Yulran 🌱 @Yulran@yulran.masto.host

Sounds like an earplugs night.

I just wanna sleeeeep
Before duty calls me awaaaake

The grumbling neighbor under me with his beeping motorized chair is quiet, the diagonale neighbor screaming at night is quiet, but I just had to put on my pyjama that the neighbour above started a dansing karaoke party.

The water in my mug is shaking

The bad news is that I triggered an emotionnal flashback by telling a scary postdoc than maybe we shouldn't use a confluence table as a database if it's already a pain to edit with "only" 300 lines.

The good news is that I identified it instead of just hiding in the lab to cry when he answered with an angry email, and my boyfriend told me I was right

In other trans news, there are a lot of new people at work now and I scared strangers in the women's bathroom two days in a row.

So I changed my mind, decided it was now more awkward to meet unknown people in the women's bathroom than to meet people who have known me since 2015 at didn't yet catch up on the change in the man's bathroom, aaand I switched since yesterday.

So far the weirdest part is that it's all symmetrically inversed so I keep walking in the wall.

But I don't feel attached to my old name, actually. I don't really hold grudges either.

It feels a bit like identifying with the univerity where I studied or the region where I lived. I can aknowledge that it was part of my identify, and now it changed, and I'm still the same person but I also changed, and it's all just a normal process.

Also it's just about the official name, it won't even matter in real life if I get a 2nd name or not.

Also I considered for a while keeping my old first name as a second name. To keep the average gender-neutral and so my grandma can still use it without being wrong or something.

But it would feel weird to have a second name!
And my therapist asked me if that was just to not make my parents angry, because I couldn't really come up for a good reason to do it like this. Except maybe being afraid of too much change?

It's a bit blurry what are the proofs they want that I'm known under my name, so my best friend wrote a letter for me, and I have my Ergänzungsausweis with a guest scientist work contract and a show-swordfighting certificate.

Oh I have updates on that!
All the papers are printed or photocopied, I just lack a proper stamp and I can drop the letter in the mail box.

I'm cringing each time I have to interact with people under my old name, so I think I'm ready to make the current one official!

And this, dear brave people who didn't mute the thread yet, is another normal day in a laser lab

(Usually it's just months-long experiments so less funny to talk about.)

How's everyone day going, what is going all wrong when you try to do stuff?

Now I'm halfway certain that by tomorrow, the unshielded electronics which is our humidity sensor in the spectrometer will catch some random electric field (inside a box with a THz laser running? How weird ) and make the computer reboot as it does at least once per week, and I will come back to no data and be frustrated and maybe just wait for my professor to answer whether that will even help identifying the absorption peak or not.

And that's how I ended up figuring out how to put together a windows batch script to move the mouse over the "save" button and click every 20min.

I had recorded the temperature while another chamber was heating back up last year so I know approximately how the temperature will evolve overnight while everything warms up again. If I correlate that to the spectrum saved automatically, I could see if my phonon at least seems tenperature-dependant.

For some reason the "temperature not in range" error on the readout also happens when there is no cable plugged in. And now that I think about it, I'm not sure I even saw a temperature sensor inside the chamber when I glued my sample in.

(My glue is nail polish, if you even wonder.)

I end up filling the chamber and I'm pretty sure it arrived at the lowest possible temperature (77K or about -200°C, the nitrogen boiling temperature), but still nothing on the readout.

The cable between the sensor and the readout are always homemade because not every sensor works the same sobwe had to solder cables on the right pins, but I'm pretty sure the cable was the right one since it was just lying there. And it's the only one there.

So, the chamber cooling down!
I'm only pouring small quantities of liquid nitrogen at a time, so I have time to take 100s-long measurements without the temperature changing too much.
And I wait for a number instead of an error to appear on the readout. I'm not sure which sensor is inside, but I don't remember that the highest measurable temperature was particularly low.

Except nothing appears.

And I'll keep a cliffhanger here because I arrived at my sports class

Such science much suspence!

Also, I found the perfect position and I don't want to remove the chamber to attach the feet before putting it in and hope it goes back at the same place, so the chamber can move around if anything touches it. Or its vibrating vacuum pipes.

The temperature sensor shows an error, that's supposed to be normal when it's above tje temperature it can measure, and I think I remember it's normal.

So I slowly pour liquid nitrogen in the chamber and wait to see it go down…

So I redid the steps from yesterday, pulling to chamber out, pushing it in, adjusting the height of each of its 3 feets, until I have 8% more signal and I can see some signal above the noise at the frequency I'm interested in, if I average long enough.

I time the length of a measurement because a "100s integration" of course doesn't mean that the measurements takes 100s, so I can calculate what the average temperature was while it cools down during a measurement.