First “Dr”
Jun 30th 2006WallabyGeneral & nerd alert
Got my first mail addressed to “Dr.” today — well, first not counting junk magazines that assume I’m “Dr.” because they heard I exist. (Actually it’s very nice of them to do that; good way to weed them out automatically.)
Science post of the week: Haven’t done much in the lab to talk about; last week before I move down the hall for my postdoc. That means cleaning out my desk this afternoon. Joy. I did finish rewriting the camera control stuff, which was pretty straightforward except for one little fact that doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere in the manual: The Andor Newton camera has *two* A/D circuits, one of which is limited to reading out at 50 kHz (which takes about 10 seconds). The other runs at 50 kHz, 1 MHz and 2.5 MHz. Guess which one answers back if you don’t specify which one to use? 
It was at least a week figuring out why my version was stuck at 50 kHz when the vendor-supplied software could go the full range.
Moral: If there’s a function provided to ask the hardware what it can do — use it. Even if you’re sure you already know the answer.