Red tape, red tape

I came in this morning and read about half of two separate articles... I started reading a paper on a 2-level model of laser ablation, but I was having trouble concentrating, so I started reading "The effect of damage accumulation behaviour on ablation thresholds and damage morphology in ultrafast laser micro-machining of common metals in air" by Mannion et al. I'll summarize both when I finish them.

After lunch, I helped Lei align the He-Ne in the lab. Since the He-Ne is such low power, my untested knowledge of laser saftey is adequate. The system is now almost entirely set up optically except for the lenses and CCD. We need to see an electronics guy about the shutter, since the trigger apparently needs more voltage than will currently reach it. We're also apparently waiting for another translation stage for the sample.

I got back to the office and found out from Bianca that although we do have the bon du commande, the earliest the ophthalmologist with whom the Ecole seems to have a preferential relationship could make an appointment was 7/1, which is frankly ridiculous. I'm going to ask Julien to help me call them tomorrow, but if they can't do anything, I've already found 4 other possible opth.s through HTH's website. The health insurance won't cover it because it's not illness related, and it would be 90e out of pocket with the POSSIBILITY of being reimbursed...because of the relationship between the ecole and the opth. they want me to go to...

So the upshot is that I was really not in a good frame of mind at the end of the day, and that if Julien can't help me convince the nearby people to give me an appointment sooner, I've got the decision between paying quite a bit of money and getting the thing done, or sitting around unable to do research for 3 weeks.


At least the day ended well. Francois invited us to a party at ENSTA, where we were pretty well welcomed by the French students.