It's been a few days since my last update and for that I apologies. The past week has been quite busy and I've worked everyday to the tune of 12-14 hours. The reason I've been spending long days in the lab is to get certain experiments running on the equipment at MSU. This doesn't have to do with the instruments I've designed, built and programmed, but instead the hardware I came to Montana to use. While the theory of operation is similar to the equipment in New Zealand, there were enough differences between the two systems to make for a challenging task. Despite being a bit tired, I've really enjoyed this time as it's been an excellent opportunity to further my knowledge and experience. It's kind of like learning to swim by being thrown into the deep-end of a pool... it's a bit terrifying and stressful, but if you survive you've grown in new ways.
Up until this afternoon nothing was working or making sense. After a long session on the machine with one of the local professors, we were able to locate our issue (which looks to be a bug in the instrument software) and figure out a reasonable work around. This evening I was able to fix up our code and make the measurement I need to make this trip a success.
Now after an intense week in Bozeman (and a few busy weeks before) I am headed to visit my family over a long weekend. When I return to Bozeman I'll have just over two weeks to continue my work, but with a working pulse sequence I feel more confident that fruitful data will come from this visit.
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