Alba is broken like since eastern. When we come back from that shutdown at the end of March. Water cooling problems, the water flow was unstable; sponges were found in the "clean water" cooling pipes, together with other dust; a weekend instrument hang causes a temperature increase and bad quality of hoses become vulcanized (below the specs) and caused a disaster in one of the two main power supplies of the booster; a TLD wrong placed in a weird space and when an Insertion Device was moved, it bends the beam pipe blocking the beam orbit, requiring to vent and replace a section. It's like we stomp shit.
This is one of the issues in this accelerator complex, but there are others that may interact.
Panic reaches the management at the beginning of this years when 12 people announces their new positions in other institutes. If you take into account that we are 145 workers, you can realizes the magnitude of the problem. From the people that says goodbye, 8 were from the computing division (around 50) and from those 4 were from the controls section (of 14). This panic didn't mention the 1 or 2 per month that has announced that the left during the past two years.
Management has announced 3 months later the creation of a commission from work behaviour improvements. Now, in July, this commission has made the first meeting by last week.
As I mention in the previous post, another reason of personal sadness: my bosses didn't case about a worker that has been called to do a talk in the university.
I didn't write here since then. I didn't found any reason to write about software design here.
But last reason to get one step further in frustration went last week.
Starting 2 months a go, in the tango meeting, there was a request to the tango community to introduce security embedded inside the tango implementation. From the last 4 years I've been trying to start a PhD in cryptology (but too busy due to the work at Alba), and I've been getting closer and closer to the field of the RFIDs and the smartcards. During the presentation where this was requested, I thought that many of the schemas to ensure RFID can be also valid to be applied in between the communication of the agents in a distributed system, like tango.
I thought it can be interesting for Alba and the tango community, to exploit that one of the workers has a hobby in cryptology and security. In this terms I've talked to my boss.
For that, I need 3 weeks to talk to my boss (this is already one problem). During this time, I've been able to, out side working hours, explain this idea to the research group in the university (they are in another city, 150 km away). I found a great acceptance about "Ensuring Tango control system", even more I've seen enthusiasm about the idea of a PhD based on an application of all the cryptological work made by the whole group (many things about public key -specially elliptic curves- symmetric cyphers, stream ciphers, secret sharing, homomorphic encryption and field like that).
At work, the response wasn't that good. The answer was like: "do what ever you like in your free time, but this must not affect your current duties at all. It's not possible to dedicate any of your working hours in such a thing". Clearly have said, if I do a PhD, is not meaning anything for Alba at all. Ooh!! This is a very clear way to motivate a worker. For my partners, also fun when was said "if you do, others would ask to do this", what's the problem on workers training?
Went I talked to my boss, I said many time to him and have to point here, that my duties have been increase every time that a partner left. Last Friday, there was a presentation about the Alba's controls system, and when the subsystems of the machine was listed, half of the elements on that list are on my behalf (and not all my duties were there).
When I went to talk about this with my boss, I went there offering my free time to work in a industrial PhD. My proposal was not to stop doing my job and disappear for full time dedication to this, my proposal was mostly the free time, but being realistic that the brain thinks at any time. As a collaboration between the university and the industry, all the involved has to put something, specially the PhD candidate.
Well done, with this deal, the simpler solution is that Alba will not appear at all in my PhD. Or if it appears will be to be mention explicitly that they haven't contribute at all; even worst Alba's position was opposition to doing a work like that.
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