BGM/Luminosity Party!

During the meeting two days ago we heard that the KEKB accelerator team had reached a new world record luminosity of 17/nb/s. It’s been over a year since we hit 16/nb/s, so it’s well overdue. Oide san, who is in charge of the accelerator, promised us we would have 30/nb/s by this time next year though. We were originally planning on having a party last night anyway, like we do for every BGM, but it took on a new meaning with this result.


Unfortunate Timing...

More photos are here, here, and here, although some of them might only work from inside KEK.

Afterwards a few students headed back to the dorm for round two. This used to be a standard procedure whenever there was a meeting here, but recently we never seem to be able to get enough people together. A lot of students left the experiment last year after finishing their masters degrees. On top of that, quite a few of those who are left have moved up to Tsukuba permanently, so there aren’t normally very many of the old crowd together in the dorm anymore. Last night though there were about ten of us, so we bought a few drinks and snacks beforehand and sat in the lounge yapping until about 3-ish. Good evening. Missed the start of the meeting today, but it was worth it.

Recovery

Spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to recover the data I wiped. Luckily I had a backup from just four days ago on the computers in Osaka, and I hadn’t made too many new changes since then. I basically just copied all the old data files and scripts from the corresponding directory back to the Belle computers, tweaked a few of the scripts, and then ran them again to recover the changes since the last backup.

Things could have been a lot worse. Ever since the hard disk on my Mac PowerBook G4 kicked the bucket last December -- taking my masters thesis and two years worth of presentations and notes with it -- I’ve been very careful about taking backups. I usually back up data on the uni and Belle computers every couple of days, important files on the PowerBook every week or so, and the rest of my files about once a month. Strongly recommend it (mum!).

While I’m at it I think I’ll use this chance to plug the Mac’s. The service I got when the disk packed it last year was awesome. It’s not unusual for hard disks to bury themselves, especially on laptops, but the Mac guys here in Osaka came and picked it up, replaced the disk, and had it back to me in three days over the Xmas holidays. They even replaced it with a new 60GB disk free of charge because they had run out of 40GB version! Highly recommend them.

I’m up at the lab since Tuesday evening for a three day BGM (Belle General Meeting). We have a party tonight and then the last day of the meeting is tomorrow. Will probably head back to Kyoto on Sunday. Off for a run before I start on the beers.

Brainmelt

I was just using the Belle computers this morning trying to get some work done on my analysis. I wanted to wipe all my old files that start with "fp", so I tried to type

rm fp*

Except instead I ended up with

rm fp *

I'm awesome! At the time I was in the directory with all of my data files and the scripts which I use to run the analysis on them. I have an old backup from a few days ago in Osaka, but it's going to take a while to get everything back to where it was. I think I'll go for a commiseration beer.