First Day at Work

I'm sorry to say I've probably waited too long to do my 'First Day,' but I will attempt to recreate it in my mind as best as possible.

I remember being uncomfortable, because I dressed up in my best clothes all day.  Everyone else was in the 'bluejeans' level of casual, and I felt overdressed.  I also walked to work, whereas I've been riding my bike recently.

I remember being introduced to dozens of people and not being able to remember most of their names.  I work with Stefan and Bernard on a daily basis, this guy named Valdemar introduced himself as, "Voldemort without the 't'" (how can you forget that?), Marcus doesn't speak English well--but I end up asking him for a lot of things anyway, and there was one other person I talk to who I don't know his name (but I thought it really was 'Bio" for a while before I realized that was just his department [Bernard would say, "Go talk to Bio."]).

I remember being afraid.  Bernard (my boss) took me upstairs, introduced me to Stefan, briefly explained the project outline, showed me the oscilloscope, and told me figure out what it was by tomorrow (pleasant dreams, I'll most likely kill you in the morning).  I spent three hours reading about electricity, oscilloscopes, waveforms, and pulse generators.  I had lunch, where someone took me to the end of the street to order a hotdog from a vendor (I haven't forgotten a sandwich since).  Then I spent five hours reading more about electricity, oscilloscopes, waveforms, and pulse generators.  I almost knew what was going on by the time I went home.

I remember being relieved the first day was over.

Foodie

Germany is a land of alcohol, meat, cheese, and chocolate.  If I wanted to gain weight I wouldn't do it in America (no matter how efficient and cost-effective it would be), I would move to Germany buy out the cheese and chocolate sections.

In a typical Publix, I can imagine the candy isle.  It has sugary treats of all sorts: lemon drops, caramel, hard candies, fruity chewies like starburst and skittles, a dozen different candy bars, and a couple dozen other brands of flavored sugar.  Most of this isn't worth your time more than once.  Some people have a favorite (like snickers) they'll go for, but this is not what you reach for when you think of quality chocolate.  And yes, Publix will probably have a small secluded section for the high-quality imports of chocolate (Godiva).

In even the smallest German grocer, you see an immense relative reduction in the flavored-sugar candies and a lot more chocolate.  In their candy section, there are a dozen different brands, each with a dozen different flavors--there is full spectrum of German chocolate.  Milka (good), Aero (good), Sarotti (great), Ritter Sport (good) and others all have a wide range of chocolate measured by %Cocoa (going from what we would call White to Bitter Dark) each combined with either different kinds of nuts (hazelnut, peanut), or fruit (raisins, strawberry filling), caramel, corn flakes, coffee, marzipan (a personal favorite), nougat, praline, and flavors of yogurt.
Germans seem to be less strict about alcohol in chocolates, I've seen some incredible liqueur filled chocolates on the cheap.
I think, if you showed a German a Hershey's Bar, they would just stare at you and ask, "Why did you put cocoa powder in this wax?"
Actually, they do sell American candy bars--for two and three times the price of the (better) German chocolates.
I've also seen strange things, like the German Twinkie--a [get this] individual cheesecake snack (which tastes about as awesome as you'd imagine).

The cheese has been equally spectacular in its own way.  I'm enjoying Castello http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Castello with some honey right now.  As Andrew no doubt remembers, it's actually cheaper to buy rounds of Brie (and other unpronounceable creamy cheeses) and cut squares of them onto your sandwich than to buy sliced cheeses.  The President camembert and the veritable chaumes has been especially good sandwich material, and I've got some slices of I-don't-know-what from the K&K down the street.

As for alcohol, Dr. Figura treated me to some Quakebruck Pils when I first arrived, but I've been concentrating on wine since.  I mostly get things in the 1.99E range.  The Dronfelder Rheinhessen was ok, I was disappointed in the Lambrusco (I must have gotten the specifics wrong, but I remember it from last year),  the Portugieser Weissherbst was all right and so was the Gerwurztraminer Tramini.  But the Stand UP and Shout 'Awesome' has been the Ume-Pflaume
http://www.marktjagd.de/angebot/Netto-Marken-Discount-Ume-Pflaume:1158473
which was an incredible experience in and of itself.  

