spring dst

someone forgot the DST changing of the clocks and woke up a good hour too late for the 10am mass at saint anthony's. tsktsk.

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joyride :)

literally, mikado afternoon :D red brick houses, garden gnomes, occassional chickens and turkeys and goats and cows, rolling green fields, hedges, flower gardens, large glass windows, donkeys!, green doors with knobs in the middle (bag end?), mailboxes by the road, cats sunbathing on windowsills..i could live here!

we spent an afternoon at the photonics innovation center in tollembeek, a quaint little town at the belgian countryside.

b-phot innovation center at Vollezelestraat 46, 1755 Gooik

to get to the b-phot center we would have needed to take the bus from the train station. unfortunately (and fortunately for me :D), the bus only comes once every hour so in order to save time the professor and his assistant picked us up from the station. it was a wonderful 10-minute ride through a beautiful residential area and i was so happy it wasn't cloudy at all the day we went there. sunny or not, though, i am a weakling for joyrides ^^,

prof. jurgen van erps behind the wheel

bunny suits!

the photonics center is right smack in the middle of a residential area and a popular go-to site for cyclists. you do get to wonder why they chose to install their equipment so far from the city and the answer is (1) real estate in brussels is terribly expensive. they needed to build the lab from the foundations itself because it needs to match the specifications of the instruments to be installed. (2) the need to minimize vibrations as the equipments, such as the diamond tooling machine, are sensitive to vibrations. so the laboratory needs to be far from any metro or train stations.

sundo #1

waiting for the train ride back to brussels

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locked-out

crazy day.

not for me but for my room 1-2 neighbor, paulo.

he locked himself out and he was asking if he could climb out my window to his open window two windows down. we're only on the first floor but should he fall he'll get a bunch of broken bones. i would have dared to do it if it was only to climb to the next window, but two windows down and no proper safety precautions? nah. before he went he even gave me a number of his friend, guillermo, who i should call just in case something happens. i even looked up the phone number to the nearest hospital.

and he dared! crazy spanish guy :))

i'm so glad i didn't have to make any calls. whew!

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on-chip mach-zehnder interferometer

i've been studying interferometers for some time now and though i understand why fabry-perot interferometers and ring resonators give a resonance pattern, somehow, i couldn't quite grasp the reasoning behind "resonance" patterns in mach-zehnder interferometers. in other words, what my question really is IS, unlike FP and ring resonators, light doesn't get coupled back into an MZI, so how does it even produce resonance?

in the end i realized i have been trying to understand the "resonance" graph all wrong. first of all, it would be wrong to describe the graph above as "resonances" as you can see dips instead of resonances but the previous TA always uses the term "resonance" which probably added to my confusion. the graph above, in fact, does not show resonance peaks but rather interference.

so, basically, the dips in the wavelength vs attenuation graph above shows the wavelengths at which destructive interference occurs due to the difference in arm length of the interferometer. changing the arm length difference results in (wavelength shift or FSR change?). furthermore, as can be easily noticed, the graph (regardless of the dips) does not follow a straight line. in fact, it is relatively bent with a minimum value of about 12dBm at 1540nm. this bending is due to the attenuation of the waveguide itself which shows it has been optimized for 1540nm use.

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coca-cola

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15-minute break

featuring gregory and virginie.

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sakura (or an attempt to write in proper tagalog)

mahal kong sakura,

alam kong bago ka pa lang sa mundong ito. posibleng magkaedad lang tayo o mas nakakatanda ka sa akin ng ilang taon. pero alam ko rin na dati rati pa, mula nang tinayo ang pasyalang ito, lagi nang may nakatanim na sakura dito. pinapasapasa ba nang nakaraang henerasyon ang kanilang mga ala-ala sa inyo? kung ganon, nais ko sanang malaman - ilang beses mo bang nakita si jose rizal na dumaan sa ilalim ng iyong lilim? ilang beses ba syang tumingala at pumuna sa iyong ganda? talaga bang kasing-tapang at kasing-galing sya tulad nang sinasabi ng mga libro? ilang babae ba ang namasdan mong kasama nya, hawak-hawak ang kanyang braso? ilang gabi mo ba sya nakitang naglalakad pauwi kasama ang mga kaibigan? sabi ng mga libro hindi naman daw kagwapuhan si rizal, pero sa tingin mo kung nagkita kami, magugustuhan ko kaya sya? magustuhan nya kaya ako? :P mabuti ba syang tao? sa tingin mo, maging kasing-galing din kaya ako tulad nya? gusto ko sanang malaman kung paano mag-isip ang isang taong tulad nya. kung sana lang maka-usap mo ako.

