.co.uk

Started: 2005-06-22 12:44:00

Submitted: 2005-06-22 14:03:00

Visibility: World-readable

For an industrialized Western nation, I'm finding it disturbingly difficult to get a decent Internet connection in the United Kingdom.

Maybe that's not really being fair. After all, if I were placed in Boulder complete unaware of my surroundings, I'd be fairly clueless as well, especially if my hotel didn't have a connection and the one I got at work were firewalled and proxied. (I can access http via the mandatory proxy; I haven't yet tried to tunnel anything else through, but I suspect that wouldn't work well. A "tunnel ssh via http" hack would be very cool right now, but I'm not even exactly sure how I'd deploy it, since the whole problem is that I can't ssh to Ziyal.) On my proxied connection, I Googled for wireless access points in Cambridge and thought I found one at a Starbucks embedded in a Borders in downtown Cambridge (which makes me wonder how un-original I can get; I'm east of the Prime Meridian, not in American Suburbia), which I'm sitting at now but I can't get my notebook to connect to anything. (Maybe that's just as well; my estimated battery life remaining on an almost-full charge drops from more than two hours to less than an hour when I turn on the embedded wireless card. I should complain to Broadcom in person; I saw their sign not far from Xaar in Cambridge's Science Park.)

Or I could harass the IT guy; I also can't connect to my employer's provider's pop3 server, forcing me to revert to webmail. If I had gotten around to switching our Exchange server to be our sole mail server, requiring out-of-office users to VPN to connect to it, I'd be out of luck. But so far it hasn't been worth it; I've been spending all of my time actually doing work, rather than doing other stuff. I'd still like to get into London on Friday (which was my original plan, but I didn't properly communicate it to Xaar, who expects me through the end of the week), meaning I'm working full-tilt. (It's been a long time since I was able to put such single-minded devotion to a single project. It's great to not be interrupted to fix $CEO's non-broken e-mail or field tedious tech support queries from Korea, usually sitting next to my wireless phone on call until 2100 MDT. (I need to tell my employer they can't give out my wireless phone number to customers unless they pay for the phone. Which, of course, just means I'm not being a team player.))

(Speaking of the IT guy, he has a new assistant, an American woman (from Georgia, although she doesn't have a southern accent) whose husband is in the US Air Force doing some IT-related stuff at a nearby air base. After being surrounded by Britons (of all skin colors) for the past few days, talking to someone whose voice doesn't sound funny is nice for a change.)

Monday morning I took a taxi into Xaar, a five-minute drive east from my hotel down the A14 dual carriageway. Xaar (Willy will be appalled that they give up and pronounce the "x" as a "z") is located in Cambridge's Science Park, north of the old town, situated to capitalize on the brain trust created by the University of Cambridge and further hike up property values. I met my host, Keith, and headed immediately into the lab, where I found a Drop Watcher with a Xaar print head, half of which was mounted on a lab stand over a catch basin half-full of red ink. Keith was trying to get the ink system to work properly; it relied on a float in the ink reservoir (the piece mounted above the basin) to regulate the level, and it was stuck after sitting idle for the weekend.

("A" roads in the UK are primary highways, one step down from "M" roads (motorways) and one step up from "B" secondary highways. In my "convert everything to American" mode of thinking, "A" roads are US highways: they can be anything from two-lane highways in the middle of nowhere to 2*n-lane (where n is greater than or equal to 2) dual carriageways (er, divided controlled-access highways). "M" roads are full-blown Interstates; I haven't made it onto one of these yet.)

As Keith conscripted other engineers to deal with the ink problem, he showed me around the building. The first floor featured reception, a number of labs (one small lab housed the Drop Watcher and a large assortment of other equipment), and a cleanroom suite. The second floor housed the break room with an automatic, free coffee vending machine (offering one's choice of black and "white" coffee -- coffee with cream -- in addition to tea), the engineering offices (a large L-shaped room without cubicles, just desks tossed around the floor), and the executive offices.

Keith eventually managed to get the ink problem resolved, so I got to work. I quickly realized that the drops on the screen, which we're trying to measure, were washed out, which meant that the strobe was firing when the drops weren't there. After some investigation, I learned how Xaar heads fired and how we should deal with it. I whipped out my notebook, annexed a desk across the carpet ocean from Keith, and started some quality time in Labview. I ended up with a test build we ultimately discarded after more little talks to more people trying to figure out exactly what we were trying to do. (Part of the problem was that Keith didn't actually know very much about what we were trying to do; he's a mechanical engineer and fairly new at Xaar. The people who really knew what they wanted were busy with other stuff, including a high-priority ship-yesterday effort.) I ended Monday with a good feeling about where we were going and how we were going to get there.