My German Trainer

Ever since I started going to the University of Florida, I've been working out with fair regularity.  It was mostly just dieting before that but, with a free gym in walking distance, suddenly the effort it took to start was significantly reduced.  At first it was once a week, for about a semester, and then I began to increase sessions to several times a week (just last semester I was going to the gym two times a week and going to the martial arts club three times a week a night).

Over winter and summer breaks, I would work out at the Church gym with Andrew, who was more experienced than I was and all too happy to show me a few tricks I could fit into my routine.  A year ago, he actually convinced me to start running in Germany.  That didn't end up sticking, but I made it around Lake Hollingsworth once and--more importantly--I proved to myself that I could run if I wanted to.

So I don't want to lose all my progress going three months without working out, so I started looking for a gym as soon as I got to Quakenbruck.  My good fortune is that DIL has a gym-->in my building-->below where I work, so I can start  immediately after I'm done for the day.  Unfortunately, it's not free.  But it's cheap, which is nearly as good (something like 10 a month).

I walk in one day, after I'm established at my workplace, and talk to the person in charge.  He fills out the paperwork, makes me a plan, and gets me started.  Turns out, my trainer is (one of) the Artland Dragon's trainer.  His English is excellent (better than most at DIL) because he trains so many American athletes, and he is often willing to give me his exclusive attention.  He has me on the low-and-slow method of doing things slowly and with perfect form on low weights, and it's a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.

I've been working out by myself mostly for the last two years.  I've worked out with Andrew before and, though he is good, he's not a professional trainer.  I've also worked with a friend (Vernon) at UF a couple times, but it's the same kind of situation.  I realize I've never actually worked with a professional trainer before, and my first is a German Athletic coach--how cool is that?

Lebara Mobile, The Empire Strikes Back

Yeah!  It's Feast of the Ascension day in Germany, and also Father's Day!
Which means no work Thursday or Friday, "If you show up, no one will be here."
But it's a stay at home with your family holiday--I asked several people if there was anything going on in town today, but they just said everybody's going to be at home or with their family someplace and everything will be closed.
Everything is closed.  Nobody is anywhere.

No one can hear you scream.

SO, Jessica sends me a text and invites me to lunch.  I text her back.  "Text undeliverable" ???  I try calling.  "The number you are calling is not listed."  I send her an email, but she's not checking her inbox.

Finally, it hits me.  I've run out of minutes.  Ha ha ah, silly me, running out of minutes.  I'll just go to lebara-mobile.de and top-up.  Yes, here's the English website, no problems here.  And here's the Top Up button to refill my account.  "Register Now" to Top Up?  Ok, I see no problems here.  Filling out information, and done!

"We're sorry, we're not up to standard and are having technical problems."

What?  Ok, I'll try again in case it was my fault.

Try to register second time...Same error message.

Gaah, fine, I'll try one more time.

"Thank you for registering."  Oh, so it works now...fine.  *activates account via email*
*Login*
"Please Select a way to Top Up"  I choose 10Euro, and they want a "promotional voucher" number.
What's that?  *tries every number on the SIM card information there is, including phone number and pin number*

Nothing Works!  What's a voucher number?  Ok, I'll call help, it says the first fifteen minutes are free.
*dials number*  "The number you are calling is not listed."  WHAT? THAT'S THE HELP NUMBER!
*Tries FOUR more times*
"Welcome, to Lebara Mobile, you have 0,2 cents, press 1 to Top Up"  *press1*
"Enter your 16 digit Voucher Code"  What do I have that's sixteen digits?  Credit card number?
"The number you have entered is not valid."  How about a person, can I call the help desk?
"You do not have enough credit to make this call, arrange a Top Up."  GAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

All right, I'll just run a search for 'lebara voucher code.'  See, they just want me to buy a voucher from someone else, fine, take my money, I just want my phone back.
Here's my credit card number and my email, now send me the voucher code.

