ILL, TFT and other bits

Still managing to prove that I am not very good at writing regularly… It was quite successful over at ILL, although very intense. We got an extra half day on D17, but that meant that I had to go in to ILL at 6PM after arriving in Grenoble at 5PM!!! I think we worked until about 12:30AM that evening and then went back in the following day for about 9:30AM. The runs had to be quite long, between 5 and 6 hours. This meant that we couldn’t run anywhere near all the samples I had prepared - so I had to pick the best ones to go on and leave the rest. We only had two days on D17 but I learnt so much in that time. Andrew explained how to operate the instrument, and showed me LAMP and how things can be automated by scripting them in LAMP. Altogether we only got reflectivity profiles of 7 samples - one gold nanoparticle sample right at the end along with mainly C16O3 with and without Li ions, and one C16O4 sample. Now the task of analysing all the data begins - Andrew was very helpful though and explained how to use Cosmos to extract profiles from the raw data. Also managed to get a TFT screen finally! It is a very nice 17" LG TFT screen that arrived on Friday. I will be getting one for home very soon too - it is so much nicer to work on than even my Iiyama 19" CRT screen (and so much smaller). It would have been Aaron’s 21st birthday on Monday, so I have been feeling pretty down about that… It never seems to get any easier. Mum seems to be taking it pretty hard too - I hope she is OK. That is it for now anyway…