There is a first time for everything

Yesterday was my first day as a paid physicist. Well, actually I'm still a (PhD-)student, but it's nice to think that finally all the studying pays off and this time financially. I have a tight schedule ahead of me. In a couple of weeks I will be attending a PhD-school on the Tessel-island (Netherlands). Right after that I will be off for my first job outside the country. I will be helping installing the muon-chambers of the ATLAS experiment at CERN. This is a very serious job, as I will be testing this chambers before and after they get installed down in the pit. If something goes wrong, then we might not have any muon information out of a region of the detector when the experiment starts running. So I have to be very concentrated, while I'm there. On the other hand it will be great fun to be back at CERN, where I spent two and a half months as a summer student in 2003.
Talking about CERN summer-school, last week I got to meet my old room-mate at CERN when going through his town with my band. We spent about two weeks travelling up and down UK. And for one show in Dublin(Ireland) we flew over, as real rock-stars do ;). It was well worth it as the show was the best of the tour, and especially since I got to meet Donough (pronounced as 'Donna' or 'Donut', whichever you prefer) my room-mate again. He has also just got his master's degree, so congratulations on that one dude.
As I have dropped my digital camera on the floor when I came home and it doesn't seem to work no more (oops!), I won't be able to show all the great pictures I took. But here are some highlights:
-I finally understand the english tradition of getting very pissed very soon. No wonder that in a country where all the pubs close at 23:00, everybody tries to gulp down as much ale as possible before you have to leave. (In Holland most bars are open till 01:00 or 02:00)
-Coming back from Dublin was a disaster, as we were playing Bristol the next day, and flying into Leeds first. So the bus to take us to the airport was 30 minutes late. Then the airplane couldn't take off, because there were problems with a computer (Windows I guess). We had to wait 2 hours on the runway. Finally after landing in Leeds much too late, we got on the road in a rented mini-van. Just about an hour away from Bristol we decided to stop at a gas-station to take a little rest, but the gear-box of our van decided that it was good time to die. Thankfully it happened when we were at a gas-station, otherwise we would be in much more trouble. So we had to get the van towed back to Leeds and the tow-company were nice enough to give us a lift to the closest train-station as we decided that the show must go on. We were very late at the gig, but we managed to play our set and good it was, as all the frustration from the day came out.
-Somehow everybody in the band got injured on this tour. We have done over 15 tours in our existance, some of them 6 weeks long but this has never occured before. Our singer fell to the floor after a stage-dive as the crowd did not catch him. I hit our guitarist with my bass during the show. And the next day I closed the car-door with his fingers still inbetween, so he was not very happy with me to put it mildly. Last day I fell myself on a wet floor while dancing to another band and injured my shoulder.
-The whole tour was great fun nonetheless, with lotsa good shows and great reactions. We  also managed to see a lot of the cities we were in like Brighton, Leeds and Liverpool. And I got to drink loads of Irn-Bru, which is only sold in the UK (as far as I know).

Comments

[Geplaatst door: m.visaya]

mandelbrot (mtn) here:
c=3+1.0293854i