(cherry blossoms near frans anneessens' commemorative statue a few meters from where jose rizal stayed while in brussels)

only you

Soundcloud: Only You

C                        C/B            Am
looking from the window of above
              Am/G     F      
its like a story of love
             C      G
can you hear me?
C                       C/B     Am
came back only yesterday
             Am/G   F
moving farther away
               C      G
want you near me


chorus
F                                  G
    all i needed was the love you gave
C         C/B             Am      Am/G
    all i needed for another day
F                   G    (single stroke)
and all i ever knew
              C
only you


C                          C/B              Am
sometimes when i think of her name
              Am/G  F
when its only a game
         C      G
and i need you
C                 C/B                   Am
listen to the words that you say
           Am/G      F
gettin' harder to stay
           C    G
when i see you


chorus

(instrumental)

chorus

C                   C/B            Am
this is gonna take a long time
         Am/G             F
and i wonder whats mine
               C   G
cant take no more
C                      C/B   Am
wonder if youll understand
                 Am/G             F
its just the touch of your hand
            C         G
behind closed door

chorus

death by GaAs

on friday afternoons from 1 to 5 i have a class under prof. vounckx on the physics of semiconductor technologies and devices. as you can well understand it's not quite the ideal time to have such an extremely long class - sunny friday afternoons spent in the basement of building k! gah! which is probably why the professor has been making an effort to make classes enjoyable on top of the fact that he has to make manufacturing of microchips sound interesting.

he's been making a lot of jokes in class but the one i found really funny by far was his idea on an agatha christie-ish murder plot by using gallium arsenide chips to execute a murder. the topic of that class was about how to make a doped layer on a GaAs substrate. one could grow layers by either of the three processes: buried layer diffusion, epitaxy, or ion implantation. of the three, you could only grow a layer on a GaAs substrate by epitaxy because the other two (both for diffusion and the annealing step of the ion implantation process) would require very high temperatures (about 1000 degree celcius). of course we don't want very high temperatures when processing GaAs since arsenic would out-diffuse at high temperatures and, as we all know, arsenic is a very poisonous substance.

soooo that's the joke, na-explain ko na. labyu. haha. of course to carry out your murder plan via a GaAs chip you'd need to have a way to heat it to more than 600 degrees to free the arsenic. but let's leave that bit for agatha christie to figure out haha.

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photobombed!

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暖かい~ もうすぐ春だね~ ^^,

when i took the photo yesterday i couldn't see clearly because the light was too bright. but i wanted to capture the way the sunlight reflects off the lamps making it look as if it's lighted. so i snapped the photo and promptly forgot about it. i only saw it today and the photo i got was more beautiful than i had anticipated ^^,

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people magnet

sunshine!

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peter

i take classes with someone who smiles like peter bishop. ayiiiie ;P

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三月九日

Soundcloud: 3月9日

流れる季節の真ん中で
ふと日の長さを感じます
せわしく過ぎる日々の中に
私とあなたで夢を描く

3月の風に想いをのせて
桜のつぼみは春へとつづきます

溢れ出す光の粒が
少しずつ朝を暖めます
大きなあくびをした後に
少し照れてるあなたの横で

新たな世界の入口に立ち
気づいたことは 1人じゃないってこと

※瞳を閉じれば あなたが
まぶたのうらに いることで
どれほど強くなれたでしょう
あなたにとって私も そうでありたい※

砂ぼこり運ぶ つむじ風
洗濯物に絡まりますが
昼前の空の白い月は
なんだかきれいで 見とれました

上手くはいかぬこともあるけれど
天を仰げば それさえ小さくて

青い空は凛と澄んで
羊雲は静かに揺れる
花咲くを待つ喜びを
分かち合えるのであれば それは幸せ

この先も 隣で そっと微笑んで

lyrics

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