Catching up, parts II and III


Some more catching up from the previous entry, then a big update from the ICRC.

Okay, here's some more summary of my work.

After noting the deadline extension and the possibility of submitting later papers to the ICRC and sending in the confirming abstracts on 7/1, I took the family to San Diego for a vacation over the 4th of July weekend. Because we booked late, we ended up staying in a Marriott near Old Town San Diego, rather than the Marriott on Coronado Island. Not as nice as the Marriott on Coronado Island, and our first room was right on the freeway, which I found pretty hard to bear. We got moved after complaining.

Saturday, we visited the San Diego Zoo, and William got his picture taken all over the place. Sunday, we visited Sea World, and on Monday, we visited Legoland on the way back to LA. We stayed late for the 4th of July fireworks at Legoland; I had originally intended to leave by mid-afternoon and maybe catch the fireworks at Disneyland instead, but Legoland was more convenient. I spent a lot of money there, including getting annual memberships for the family, which will be of value if we return two more times in the next year.

I worked a bit on analysis for my ICRC papers the following week, and with Rick L. away for a conference in Hawaii, I picked up his work analyzing data and started to help Rick C. try to figure out why LET FM2 was crashing during the thermal vac tests.

On Saturday 7/9, I started getting sick again. At first, I thought it was another virus, with a fever getting as high as about 103 F at most, with lots of muscle aches and pains, loss of appetite, hot sweats and cold sweats and shivers, and so on. I also started to notice that my urine output felt unusually low. By Monday 7/11, I was sick enough that Hsuan brought me to an urgent care clinic in Irwindale, where the doctor figured I had a virus, too, but he prescribed me some antibiotics (a Z-pack) "just in case". He cleared me of strep throat (I had a mild sore throat) with a strep test. He also figured I might have a mild case of bronchitis, and he said I should see my primary care physician in a couple of days if it didn't clear up. I took the initial dose of the Z-pack, and by the next day, it gave me diarrhea, which was not one of my original symptoms. By Tuesday 7/12, the pain was so severe, especially in my back, that I started to wonder if I had a kidney stone, to go along with my decreased urine flow. Hsuan got me a portable urinal and a strainer, and I tried to see if I would pass a stone. By now, I was regularly using strong doses of Motrin, which would kick my fever down to about 100-101 F and also relieve the pain enough for me to sleep. Basically, if I wasn't asleep, I was awake and in terrible pain. I was bedridden and unable to work or otherwise function normally. Hsuan brought William to daycare while taking care of James as well. I was that sick.

Finally, on Wednesday morning, I saw Dr. T., and she cleared me of bronchitis (lungs sounded clear to her). She asked some other questions whose answers eliminated things like hepatitis and so on, and finally, she ordered a blood test (CBC). Later that day, the blood test showed slightly elevated white blood cell counts, so she figured I might be in the early stage of a bacterial infection like sinusitis. She let me drop the Z-pack and instead prescribed augmentin (amoxicillin and clavulanic acid generically). Gradually, my fever came down and the pains, chills, and sweats went away over the next few days, and by Monday 7/18, I was able to return to work, even if only at 75% of my full strength.

By now, I had lost too much time to illness to make the 7/20 deadline to get my ICRC papers in for the CD, so I gave up that idea. Further, Andrew D. requested a final update to the LET Science Frame Format document over the weekend, which I e-mailed him on 7/17 in time for the final software review that week. Then, Dick requested calculations from me on the effect on our LET energy ranges if we were to lose an L3 detector due to high leakage currents. I ran a bunch of calculations using some of Mark's old Monte Carlo data, which I had on disk, and I sent them along with plots (data overlaid onto the matrices, plus energy histograms with and without the L3 detectors) to Dick on 7/22, with later revisions around 7/29.

