Halloween!

Two groups! Very dedicated indeed.

-Tim

Halloween?

Six-thirty and still no trick-or-treaters. Guess our pumpkin is scaring them all away.

-Tim

Scared-E-Pumpkin

This year's carving effort turned out a little different than last. We're hoping it will look like it's frightened of all the kids.

2005

2004

-Tim and Tamara

Jump Start

Last Sunday I dropped Tamara off at Loomis for her tutoring appointments with the understanding that I would pick her up again in a few hours. Unfortunately, the car had other plans. Oh well, at least we got to take a nice evening stroll together...

The dreaded 'click of death' when trying to start, no head lights, no windshield wipers, definitely a dead battery. I did all the requisite research to try to find the cheapest way to deal with it, mostly trying to avoid having to have it towed. And in the end, I got my brother to come over and try to jump the car for me.

Afterall that research, including actually reading our car manuals, we had it all figured out and let his car charge mine for several minutes. Too bad it didn't work. Eventually, I had to give in and call a tow truck. But instead of towing it, they just used their portable jump start kit to get my car running in seconds. Of course. (I really want one of these now, there are even models that have air compressors in them to fill flats!)

After, they got the car running I just drove the three blocks up to Advance Auto Parts (which the tow truck guy recommended) to buy a new battery, where the car promptly died again. Now, usually, AAP does free installation with a battery purchase, but my car happens to fall into the 'labor intensive' category and so, the clerk informed me, they can't change the battery because their insurance carrier is afraid they'd screw it up and doesn't want them to be held liable for it. Great, so I should have just gone with my original plan of just buying a battery and carrying it home.

But the clerk was a really nice guy and he offered to loan me a tool set (since mine were at home) and advise me while I exchanged the battery. The problem turned out to be just that there was a (completely and totally unnecessary) support bar bolted over the battery and that there was a fuse box strategically placed to make it difficult to get the battery out. Brilliant design, really, brilliant.

After I got the cross bar off and unclipped some hoses, the clerk unhooked the battery terminals for me. I was pretty surprised when the positive terminal literally fell out of the battery, but he said that happens to about 30% of the ones he exchanges. And that that may have been the source of my problem. Of course, that made me fell a little better since now I was going to leak battery acid all over their parking lot instead of my lawn.

With the battery disconnected, I, for liability purposes, had to be the one who actually pulled it out. It took a little coaxing, but it came free without disturbing the fuse box. And the new battery, which is a little smaller, went in quite easily. I'm sure it wouldn't have gone nearly as smoothly without Shane's (the clerk's) help, but it was satisfying that I did it myself. It's just too bad that it cost me the tow truck fee too.

And I didn't even lose my radio station presets.

-Tim

Violins and Pipe Organs

I gave the Physics 140 lecture today, since both Prof. Greene and Prof. DeMarco were out of town. It was the music lecture, specifically concerned with vibrating strings and air columns. Everything went well, except that the Line of Fire didn't really cooperate. The flames kept getting blown out while I was trying to get a good standing wave. I'd never realized how difficult that demo was to do without any help. When I described the line of fire demo to Prof. DeMarco he immediately decided that we needed an excuse to use it in every single lecture. The students favorite demos seemed to be the pyrophone and the tacoma narrows bridge video.

At the end of the lecture I showed the first half of Disney's Donald in Mathemagicland. Which talks about how Pythagoras developed the structure of musical chords. A surprising number of students were willing to stay late to watch it.

-Tim

Was it something it said?

What do you think the poor roll of toilet paper did to deserve this?

alternate link.

In Cassie's defense, we have reason to believe that Ally actually started it.

-Tim

Grrrarrgghh@#%!!!!!! (part 2)

You should probably read the previous post before this one.

I got in on Tuesday morning fully confidant that I could still manage to have both samples tested by my Thursday deadline. I had a new developer recipe and I had decided to bend the rules slightly and use the nicer contact aligner. I've asked for explicit permission to use the better aligner several times now, but I've just been ignored. Meanwhile, no one else seems to pay any attention to the sign on the door which says who can use the aligner. I hate to cross a line that I'm not technically supposed to, but I can simply no longer get by with the other machine, it just doesn't work well enough to process these devices.

