CenterLeft.net

It’s very odd who you will run into and where these days.

When I was waiting to get onto my flight in portland I ran into a group of my friends from college. They just happened to be in town for a conference and were leaving to go home at exactly the same time that I was flying out. We managed to snatch some time to have a nice chat and catch up a bit.

A couple days later, I’m hanging out, having a nice time in Vietnam, and just happen to go onto facebook. I haven’t been on facebook for a long time and randomly I click on a picture of a friend of mine. You wouldn’t believe it, but the first message on their wall was “How are you enjoying Hanoi?” No shit…

Long story short, I looked em up and was able to go out and have a nice evening last night with them.

So, like I said, you never know.

When you make a living installing multi-million dollar instruments you come to expect the unexpected snag in the process. Installing the first new TEM in the entire country of Vietnam adds a whole new layer to it though.

Of all the things that come up all over the world, South East Asia probably has a few of the more unusual possibilities for trouble. Our microscope was delivered to the site sometime last year, but the room wasn’t ready for some time, and the system had to sit in storage for about a year. On the first day of the install I opened the main electronics cabinet for the system and discovered it was full of animal bones.

The fragments appear to be from a fairly large animal. Probably one of the local dogs or some pig scraps from a rubbish pile. It will be interesting to find out what the conductive qualities of bone and rat urine are.

There are a lot of managers and supervisors on the e-mail chain for this one. I can only imagine the consternation that my first day’s report must have caused.

I feel like death.

The whole of the country of the Netherlands is infected with some sort of evil pox or flu.  I managed to avoid getting sick right up until the end, but it finally got me.  This is sure going to make 4 days of back to black flights a joy.

There’s nothing quite like a miserable sinus cold at 40 thousand feet.

I passed my course.

I’m at the end of my first week in the Netherlands.  I think I’m mostly over the jetlag by now, and everything is going pretty well. 

It has been a nice week touching on all of the basics for my job.  Training thus far has been a bit hit or miss.  I believe that I’ve been learning a lot of important bits, but the class has reminded me of a few things so far that I’m not as strong with yet.  I’ve got one more week here with this class, and then the next 5 years of my life to really get good with these microscopes.

We took a day trip down to Belgium today.  With the other guys in the class, we borrowed two of the company cars and headed over to Brugge.  It’s a pretty little town that’s been around since the 9th century. 

We climbed to the top of the clock tower for a little history and a great view of the town.  That is a heck of a trip.  The stair starts out winding and reasonably wide, but as you get higher the turns get tighter and tighter.  This is the first time I’ve been able to encounter both vertigo from heights and claustrophobia at the same time. 

Along the way there were a few rooms to poke into and rest.  A couple of them had some pieces of history and explanations of how the tower had been used in the past.  At one time the clock tower used to be the strong room for the town; it was used as a place to store the treasury and other important documents.  But the coolest room was definitely the clockworks.  The tower not only was a clock but also had a full set of bells that could be played with the clockworks or by a musician in the room above. 

We happened to be climbing the tower near the top of the hour, so we waited a few minutes in the room with the clockworks and got to see how the chimes are played on the bells.  It was really quite amazing to watch all of the gears and wheels whirling as the time was kept and announced.

After that it was off for a fantastic lunch at a cafe nearby and some shopping.  There’s a great little shop in Brugge that has chocolate that is out of this world.  I’m not at all ashamed to say that I’ve bought quite a bit of it to take home with me.