I had three more 8 AM to 4 PM thermal vac shifts at JPL on Friday (7/22), Sunday (7/24), and Monday (7/25). Worked some more on both of my papers for the ICRC. A short thermal vac shift at JPL on Thursday from 8 PM to midnight (a previous shift on Wednesday from 4 PM to 8 PM was cancelled). Submitted my Q-states paper to the ICRC via e-mail on 7/29 and the penetrating particles paper on 7/30, after comments and revisions from Dick. Also finished my presentations before leaving on Sunday.

----------

What follows is my account of my ICRC trip, which I sent in e-mail to Dan:

The past couple of weeks were pretty adventurous. Ever watch Amazing Race? Reality show/contest, in which teams travel around the world as fast as possible and do assorted tasks at various locations. I now almost know what it's like.

First off, Rick (one of my colleagues from the lab) gets a detached retina during the SFO-LHR (London Heathrow) flight, becoming completely blind in that eye, and I (with one of only two cell phones in our traveling group) have to stay with him in London while he navigates the Brit medical system. Fascinating. For one thing, Rick kept mentioning he has insurance (Blue Cross HMO) which will pay any bill they send him, and they just gave him blank looks, like the charming Yank has such quaint notions of associating money with medical care. On the other hand, most of our time (and the time of other patients around us) was spent waiting for hours in triage, with the end result that a patient may or may not get actual medical care that day, perhaps not even for several days.

Much to be said for the American system, but I can understand one of the attractions of the British system -- not worrying about paying medical bills. Still, the British medical people were uniformly nice, unlike a lot of American medical personnel who can be real assholes at times. (I'm lucky that all the docs and the staff I see personally are really nice; maybe it's a California thing. Or having PPO insurance.)

Our final stop was Moorfields Eye Hospital (http://www.moorfields.org.uk/Home) in London, which is apparently a world-class eye hospital. We could only guess. (Rick later got treatment at USC's eye center, and his doctor there had once worked in Miami (???) with his attending physician at Moorfields. Small world. He got treatment, which I later heard was very similar to what he would have gotten in London. Treatment in London would have prevented his flying home for six weeks, which is why we sent him back. More successful than I had expected; he says looking through his left eye is like looking through his eyeglasses smeared with Vaseline, which is a hell of a lot better than seeing nothing at all.)

After it was determined that Rick's eye couldn't get much worse in a day or two, we got him on a plane back to LAX that Tuesday (8/2), and I got myself booked on the next available flight from LHR to Mumbai (Bombay), on Wednesday. I spent the rest of Tuesday running around London seeing the sights, figuring I wasn't likely to return for a visit (beyond passing through LHR) any time soon. Saw the Tower of London, Tower Bridge (after mistakenly looking for London Bridge), rode the Underground all over, ate fish and chips from a street vendor (and a hot dog from another street vendor), tried to see Buckingham Palace (which they apparently do not light up at night; disappointing), saw Big Ben, Westminster Cathedral (got accosted by panhandlers there), Westminster Abbey, and some Parliament building or other.

BTW, my checked luggage, which contained almost all of my clothes and my cell phone AC adapter, not to mention other adapters and toiletries, never made it to me in London. I had to buy two extra changes of clothing (shirts, underwear, socks) in London, which was pretty hard because I didn't know the clothes shopping areas. No Gaps that I could see anywhere nearby, so I shopped at a place called Next, which was sort of like Banana Republic. Close enough.

Flew the next day via BMI (British Midlands International) from LHR to Mumbai, arriving at 11 PM. Some Indians with ICRC 2005 signs (International Cosmic Ray Conference) met up with me and gave me directions on how to get a taxi to the hotel I'd stay in overnight (Parle International Quality Inn). Got a prepaid ticket for a taxi for 170 rupees, and the only taxi driver we could find for me didn't want the fare, since it was so small, so I had to grease him another 30 rupees.

BTW, my checked luggage, which I had notified BMI of at LHR, did not arrive with me in Mumbai. BMI baggage service promised to deliver it to the Taj Blue Diamond (my hotel in Pune) as soon as it arrived.