And the nicer machine is MUCH nicer. The action on the arm swinging forward is so smooth that it couldn't possibly knock the sample out of alignment, even if it was in poor contact. And as a bonus, the microscope actually focuses! Aligning an 8 micron by 8 micron square on top of a 10 micron by 10 micron square is much easier when you can see them. It takes roughly an hour to align and expose two samples on the micro aligner, I can do it in 20 minutes on the nano aligner. It was so much easier, it felt like I was somehow cheating.

Of course, the developer recipe failed miserably. Completely washed away the photoresist squares that were supposed to protect the devices from the SiO2 I needed to deposit next. It took two more tries on each one to finally dilute the developer enough that it didn't destroy the pattern completely, and even then it looked terrible, but it looked like at least 50% of the devices would survive.

The next machine I needed was in use. I came back that night and deposited the insulator without issue. As I expected, very few of the device looked like they survived this far.

Wednesday morning I just needed to do one more step. I was able to do the exposure in two tries (more developer issues), and Paul and I went to deposit the Nb contact layer. The Ion Mill was acting funny, but we pressed on. The Nb came out with a distinct blue tint, but we pressed on (no one listens to me when I say that something looks like it's colored funny). It took until nearly 5 pm.

While soaking the samples in acetone to lift off the unnecessary Nb, I began to stake out my claim on the testing equipment since I knew I was going to need to be there all night. Turns out Soren and Kevin both wanted it too. Well, too bad for them, I've got a deadline.

Except that it turned out I wouldn't be needing it afterall. All of the Nb I had deposited lifted off, not just the unnecessary parts, meaning that there was no way to contact the samples for testing and I would need to repeat the entire step. At this point Paul said to forget it, the sample looked awful and unless we could get a reliable developer recipe and figure out what was wrong with the Nb we would never get any useful info out of the samples.

It turns out that the machine was just out of Nb and we were actually sputtering the Nb container onto our sample. See, I told you it looked weird.

*sigh*

-Tim

Grrrarrgghh@#%!!!!!!

I've been rushing all week to get the latest two samples processed so that I could get them tested before Paul started growing the next set tomorrow. To make a long story short, I failed. But it wasn't my fault...Honestly. I encountered a new disaster at every step along the way. It's been utterly ridiculous. I mean, I'm a believer in Murphy's Law (that everything that can go wrong, will) but I'm talking about things that couldn't go wrong going wrong! Things going wrong that made no sense. Things going wrong that came from so far out in left field that they must have actually started from miles outside of the stadium.

It all started on Sunday. I went on Sunday to do the first step in the process thinking I'd get a jump on it and easily beat my Thursday deadline. The first step has the most parts and relies on the most machinery being available for use, so doing it on Sunday meant less competition from other grad students for the equipment. Everything went ok, the Ion Mill milled through a bit more material than it should have, but no big deal, the samples came out in great shape. I had been there processing for about five hours by that point, but I decided to press on and get the second step (which is the shortest) done too.

That's when the avalanche began.

On the second photolift, both of the samples moved during their exposures (each is done separately), and so I needed to run them again. And they moved again. To explain a little better, what we do is cover the sample with a thick liquid called Photo Resist (PR), line it up beneath a mask (a glass plate with a pattern on it), and then expose it to a strong ultraviolet light. Since the pattern blocks some of the light, only some of the sample is exposed. The exposure changes the chemical properties of the PR so that it will be removed when we dunk the sample in developer, while the PR that was not exposed stays on the sample throughout whatever the processing step is that we need to do. In the second step, we're actually aligning the pattern that actually defines the devices to the pattern that we made in the first step, so it's important that the sample doesn't move during the exposure.

The mask aligner we use to do this is a simple contact aligner, you work it by basically smashing your sample up against the mask and then an arm with a set of mirrors moves forward so that the light from the lamp is directed down into the sample from above the mask (it's all very technical). The problem with this particular aligner is that the arm doesn't so much move forward anymore, it's more like it lurches forward. Which causes the sample to get knocked out of place no matter how tightly you put it into contact. After two failures I decided to give it a rest and come back in the morning.

Monday morning I failed twice more, same problem as before...And then it got worse. One of my samples slipped off of the plate and into the aligner mechanism underneath the mask holder. Well, of course, I totally freaked. It didn't fall out the bottom and I couldn't see it, it was stuck. The aligner still worked perfectly, but I was sure that I would break it if I went prodding around inside, and these things are expensive. Really expensive. I ran off to find Paul, but he was no help. I went off to find Tony (who is in charge of the cleanroom/fabrication rooms), but he's out of the office this week. At this point, Paul emailed me to reiterate that I had until Thursday to finish testing the samples.