"Hello Edward Carley,
Mobile Top-up Online just sent you a full refund of £12.50 GBP for your purchase."

NOnononononononononoNnnO!  DON'T send me a REFUND, keep the money!  I just want a voucher code!  Take my money, take my money, Why Won't You Take My Money!?!

My phone is broken so there's no one I can call.  It's a stay-at-home holiday so there's no one I can talk to.  None of this would bother me, I would just shrug the whole thing off on any other day, but I just missed lunch with a friend because of this.  Any other time this would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience to me, I still have internet so I can still be in contact with my family and friends so it's not even a big deal, BUT it had to be on the day when I was going somewhere and didn't know when or where to go and couldn't ask anyone.

So I ended up communicating with my parents through gmail, and they haven't figured it out yet--they might yet, but not in time for Lunch with Jessica (it's 12:35pm and it takes 40 minutes to get to Osnabruck) so my story is fairly much concluded.  If all else fails, I'll walk to the store in town tomorrow and they be able to help me for sure because I got it from them.  It's not a very satisfactory end to the story, I know, so I'll end it on a good (but unrelated) note.


I've been wanting to go to this cute little Chinese place in town, but I didn't know when they were open, and I just got a menu in the mail with their hours on it!  This totally brightens my otherwise gloomy morning.

It's like a Sympathy Card from God.

Second Explanation

My first explanation here was a load of techno-babble ment for my official report.

Allow me to explain the waveform thing better, perhaps more clearly. The outgoing pulse from the generator is a simple wave (one vertical peak). The outgoing pulse passes by the oscilloscope (EKGs use a modified kind of these, they display the heartbeat on an amplitude-versus-time graph), and gets read as it passes. The outgoing pulse travels through a wire, reflects off air or water or meat, and the reflected pulse returns to the oscilloscope (the trip separates the reflection from the outgoing pulse). The reflected pulse is a complex wave (with wierd shaps and little molehills around it), because it contains information about what it reflected off of. 

The oscilloscope does 100X10^6 samples per second, but it's just barley enough to read this wave. The result is that the data I work with is about 200 samples long, and about 8 of those data points will describe most of a wave. Because there are so few points on any given reflected wave, there's way too much opportunity for variation on one temperature/concentration setup.

So I've told the program to do an averaging of 1000 waves--so in my final data set each 8 points of interest are an average of a 1000.

Because my 'waveform' is really the scientific equivalent of some kid's Connect-the-Dots drawing (or maybe a Cubist trying to paint a tree), it's going to be practically impossible to regress linearly, with polynomials, or even non-linearly because any equation acurately describing the shape as a whole would be too bulky to work with.

My idea to deal with this is to take those 200 samples for one wave, and compare each point individually with another wave at a different concentration. So I take 10 waves for ten concentrations, and I take 1 position (out of 200 positions) and regress how it changes over the 10 concentrations. What I get is a much more simple relationship between amplitude and concentration.

It is this simple relationship I want to regress--to find an equation describing one point on the wave. With a spreadsheet program I can do this 200 times, and be able to describe the waveform as a whole using 200 equations.

German Keyboards

So you all know I have a job at DIL, more on that later, but what you may not know is that it's a desk job and I spend eight and a half hours each day sitting in front of my computer (I just got mine, more on that later).  Normally, this would be inconsequential--I have a long association with computers and, though I don't know much in the way of programing, I'm pretty good and I continually make efforts to learn more [Minecraft has actually been a minor course in the technicals of how computer filing works, I have to manually place the texture packs into the proper folder {took me forever to figure out *windows button + R* and search appdata}]--but in this case it amounts to something because I have to use a German Keyboard.  

What did I just show you a picture of?  This is what I have to deal with every day.  At first glance it actually looks normal, the F and J are in the right places so you don't have to alter your hand positions or think too much about where things are on the keyboard.  But, before you say anything, do me a favor--look down at your keyboard, and back at the picture.  Notice the "y" and "z" positions are reversed.  Just those two.  Zou have no idea how annozingz this can be.

