Wow, long time no post.  Not that I have much of importance to say with this post, mind you - mostly I’m going to rant about a variety of little things that went wrong today.  Seems like somebody dropped a Broken Bomb on the city and there’s shrapnel everywhere.

To start the day, we were going to take the morning and hook up our new water cooled RF amp at the lab.  Well, we found out once we all of the water lines hooked up that some of the connectors were leaking, and that the pump would spontaneously shut itself off.  After an hour of troubleshooting accomplished nothing, we tried to put everything back the way it had been, but the pump still refused to stay on.  We had a subject booked for that afternoon, so the pump needed to be running to cool the gradient coil.  We finally got it fixed in time, but we basically wasted the morning.

Once the subject got in, we found that our signal was about a quarter of what it should have been.  Suspecting a problem with the electronics, we tried switching to some of the backup units we have, to no avail.  Eventually we had to pull the subject out and ask her to come back in an hour, hopefully by which time we’d have everything fixed up.  Turns out it was a flaky cable on one of the receivers, which is not a big problem because we have spares, but it’s still annoying.  And when the subject came back, the good printer would not turn on so I had to print off her images on the crappy laser printer.

I’m not the only one with things going wrong either.  Apparently Dal has been having a lot of computer problems, so all of the students (including Kim) are unable to access their email, and this problem may persist for as long as 48 hours.  The computer problems also meant that the lab she was TAing was almost cancelled when none of the students could log in to the terminals needed to do the lab on (though they did manage to get in at the last minute).  And it seems that one of the other grad students at the lab had his Linux box hacked and they had to wipe the hard drive.

Finally, when we get home, we get a strange phone call from Aliant asking us if we still have no dial tone.  I wasn’t aware that we’d lost it, and said so. They asked if they had called the right number, and it turns out they hadn’t, even though our phone rang.  Turns out that our line has been switched with some Ray guy who had just moved into the apartment building across the street. The reason he had no dial tone is because we had it instead, and our number was hooked to nothing.  Kim called our number on her cell and got voicemail, and when I tried to check voicemail, it asked me for Ray’s password.

Hopefully all this telephone crap will be straightened out tomorrow, though as a bonus, I was able to get them to fix a problem with our voicemail that I’ve been supposed to call them about for months (but that I kept putting off).  I guess this just goes to show that, if you wait long enough, some problems will solve themselves - but you get about ten others in exchange.