Luckily, by now I had calmed down a bit. I went back into the cleanroom and found where the sample was standing, yes standing upright, next to the mechanism, not really stuck in anything, just sitting on a little outcropping. I was able to knock it free and clean it up with surprisingly little fuss. I did the exposure once more, they moved again. But they didn't move much and I was losing my tenuous grip on my sanity so I decided to move on, this wasn't the most critical alignment step anyway--the devices would still work fine. Then I discovered that the cleanroom was out of the developer we use. Screw this.

I went to watch the Physics Van show in Loomis, they did a great job and had twelve volunteers there (one had been in my 212 discussion section last semester, he was a pretty good presenter too)!

After my break, I found Kevin (Tony's assistant/backup/whatever) and he said that he was under the impression that Tony had decided to no longer stock the developer we use and that there was no more left!! Plus, he hadn't bothered to tell anyone, even Kevin, until the day before! (As a side note, everyone in our group and everyone who we've talked to uses that same developer too. Tony gets back tomorrow, should be interesting.) So now I have to learn how to use a new developer, on actual samples no less, since I have no time for testing. And of course, everyone has their own recipe. Even though we all use the regular AZ Developer (that they're no longer stocking) most people I talk to have resorted to one of the others in the past when the regular one ran short, and they all swear by completely different mixtures/times. In the end I went with Kevin's recipe of diluting AZ 351 three to one instead of using the regular AZ at two to one. It worked beautifully. The mesas I was defining in the photolift came out square and clear, and the rest of step two went without a incident.

Things were finally looking up! Except that it had taken me an entire day to do the shortest step and the alignment was terrible. Yeah, except for that, things were looking up.

So to recap, the processing so far has gone from "good" to "bad" to "worse" to "a little tiny bit better". I'm going to stop here tonight, but stay tuned because in steps three and four it actually goes to" incredibly more worse" and then to "you've got to be kidding me" and finally stopping at "oh for the love of...Just...@$#%&!...I mean, come on, really!"

-Tim

Be afraid...

It's liquid nitrogen week in the Physics 140 Discovery Room. Could be worse though, at least it's not unofficial St. Patrick's Day this time.

-Tim

Mythbox

My brother recently decided that he no longer needed his desktop pc and he traded it to me for a laser printer. And I've been working to turn it into a file server/myth tv box running Fedora Core 4. It's at least partially up and running now, but was far more trouble than I'd bargained for. Finding a video card that would actually display to the TV

Basically, so far I'm able to watch downloaded video content (like my 80 GB of Mystery Science Theater episodes from the Digital Archive Project) on the TV and play mp3s on the stereo. It's also currently acting as a backup file server for our laptops and even a web server. I doubt I'll really use it for anything as a webserver since I can just use the university's space and bandwidth, but running my own webserver would let me use php and such (like with this program that parses and displays my calendar files).

I still have to figure out how to get the tv card and remote control working. But even though the remote would be nice, we don't really need PVR functunality, in fact, the downloaded MSTs are actually clearer than our tv reception.

-Tim

Since I found Serenity.

Tamara and I saw Serenity (the movie based on Joss Whedon's Firefly tv series) last night. Overall, it was very good. In fact, the story line seemed to work better as a movie than it was faring in the weekly series. The one problem we both had with the tv series was that it felt like it was going somewhere, but it didn't want to tell us where that might be. Basically it was like Whedon just expected everyone to trust him that he was going somewhere. We only got the vaguest idea where the various characters came from, how the universe was structured and where the story was going. Entire groups of people (like the reevers) were presented as major characters/plot points in the pilot and then forgotten about. Of course they weren't actually forgotten, Whedon was just trying to stretch the plot out as long as possible. And that leisurely build up was just too slow.

The movie, however, was much faster paced. Plus, the movie had a sense of seriousness and weight that the series lacked, especially noticeable when they killed off two major/popular characters. It just made it feel all the more possible that the heroes might not make it out alive, and they definitely wouldn't make it out unchanged--and that's rare in commercial action/science fiction movies. Plus, a huge chunk of the tv series plot was satisfactorily resovled, while still leaving plenty left for more movies. I'm definitely looking forward to a sequal focusing more on Mal and Inara, as well as more of Mal and Zoe's past.

-Tim