Snow on the Horizon

The view from my bus stop on Saturday,

As part of my new job, I was trying to attend the AIDA Horizon2020 workshop at CERN next week. It's a good opportunity to network with the groups who are active in detector development, and to get a good overview of the field. Not really a short trip from Sendai, but such is the life of a particle physicist.

Well, it looks like Frau Holle had something against my travel plans. After my flight from Sendai to Narita got canceled on Saturday, I spend a significant fraction of my day on the phone to get the flight changed to Sunday. It's not as easy to get the airline to accept they are responsible for taking care of their passengers as you might think. And apparently the travel agents can't always call the airline support numbers from outside of the country. A little after midnight everything was sorted and I had my new itinerary.

The view from my browser window on Sunday.

Unfortunately, the flight got canceled again. Notice the missing arrival time next to the flights expected at 08:55 in NRT.
So now I am trying to get a refund. It seems to be completely normal for the airlines to fly for 20 hrs. from Japan to Switzerland, arrive in the evening, spend the night in Switzerland and fly back the next morning. I'm trying to convince that a) I was trying to attend a meeting that will be over by the time they propose to get me there, and b) spending less time on the ground than in the air is something I would rather avoid in any case.

There are again some lessons to take away from this:

• Online travel agencies are worth their money.
• When it looks like it's going to take forever for the agent to get back to you, or if they put you on hold repeatedly, have them call you back. Most agents will happily do that. It took me a while to learn that, and I am honestly a bit nervous about my next phone bill.
• If you cancel or change an inbound flight, and you would like to keep your outbound flight, make sure the airline knows about this change. Most airlines will cancel your whole itinerary including your return trip if you don't show up on an inbound flight. The airlines are supposed to notify the operators of your connecting flights of any cancellations, but apparently you cannot rely on this. 
• Trips with several different carriers cause significant headaches to change.
• The airline that cancels the flight should be held responsible for the follow-up with the connecting flights and possibly re-booking those, even if they are code-share flights operated by other airlines. I had to call offices in Japan, Switzerland, and in the UK to find this out. After insisting that the operator of the canceled flight should take responsibility, the agent became suddenly quite helpful.

Safe travels.

The first month in review

The first month in Sendai has certainly been rather eventful. The excitement of the new environment hasn't worn off, yet, but fortunately I'm starting to become more productive. I still don't have my household, yet; apparently that will take another month. On the other hand, I do have:

• registered myself at the ward office (if you live east of Sendai Station, your ward office is surprisingly far away from the station).
• opened a bank account. This took about two hours, but it was rather straightforward (given the fact that my wife speaks Japanese). Unfortunately, I don't have a Japanese credit card, yet.
• met (most of) the graduate students. Seems to be a great bunch. I look forward to working with them.
• introduced myself a number of times to different groups. I find myself sharing different bits of information each time, just to prevent myself from getting bored.
• bought a six-months bus pass. I'm not an avid driver.
• signed up for a new cell phone plan with a data flat rate. This helped me survive several weeks without a laptop. See also my previous post.
• registered with a new certification authority (KEK) for a grid certificate. Apparently, moving between different certification authorities is not foreseen on the grid. I can currently not delete my old files.
• started to get involved with some of the different research projects that we work on at Tohoku University. I plan to post a bit about each in turn in the coming episodes.
• accepted the job of deputy Linear Collider Detector R&D liaison. This task will most certainly provide material for future blog posts as well. My responsibility is mostly to facilitate communication. To ensure the best achievable performance and cost-effectiveness of the detectors it's important to encourage the widest possible participation in building them. The Detector Baseline Documents for ILD and SiD have been written, but the detector collaborations are still in the process of being formed. Now is the time to get involved with the detector concepts and help shape the face of these collaborations. If you work on particle physics detectors and care about Linear Colliders, please make yourself known.
• not really studied as much Japanese as I had planned. Back to work.