Free at last

This just in. Today is a good day for Colombians and French alike. Today is the day that Ingrid Betancourt was finally rescued from FARC in a military operation well worthy of a movie. After six years of captivity in malaria infested jungle, she can rejoin her family at last. At this moment, details are sparse. Colombian online newspaper websites are currently down. All of them. Interest is huge. French television has just shown a long special news show with interviews and footage of what is known so far. Ingrid, three americans and 11 other hostages have been rescued. According to President Sarkozy she is in relatively good health. At the moment she and the other former hostages are being cared for at a hospital before they will be transferred to the military airport in Bogota. She will have quite a story to tell.

In memory of a battlefield

From the western front, literally this time..

The cold rain is pouring down from a steel gray sky, perhaps fittingly considering the torment and anguish that is forever attached to this place. How could the sun ever shine from a clear blue sky around here? On every square meter where I am walking, an estimated one thousand bombs have fallen. Some have still not exploded, almost one hundred years later, which is why large parts of this battlefield are still off limits to anyone. Looking around me, it is hard to imagine that it happened so long ago. It could have been yesterday. The scars of war are everywhere. Kilometer after kilometer, the field of craters is endless in this abysmal landscape. Pockets of dark ugly woods and remnants of bunkers and trenches, are lined with open expanses of dented fields that will never again be cultivated due to its contamination of explosives, corpses and poisonous gas. This place is an eternal memorial of the stupidity of man. During eleven months in 1916, this was hell on earth for the almost countless men who fought and died here. The exact number is not known, but around one million people lost their lives here, in a completely meaningless effort of warfare.

I am standing at the epicenter of the fighting in the champs de bataille outside the small city of Verdun, France. Death surrounds me. It is said that if you take a shovel and dig the ground, you will immediately find human remains. It is not an exaggeration. Ten years after the Great War, the leaders of France, Britain and Germany met here in reconciliation, so that this would never happen again. A beautiful thought, but less than ten years later a crazy person took power in Germany and the rest is, as you say, history. In general, people don’t learn and the horrors of war are repeated again and again. History repeats itself endlessly.

Verdun was the strongest point in France before the war, and the German strategy was to “bleed the French white” in a swift surprise attach. The French were expected to throw every man they had into the furnace of battle and once they had been defeated, Britain was to be brought down as well. However, the French put in hard resistance under the leadership of General Pétain, who would later take part – as a traitor no less - of the Vichy government in WWII, and the losses were heavy on both sides. In the end, no significant strategic positions had been gained. After all those futile months of fighting, the cost of war was close to a million casualties, evenly spread on both sides and to boot countless British, American and others’ lives had been wasted. Needless to say, Verdun and the surrounding countryside is the saddest place I have ever been to.

I AM BACK!

Yes that's right! From now on there will be news from the western front on a more regular basis than once per two years. Needless to say, many things have happened since the last blog, including many trips to distant places; from the hot plains of Texas to the even hotter plains of Egypt, from tropical Colombia to less-than-tropical Scandinavia, England, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, Canada, as well as a few other places. I went on most of these trips together with Maria Lucia, who has travelled to quite a few more exotic places. Work is good, but hard. We have been quite successful in the Panda team which has had the side-effect that my workload has tripled to say the least. Panda is now serving grid users, both for production and user analysis, around the planet. Previously it was "only" used by the ATLAS affiliated universities in the US. I have written my first physics publication in ATLAS about Supersymmetry (on the topic of Gauge-Mediated SUSY Breaking), and my first computing publication about the Panda pilot system. It has been great fun, in a nerdy kinda way, and has offered great opportunities of learning new things. So in spite of a constantly falling Dollar (I am paid by a US university, UTA), I must say that I am happy with both my professional life and my private life.
Catch you later,
Paul

Honeymoon in the Maldives!!!

Honeymoon!

Finally, almost one year after our wedding, we could go on our honeymoon! Since we were invited to Chanuka and Danushka's wedding in Sri Lanka, we first went there to attend the wedding ceremony and the home coming party which both took place in Kurunegala. We also spent several days in Colombo doing shopping and visiting friends. After a busy week in Sri Lanka we left for the Maldives on the island Kurumba. Having seen the pictures on the web I expected a really nice and wonderful place, but after having spent a week at the resort I realized that the superlatives were not enough to describe the reality! The beauty and perfectness of the island were perfectly matched by the incredibly helpful and super friendly staff. This added a dimension to the experience that I had not even thought about. Besides the obvious tanning at the beach and swimming in the warm and shallow lagoon (together with shy small reef sharks!), we also played table tennis and worked out in the gym, kayaked around the island, drank exotic drinks (pina coladas, daiquiry's, ..) and ate a lot of good food from some of the nine restaurants, visited a fishers' village and an inhabited island, went snorkling and scuba diving and saw a lot of fish (moray eel's, sharks, turtles, and thousands of reef fish), took a tour with a glass boat, went to a presentation about the Maldives, made new friends, etc etc.. The last night we visited the capital Male, a quite small city with not much to see or do. It was hard to go back home, not only to leave this tropical paradise but also since the actual trip home took 32 hours.. A link to some of the thousand pictures we took will come soon...

Panda!

