting currencies, determining coverage, and then doing it all in reverse. But at least they had a system already in place.
But in the summer of last year the University announced that they would move us graduate assistants from this plan to a new one with another company. And my worst fears were confirmed - the company had no paradigm for handling people like us, who live outside the U.S. and don't just travel internationally for short periods. They would only pay in U.S. dollars, in check form!
Did I ever tell you why checks are impossible to deal? Banks/credit unions won't accept unendorsed insurance checks, because the insurance companies that issue them won't honor them unless signed. So the check has to be mailed to us for signature, and then mailed back. Then the money has to be wired back here to pay the provider. When you generate as many claims as we do, this is a non-option.
Did I ever tell you our woes with the mail system? When I first got here I sent a bunch of checks to pay off bills and others for deposit, plus birthday cards - none of these ever showed up. Two years ago I sent my annual life insurance premium back to the states, and paid the extra money for tracking. It didn't matter. The check never got to AIG. The tracking said it was delivered somewhere in Binghamton, NY. AIG has no offices there. But lo and behold, I did get the check back - from some company in Kentucky I never heard of! They don't have offices in Binghamton either! And they are not affiliated in any way with AIG, nor do they do any business with AIG. Only God knows how it got there...I paid the bill by phone mere days before the policy lapsed.
Once I submitted some claims where I got one digit wrong on our bank account for wiring the reimbursement. Because the reimbursement didn't go through, the old insurance company sent me a check, drawn from Credit Suisse bank, in Swiss Francs. If any check would be honored in Switzerland, this would be it, right? Well. First I went to the post office - where I have a "PostFinance" account! They looked at it and said "we're not a bank" - could've fooled me with the ATM machines and the tellers behind counters, etc...So I called the central office in Bern. They said I had to go to downtown Geneva. I took the kids with. Had to carry a double stroller with both kids inside up half a flight of stairs to a temporary office (they're remodeling), only to have the guy look at the check and say: "This isn't one of ours. We won't cash this. You have to go to Credit Suisse." These are the kings of world banking? I guess *this* is what makes them kings of world banking - no customer service.
When I went to Credit Suisse they looked at the check like they'd never seen one before! (They do not do checks over here...) "Do you have an account with us?" she asked, and to my response said I had to go back to my own bank! Credit Suisse wouldn't honor their own check? I told her what they told me. So she had to call the main office in Zurich. In Zurich they speak Swiss-German. Her first question over the phone was "Parlez-vous francais?" (Can you imagine having to do that in America? - never mind!) Finally they honored the check, and charged me 10 francs to cash it, better than 10% of the check's value! She didn't tell me she was going to do that...
Long story short (too late!)? To this day we're working on getting a system set up to do what we used to do before, and providers are starting to get restless. But once my department and University officials got involved (one of them knows my mother, who's a retired benefits specialist - Hi, Ma! :) , they got the messages: no checks.
So as I say, now we are back in cold, snowy Minnesota, having already celebrated Christmas with both sides of our family, feeling like we had barely just left from the last time. Who knows what the new year will hold. Hopefully my graduation! But already I have misgivings; I mean, "aught-nine" at least sounds like a year, but what do we call the next one? "Ten"? You just can't take it seriously unless you put the "twenty" in front of it...
There is of course much more to say about our time back in the States, but I think I'll wait until it's over to post a blog about the whole thing like last year. After all, it's all for all of you, anyway. Like the Scriptures say: when the groom is absent, there's only blogging, but when the groom returns there is celebration and the blogging has passed away. Besides, this pretending to live in the past wears on a guy...
Take care,
PKBGD
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