Second day of work

Went back to work this morning, but the Internet was still down, not only at the Rocket Range but also at Alomar. Still, I had a productive conversation with Trude about the Domex project, and about how to set up and run the "EZ Lidar" should it be repaired and make it to Norway before I leave.

Before lunch, Trude and I "hiked" down from Alomar to the main road (a long downhill walk, almost like a hike, but along the dirt road used to drive there), where her husband met us. We went to the sporting goods store "downtown" (if Andenes has such a thing) so that I could buy a bike helmet and a backpack. Now I can bike to the grocery store and carry some groceries back with me, and I probably won't need to drive so I'm not going to bother trying to tame the manual transmission. Then we went to lunch at a bakery, and after that to the electronics store where I bought a cell phone that will work on European frequencies, and a pre-paid temporary SIM card. Food at grocery stores is reasonably priced here (so I might stay within my $80/week budget), but everything else is ridiculously expensive--I paid $60 each for the bike helmet and backpack, and $80 for the phone, which doesn't even flip or take pictures. It does, however, have a "fake call" feature, for those situations "when you want to get out of meetings or unwanted conversations" (as stated in the manual). And I can bring these things back to the States, and the phone might come in handy on future trips abroad--it will work anywhere in Europe, I just have to keep getting prepaid SIM cards.

Trude and her family left after lunch, to head back to the US. Zuguang picked me up to go back to Alomar, where I started reading up on the lidar I'll be using. It's a really interesting instrument, involving Raman scattering as well as the backscattering at the original laser wavelength. Raman scattering is something that I've worked on at Yale with Mark Brandon, and the calibration of the polarization channels involves something that came up last year in my REU work at Oregon State University. I love how research experience builds on itself.

The Internet finally came back on when I got home, so I was able to respond to some correspondence, and I finally have the passwords for the Domex data. I had to use Google Translate to set up the cell phone and change the language from Norwegian to English. Interestingly, the first 3 digits of my Norwegian cell phone number are 911, the US emergency number. (In Norway 110 calls the fire department, 112 the police and 113 the paramedics.)