For lunch, Keith took me to Tesco, a supermarket across the A14. It was probably half the size of an average suburban American supermarket (which is about 2% of the size of a Super Walmart) but was well-stocked. Right at the entrance, it featured an array of refrigerator shelves with pre-packaged sandwiches, cut in half into two right triangles. I quickly discovered that the ones with green packaging were "suitable for vegetarians" (as the label proclaimed) and grabbed a sandwich and a wrap, then headed back into the body of the store to grab a half-litre of orange juice.

After work Monday, Keith dropped me back at my hotel and I decided I wanted to wander into Cambridge. I was vaguely aware of a bus service, so I wandered north into Impington, where I spotted a few busses driving around but couldn't quite figure out how to catch one. I headed south, across the A14, into Histon, where I found the bus shelter I walked past the day before. The bus, hourly after 1930 (although thrice hourly during the day), arrived ten minutes after I did and took me into downtown Cambridge for £1.40. I wandered around town, saw an epic queue of well-dressed University of Cambridge students waiting for the May Ball at Emmanuel College, and tried (and failed) again to locate the cybercafes Wikitravel indicated to me. I wandered past King's College and broke into full "wide-eyed American tourist with video camera" mode (which Willy knows well), spun around in the middle of one street to capture the scene around me, and filmed a small group of May Ballers who waved at me.

I ate supper at the First Floor, an Italian restaurant not far from King's College that was upstairs one floor from ground level, which we Americans would call the second floor. As I waited for my food and ate, I wrote the official record of my work day, which will be transcribed into my Official Trip Report, on a little notepad I stole from the supply closet at iTi. (It's easier to carry around than my full-sized engineering pad; what I'd really like is a half-sized A5 engineering pad.) I checked the Citi 7 bus back to Impington and discovered that it had left ten minutes earlier at 2150. I didn't want to wait an hour until the next one, and the blisters I developed the previous evening were back in force, so I took a taxi for £9 back to my hotel. Instead of going to bed early or doing a bit of work before the next day, I started a quick changelog, which I eventually finished at midnight, an hour later than I was planning on going to bed.

That wasn't the worst part, though; I had too much caffeine late in the day (a Coke for supper, plus tierra misu), so I couldn't go to sleep immediately. Tuesday morning, I slept through my wake-up call at 0700 and woke up when Keith called my room from the lobby at 0818 to pick me up. I didn't let on that I had over-slept, but I don't think he could have missed it. I threw on some clothing, tossed my stuff together, and sprinted to the door, where I met Keith looking at the Batmobile in the center spread of one of the complimentary copies of The Independent my hotel provides. (The Independent features a number of Sudko puzzles daily.)

At Xaar, I got two important things: an Internet connection, albeit proxied, and a badge I could use to get in and out of the building, automagically unlocking doors as I went. (These badges also keep track of who is in and out to assist in role calls in emergencies.)

With the ship-yesterday push complete, I was able to talk to more engineers, including one who actually helped us figure out how to actually use pixel triggering instead of cycle triggering. With that important piece of information, and a registry hack to get Xaar's software to let us divide our pixel clock by 1 instead of 2, we were able to get good contrast, minutes before the scheduled 1500 BST (0800 MDT) conference call with iTi.

I gave Eric, Bruce, and Ross an update of our progress and was optimistic about my potential for success. My next mission was to actually try to get some measurements.

After the conference call, everything died; I attempted to readjust the print head to get better results and I couldn't get anything at all. In my sleep-deprived stupor, fueled by the noxious red ink fumes, I couldn't think clearly enough to come up with a worthy plan. I finally decided that it had to be the print head electronics or software; it was the first time I had run them by myself and I wasn't quite sure I had done everything right. I eventually gave up (since it was getting close to 1700); first thing in the morning I'd get back down to the lab and see if everything would work again.

After work, Keith dropped me off at my hotel; he asked if I wanted to get a shower before going out for the evening. I thought that was a great idea. After showering, I headed into Impington (having consulted the bus map and schedule on the Internet, thanks to google.co.uk) and attempted to catch the Citi 7 into Cambridge again. When the bus finally arrived, it was fifteen minutes later than I expected and drove past the stop, completely ignoring me. I wasn't sure if I had screwed up reading the schedule or what. I headed back to my room, grabbed Keith's mobile (remember the UK pronunciation) number, called to say I'd be late, and headed back to the bus stop. I decided to run there, just in case it was on time. As I turned the corner onto the road it was on, it was driving past. I managed to hail the driver and he stopped. I paid £1.80 for my ride into Cambridge and found Keith and Steve (another engineer; he sits next to Keith and actually knows more about what they want the Drop Watcher to do) on the corner. We walked across the River Cam to a small restaurant. I learned from last night; I avoided caffeine.

After eating, Keith dropped Steve off at his residence in the outskirts of Cambridge, then took me to my hotel. I called iTi, talked to Eric briefly, watched a bit of the BBC's evening news programmes, and went to bed at the quite-reasonable hour of 2300.