Well, well.. Finally I got a permanent position! My desire was to remain at CERN and still get a good position. I really like this region and the work done here, but it has turned out to be quite difficult. Since last summer, I've not had a steady income which is rather hard since the Geneva-area is among the most expensive on the planet! But finally my persistance paid off when I found a position that seemed really interesting. I applied and eventually got it. The position is with the University of Texas at Arlington, USA, to mainly work on the Panda project, which is one of the LHC grid projects for the ATLAS experiment. I will continue working with distributed computing which is a field that is urgently needed in high energy physics and is under heavy development. Hopefully, and if there is time for it, I will also do Supersymmetry research. In the meantime, Maria Lucia will get her Swiss work permit on May 1, to work with ethical education for children with the Arigatou Foundation in Geneva. We will both start working on the same day. Next up is a trip to the good old US of A to arrange the bureaucracy of the position.

New job

Well, well.. Finally got a new job, although it's only a temporary project for a few months. I turned down a more hardware oriented job in favour of something more up my alley and was offered a position in the ROOT/PROOF team to work with parallel computing. Even though the other job was a one year position, I wanted to do something that lies closer to my interests. A few weeks into the project I'm happy to say it's VERY interesting. It remains to be seen how long I can stay, but at least until Christmas.

Wedding at Bäckaskog Slott, August 27!

On a wonderful day in August, we finally got married at the renaissance castle in Bäckaskog. It was a really international wedding, me being Swedish, Maria Lucia being Colombian with relatives and visiting friends from Colombia, France, Sri Lanka, Spain, Romania and of course Sweden. The Christian ceremony was given in English by Reverend Göran Mellander. After the wedding, we went with a veteran car to Valje Hus where we had the dinner and the party. A superb three course dinner was followed by cake (with Colombian coffee) and dance to live music..

Preparing the wedding

Finally Maria Lucia came back from a very successful year in Sri Lanka. A year that did not exactly lack drama. She did a lot of work in the aftermath of the tsunami. The projects she helped starting are expanding and continue to help many people. At the end of May her contract finished and she left for London where we met for five wonderful days. She then returned home to Colombia and I went back to France, to prepare for our wedding. The drama continues with various problems with embassies and visas, and there are several hard problems we need to solve. We will get married at Bäckaskog Castle close to Kristianstad, Sweden, on August 27.

Tsunami

A lot of things has happened since the last entry. Basically a trip to Sri Lanka, a trip to Sweden for Christmas and another trip to Sri Lanka. Lucia was in Colombo at the time of the tsunami, although she had considered going to the beach before it happened. Luckily she didn't, but some of her friends did and literally had to run away from it. Afterwards, she went with the UN as a volunteer. During and after Christmas, my relatives, friends, collegues and neighbors back home donated 1000 Euro as well as three full bags of medicines and other medical supplies that I took to Sri Lanka first week of january. To make a long story shorter, we located a refugee camp in Panadura. The director told us they had received basic aids except shoes for the school children. So we bought 199 pairs of shoes for 900 Euro and the last day I was there AIESEC had organized a day long event for the kids in the camp with ball games, singing and shoe delivery. I think they were happy. The remaning money went to a fund for supporting the women at the camp to help them get started with small businesses, like bakeries etc. Lucia is organizing this too. The medicines were given to the Slovakian rescue team who took it to a hospital in Galle. We also went traveling round the country and saw many places, both destroyed by the tsunami but also unaffected places (the tsunami only destroyed part of the coast of course). It is important that the tourists come back as soon as possible since the country is relying on this income. 50% of the beach hotels were partly or totally destroyed but many of them are already back in business. We visited the hotel (the excellent Ypsilon hotel in Beruwela) which had been half destroyed. We were told that they would already open again on february 1! Here in Switzerland, I have just started my new contract that will last until summer. Our wedding will be on August 27 (new date), but will probably get legally married already in april to speed up and simply the visa/residence permit application.

Trip to Sweden

Went home to Sweden for a week and a half, at the end of August. Stopped in Hannover on the way and met up with Maria Lucia who was there on an AIESEC conference. At home, we did the usual tour to see the family and checked out a number of churches for the wedding next summer. We are opting for Backaskog Slott close to Kristianstad. We also went to Copenhagen for a day, walked along Stroget, saw Mme Taussaud's wax museum and rode on the most amazing Demon Rollercoaster at Tivoli. Only one minute long ride, but try to scream without drawing breath for one minute and you will understand! Pictures can be found here.

On holiday

Since the week has been particularly exhausting, let alone the mind boggling and fantastical trip to Spain last week, seen in the pictures in the link below, I will now go on (another) relaxing holiday to Sweden via Germany where I will pick up my fiancee who is on conference in Hanover. Back at CERN on September 9.
Trip to Spain, August 2004:
http://pnilsson.web.cern.ch/pnilsson/galleries/Espana2004/index.html

End of contract...

My two year contract + extention as fellow at CERN in Switzerland has ended. I will remain with the ALICE SPD group at least until the end of the year, but as a (paid) unpaid associate. This position might change to a project associate later on. Since I came here I have mostly been working on test beam analysis, i.e. mainly programming in C++, but have also done some LabView work for the test beam DAQ system. At the moment I am working on new analysis methods for retrieving the intrinsic resolution of the SPD together with my collegue Jan. We will at least write an internal report on it, and perhaps it will lead a publication.

Well... That was the boring professional part! In my private life things are moving rapidly. On June 9, I got engaged with my Maria-Lucia, just before she went to Sri Lanka for one year to work with AIESEC, the largest student organization in the world. We are planning to get married next summer in Sweden. In just over two weeks from now we will meet in Germany, where she will go to a conference, and then we will drive to Sweden for a week of holiday. But before that, I will have some holiday in Spain for the wedding of my friends Mercedes and Alejandro. Other private news include a visit of my cousin Malin and Martin, and later also her parents Per and Kerstin.