Dark, wet, and muddy were my nighttime impressions of India, and it remained wet and muddy for almost all of my stay, both in Mumbai and Pune. Monsoon season. Once I got to the Parle International, I went into full paranoia mode on the water. Got bottled water, which I drank and brushed my teeth with. Had a little of that Purell disinfectant in a couple of pocket bottles. Took a shower and planned on using hotel laundry for my four changes of clothes, in Pune, until my luggage arrived. Kept an eye on my stock of biscuits (cookies) and whatnot that I had saved from London, and reviewed the foods I was not supposed to eat (basically any raw vegetables and the like).

The next day (Thursday, 8/4), I got a taxi from Mumbai to Pune (where the conference would be held) for 2000 rupees. The driver was Frederick, and he had a Sacred Heart of Jesus decal on his windshield. After he found out I was Filipino-American, he revealed he was Roman Catholic and asked if I were, too.

Crushing poverty was my impression of Mumbai, overlaid with advertisements on billboards for high tech companies selling various things or billboards for luxury apartment buildings going up. Between the major buildings and built-up areas, I could see vast shanty-towns of shacks made of scrap wood, corrugated aluminum sheets, tarps, and whatever else people could scrap together to live in. The worst were tents along the sides of roads, near ditches that apparently also served as toilets and sewers. Some of the worst of these were single tarps on a bridge, stretched between the railing of the bridge and the edge of the sidewalk. Semi-naked children running around the insanely crowded streets, some women with children begging (unsuccessfully) for coins from the cars and other vehicles stuck in traffic, people cooking stews next to the ditches. Stray or loose dogs were all over the place, and while I'd be very worried about them in the US, I couldn't give them much thought in India.

Frederick pointed out that the slums there were the biggest in Asia, which may have been only a slight exaggeration. Soon after he said this, he started playing a tape of Christian pop music on his car stereo over and over. ("Praise Jesus", "Praise the Lord", etc.) I'm not sure if he actually liked that music or if he used it as a way to cope with the poverty he saw all around him, but after we left Mumbai and reached the Mumbai-Pune expressway (a tollway, and a relatively well-kept expressway, compared to the potholes in the cities), he didn't bother restarting the tape after it ended.

Traffic in India is a wild, unregulated mess. They seem to drive on the left side of the road and obey traffic lights, but otherwise, the rule appears to be "whoever gets there first has the right of way". We got in a traffic accident in Pune: A motorcyclist and his passenger hit us at a traffic stop (glancing blow), fell down, got up, brushed themselves off (with help from a temporary crowd of onlookers), and then moved off after exchanging not impolite words with Frederick. Traffic lanes appear only to be suggestions, and given the crappy state of the roads in the cities, it's not surprising that people drive every which way. And everyone is constantly honking horns, not in anger but in "get out of my way, I'm going to pass on your right".

The Taj Blue Diamond hotel in Pune is a five star, world-class hotel catering to business travelers. See http://www.tajhotels.com/Business/Taj%20Blue%20Diamond,PUNE/default.htm . Impeccable service from all of the staff, with the concierge and bell services almost being butler-like. The restaurants (Indian and international food in one; Thai and Chinese in another; pure Indian in a third which I failed to visit) also had great food and incredible service, with waiters plating the food for me right at my table. Delicious Indian food, adequate Chinese, pretty good Thai, and decent Western food. Felt weird about not tipping, but when I signed for my checks, there was no spot for tips.

Laundry service was good. Wireless Internet access was harder to log into than it should have been, and I spent a lot of time talking with the on-site tech support staff who gave me the impression that they should have run a better network.

The thing about the Blue Diamond was that it seemed to cater to business people who maybe travel so much that they want their hotel rooms to be isolated sanctuaries. When staying in my room, I almost felt like I could have been in any big city in the world, and it was only the Indian TV channels, the Indian newspapers delivered to me daily (in English), and the hotel stationery that gave me a hint I was in India. Mostly, I watched American TV shows when I watched TV (CNN, HBO (which has commercial interruptions in India), Xena Warrior Princess, and Friends).