That being said, I submit my further observations on the design.  The "up arrow" key can be correctly inferred from relative position to be the "Shift" key.  "Down arrow" is similarly "Caps Lock."  "Strg" is "CTRL," there are some extra letters you don't use, but they're not in the way (and end up being downright convenient when you have to type "Quakenbrück").  The ' key is aggravatingly hidden behind the #, whether you can see that from this image or not.  

But the only thing you might really be confused about is something called "Alt Gr."  Notice the upper row, with the numbers.  There are three symbols per key.  The "Alt Gr" is a kind of 'second shift' key, that lets you  stack numbers and letters in groups of three--actually a good idea if you desperately want to fit all the German letters and symbols onto an American style keyboard.  But it makes hunting down "[" "(" and "@" very difficult.  

I don't know how many 'alternate shift' keys you'd need to fix this, 

Report

Deutsches Insitut für Lebensmitteltechnik
Edward Carley
5/18/11

This report documents the process through which I went to find a usable setup for a pulse signal and the subsequent tests I set up in preparation for calibrating the probe to the analysis of meat. 

Initially, I thought the TGP110 10MHz Pulse Generator would supply the pulse, but the setup was somewhat complex and the analog knob for the amplitude was libel to change accidentally.  Also, the pulse it generated had secondary peaks besides the desired reflected pulse, which were probably pulse echoes from the apparatus.  Since extra signals are undesirable, it being unclear where they come from, I continued to look for other ways to generate a pulse. 

The Handyscope HS3-100 has a function generator feature, but no pulse function.  However, by setting the square function to the max 12.0V DC Offset, max 12.0 Volt amplitude, 0.2MHz Frequency, and 0.1% Symmetry, I achieved what was effectively a pulse.  The Out cable was attached to a coaxial T adaptor at the CH1 In port, leaving a long cable out the other side attached to the probe.  The Handyscope displays several measurements a second, resulting in turbulent appearing data.  To reduce random error, I set the program to perform an averaging of 128 measurements before wiping the results and I record the waveforms generated by the probe only when they are over 115 measurements averaged. 

A long cable for the probe is needed to separate the pulse from the reflected pulse and the accompanying signal.  At first I connected several smaller cables together with female to female coaxial adaptors, but concerns were raised about possible error due to cord arrangements.  It was supposed the close contact of coiled cables could create a small magnetic field, affecting the pulse.  So, as the experiment in the Excel spreadsheet ‘Cord Arrangement’ in the ‘rn’ folder of ‘Eddie Data’ shows, I set up an experiment to compare positions of the cable and the order of the individual cables. 

To determine if these differences were significant beyond random error, I created the experiment which can be seen in the nearby Excel spreadsheet ‘Random Noise with Air.’  I took measurements of air with the probe, isolating temperature and cord position, approximately every thirty seconds to see what error could be attributed to random noise.  What I found was that the probe in the most consistent environment I could create has differences on the order of 0.1% of the amplitude.  Comparatively, the cord arrangements have differences greater than 1% of the amplitude, over an order of magnitude increase. 

When I switched to the new cable, which is one line of cable with no adapters, the differences between the arrangements shrank dramatically.  While the doubled over and quadrupled over cable arrangements had differences with the straight line greater than 1%, the other arrangements had much smaller differences.  The differences between the straight and jumbled cables were on the order of 0.1%.  I used the jumbled arrangement for subsequent experiments.

I began using the probe on solutions of salt in water, beginning with the Open Office spreadsheets ‘Salt Test Range,’ ‘Salt Test Range 2,’ and 3.  I wanted to examine the reflected signal waveforms generated by high and low concentrations of salt in these experiments.  Later, I also tested how the waveforms responded to changes in temperature at different concentrations, with tapwater as a base of comparison.  I have yet to mathematically analyze these results, but it currently appears there is no interaction between the variables of concentration and temperature. 

I note here that it matters where in the liquid solution where you hold the probe, but this is not a problem as long as you are consistent.  The probe senses less salt, and the waveform rises, when it is in contact with the sides or bottom of the container.  Holding it in the middle of the solution seems to give a consistent reading, but this is conjecture and will be tested.