The conference at Pune University was kind of a nightmare of dynamic scheduling. Nobody knew before the conference when they were supposed to give a talk. While in London, I received e-mail from Dick Mewaldt (one of my bosses who had gone on to India while I stayed in London) that my talk was scheduled to be given before I arrived in Pune, so I had to e-mail it to him for him to give it. When I actually arrived at the conference on Friday morning, Dick told me that he managed to reschedule my talk to Saturday, but that I could probably get it rescheduled for that very morning. The problem was that, when I had e-mailed it to Dick, I erased it entirely from my thoughts, so I felt unprepared and unpracticed. Plus, he had made modifications to my talk, and he gave it to me on a USB stick. I spent the morning sessions trying to cram my modified talk and rehearse it in my head (while listening to other talks), but luckily or not, I couldn't get myself squeezed into the morning sessions. After lunch (Indian food, catered by the university), I went to an afternoon session chaired by a friend of mine, and half the speakers (interestingly, all from India) failed to show up. I gave my talk then in the copious spare time, and none of the people in attendance were expecting it, so I got no questions there. Later that afternoon, at a poster session where my poster was put up by another colleague, people who were interested had heard about my talk, and they asked me questions there instead.

So, I arrived on Friday, and I was done on Friday.

BTW, my original checked luggage didn't arrive on Saturday. BMI had a 6 kg weight limit for carry-ons, so I took out my PowerBook, locked up my carry-on luggage (the Swiss-Army bag I told you about earlier), and checked it. Luckily, the checked-carry-on luggage arrived, so at least I had a few changes of clothing.

Pune University was very far away from the hotels, and the University organizers scheduled only one bus from each hotel each morning and one bus to each hotel each evening, so I was, in principle, a hostage to the conference. After a traditional Chicago-alumni dinner following some "Einstein lectures" (mostly cosmology, of all things) on Saturday, I decided to try to avoid being a hostage.

Fortunately, there were auto-rickshaws around which I could flag down and which could ferry me between the hotel and the University for a little over 100 rupees (10 rupees per km). Auto-rickshaws are gas-powered, three-wheeled vehicles with a covered back seat for one or two (or more, what the hell) passengers. If traffic was scary and frightening in a taxi, it was doubly so in an auto-rickshaw. Still, I managed to use them to escape back to my hotel for lunch (and to call BMI baggage service), where I once or twice collapsed unexpectedly due to jet-lag and would miss afternoon sessions.

Sunday (8/7) was free, and I went on a big excursion with a lot of other attendees to a big radio astronomy facility with ~47 radio telescopes, where we had lunch. Then we made an unscheduled stop at a winery to taste wines. When I saw a waiter rinsing glasses in a big aluminum tub full of cloudy water, I passed; no telling how long it takes for alcohol to kill the germs. Later, we went to a temple of Ganesh, where I couldn't help but think of Homer Simpson at Apu's wedding. They told us we had only fifteen minutes to visit the temple (take off our shoes, navigate the crowd of other people going through the tiny doorway, and then come out and hopefully find our shoes -- you could pay a guy a rupee to watch your shoes), I decided I'd visit one of many stalls in the area and buy souvenirs instead. One Ganesh keychain, plus a couple of teddy bear keychains when the merchant gave me a couple of torn 10 rupee notes as change for the Ganesh keychain. (Torn bills are often not accepted.)

Later, we visited some Indian fort at the top of a mountain, which involved a long, hard, forced march up the mountain. Once at the top, there wasn't much to see other than the (admittedly) spectacular view of the valley below. By then, though, I knew my thighs were going to kill me in following days (plus, I suspected some pulled groin muscle from earlier in the trip), and it started pouring rain on the way down.

The bus, originally scheduled to return to the hotels before 6 PM, dropped me off at the Blue Diamond at 10:15 PM.

Split my time on Monday and Tuesday between the University and the hotel. Mornings at the University, then afternoons and evenings at the hotel, using the Internet connection and my PowerBook to try to do some data analysis to help a colleague left at Caltech prepare for an upcoming pre-ship review of some instruments were hoping to fly in space next year. Also passed out from lingering jet lag. Spent time calling BMI and United Airlines baggage services pestering them for information regarding my baggage, which still hadn't arrived. Eventually, United admitted they still had it in London and that they hadn't sent it, despite getting requests from BMI. (My cell phone was dead by Sunday night, and I had no way of recharging it. I had a Solio (http://www.solio.com), but the weather was too cloudy to recharge it.)

Got food poisoning on Monday or Tuesday. At first, I thought the diarrhea and cramps were just from eating a really spicy meal, but the discomfort never went away, so Tuesday night I took my first Cipro tablet (500 mg), which was like dropping a neutron bomb in my bowels with a hearty FU and big middle finger to all the unwelcome visitors in my GI tract. Cleared me up with one dose, though I continued for a couple more days later.

On Wednesday at noon, I took a taxi from the hotel back to Mumbai International Airport (5000 rupees this time; nicer car), where I found at 4 PM that the BMI check-in desk wouldn't even open until about 9:30 PM. (Military guards with rifles made sure I was actually supposed to be at that airport. Poverty in Mumbai hadn't gone anywhere in my absence.) Slept in a waiting "lounge", covering my head with a shirt so I wouldn't have to swat flies from my face as I napped. At 8:30 PM, BMI opened early, so I checked in, told them about my lost luggage, and managed to beg them to let me take my 16 kg of hand-carried luggage (including new stuff from the conference) onboard. The supervisor must have felt sorry for me about my lost luggage.

When it came time to board the flight, a PA announcement brought me to the head of the line, where the BMI baggage service and boarding supervisor (same woman who I filed a report with on arrival) told me that my baggage was never delivered to BMI by United Airlines in London, confirming what I had heard on the phone earlier. I was given some claim numbers, told to check with United when I reach London, and allowed to board first.

When we arrived in London Heathrow, I checked in with United, and I spent a long time with the agent as she made calls all around LHR. She finally located my luggage at inter-line holding. Apparently, BMI maybe called the wrong United number (not inter-line holding), and they never forwarded the requests. The agent not only rerouted my luggage to LAX, but she also offered me a business class seat on a direct light from LHR to LAX, saving a couple of hours of travel time. (My original routing was a business class seat (upgraded with miles) from LHR to SFO, then SFO to LAX. I left my colleagues from Caltech, including my bosses, to take the longer route.)

Arrived safely at LAX around 2 PM on Wednesday (8/10). My long-lost baggage showed up shortly thereafter, as I waited. Took a shuttle to Caltech, where I took a much-needed shower in the gym.

----------

BTW, I didn't use my PSP until my return trip. I was never sure when I'd get the AC adapter to recharge it, so I saved it for the return. Played a lot of Untold Legends until it started getting repetitive again. I don't like how monsters reappear in an area after you clear them out from a previous pass through the area. Neverwinter Nights is better that way. Also played a lot of Need for Speed. Having the Boss cars makes all the difference. Up until the Master-level circuit races, the Corvette is so much faster than anything else that I win races based on speed on the straightaways, even if I crash a lot elsewhere. At Master level circuit races, the computer-controlled opponents have similar cars (I have the Corvette Z06 and the Subaru WRX STi boss cars), so it's a matter of driving skill. Much harder.

I never actually watched any movies on my PSP while traveling.

Disneyland with the family today. Finally got a decent picture of William in the Buzz Lightyear ride (sitting him on my lap so he would show up in the photo). The 50th Anniversary fireworks show is the best I've seen Disney do, either here or at Disney World. This was also James' first trip there.

Allan

Posted: Mon - August 15, 2005 at 03:27 PM          

©