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And for a change, a boring title!
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8 April 2005
Yesterday I swapped rooms with Bobby. Now I share my room with three or four other people (the come and go... I'm not sure which ones are permenent.) One of them has a PC dual-booting Windows and Linux, *and* a PowerBook G4. Meanwhile I'm stuck with a pentium 3 with 128MB of RAM and walking (it can't really be called running) Windows XP. The joy of being the new person. Anyway, I got a phonecall which was meant for Bobby, so I fetched him and gave him the phone. While he was talking somebody called the phone in the other office (which used to be mine but is now his.) I don't think he got to it in time. About 20 minutes later I got another call for him, so I went to get him and found him already on his phone (which used to be mine) talking to someone else. Popular guy.
I went to the Macintosh meeting of the CERN Micro club in building 555 yesterday. Only a couple of guys speaking French were there, and it turns out the club is in the process of moving to building 567 so there wasn't really a meeting this week. But nonetheless, it was a pretty cool place to visit. There's a Lisa, old Apple and Commodore posters, some other old computers like Olivettis, etc.
It's been raining (though not very hard) most of yesterday and about half of today. Yesterday the place smelled of wet concrete, this morning it smelled worse. I'm not exactly sure what it smelled of, but it was quite unpleasant. When I left my office this evening most of the rain had evaporated. I looked toward the Jura mountains and thought I saw some clouds that had descended rather low, I looked again and saw it was some freshly fallen snow! I wouldn't have thought mountains would be very interesting to look at, but they look different every time I see them.
Sliced horse was on the menu again today. Some day I'll try it. I noticed that the knives and forks are slightly magnetic.
I went into town to meet up with the French Language Meetup group. As I was buying my bus ticket from the machine the bus driver asked me something in French, to which I replied something like 'ungh'. About 20 seconds later I realised he had said 'est-ce que vous allez' which means 'Are you going?' since he was about to leave and wanted to know whether to wait for me to buy my ticket. It takes too long for my French-recognition software to start up.
Anyway, I didn't manage to actually meet up with anyone, since I didn't know who I was looking for or in which language to ask random people if that's who they were. And for a change, some work!
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6 April 2005
Today was interesting, but probably not so to read about. You might remember that yesterday I mentioned that the computer had Office 2003 installed. Well, it did. But when I logged in this morning, it had Office 2002 installed instead. That's the sort of thing that can happen when everything is done by the IT department using login scripts and other magic. And while I'm on the negative side, I'll mention that the computer has the same amount of hard disk space as my two-and-a-half-year-old mp3 player. But on the plus side, I have my own phone, and when I emailed the IT people about the surprise downgrade, one promptly phoned me and sorted it out. By lunchtime I had that and some other issues sorted out, and I had the rest of the day to play with the software I'm supposed to be learning to use. I think I actually got somewhere. That's enough of positives and negatives, now onto the imaginary axis.
That wasn't very interesting to read, was it? Well, to add some excitement (or rather, subtract some from my earlier post) I'll mention that there are pink trees on the Swiss side of CERN too. They're probably sakura, but they could be the result of too many muons hitting pine trees. And for a change, some transnational travel!
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5 April 2005
I went to building 65 in France for a safety course today. It is a strange and alien landscape, with pink trees and roads named after scientists from far far away. The safety course was interesting, dealing with heavy lifting equipment, lasers, radiation, toxic chemicals, cryogenic gases, high voltages, breathing apparatus, dosimeters, what to do if you're 100m underground and hear an alarm announcing that some very excited hadrons are about to be sent your way... all in a day's work, really.
The guy who shares my office was in today, and he got my computer working. I already had about eight emails at my work address, mostly automated, one spam. I noticed that the machine has half the speed and half the memory of the one I got when I started at my last job three years ago, and a quarter the speed and memory of the one I was using for my last few months there. Well, I guess it's common practice to give the new person the worst computer, and the bigger the organisation is, the wider the spread of computer specifications is. It is, however, capable of a slightly higher screen resolution, and is in better working order than CERN's first computer. It also has Office 2003 rather than 2000, which seems to be a mildly good thing, so far. The best thing is I didn't have to install any of that stuff, it's all done by login scripts. In fact, since it's against the rules to install just about anything that those scripts don't install, I'll never have to install anything. Which suits me fine, because Windows developers don't seem to understand the concept of drag & drop installation. It's more usual for Windows users to download an archive containing 30 similarly named files, guess which one is the installer, and click through premature or unnecessary setup in the installer to find that it installs a single file.
I figured out what makes rustling noises in the shrubbery sometimes. There are tiny little finches of some sort. Well, I call them finches because finches are the only birds I know of that are that small. I suppose they could just as well be hummingbirds, or miniature albatrosses (imagine that... you could hang one around your neck on a gold chain.) You, too, can come to CERN...
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4 April 2005
I was talking to Carla yesterday (the one from Canada who lives in Christchurch, not the one from Christchurch who lives in Whangaparaoa, or, if there is one, the one from Whangaparaoa who lives in Canada) and she mentioned that she got to do the Summer Student Programme last year, despite not meeting the criteria. She's not an undergraduate, she's not within the age limits, and she's not a national of a CERN member state. So how did she do it? It turns out the Royal Society of New Zealand is sending two people to the summer school, and because they won't be 'official' summer students due to not being from a CERN member state, they don't have to conform to the usual rules. Last year nobody (or hardly anybody) applied -- although Carla says the information was sent to all the universities. And she says that nobody has applied this year either, they still don't know who is going to take those two places. So if you're at all interested in finding out about particle physics, apply for the summer school through the royal society, and you'll probably get in. They pay you a subsistence allowance, so you get to live in Geneva for a few months for free, and learn about physics too! Who wouldn't want that? I'm not sure whether it's still possible to get in, the CERN page on it says the deadline for this year has passed, and I can only find a 2004 reference on the RSNZ site, but perhaps they can still send someone... I think Carla said she was talking to the person organising the special NZ thing the other day and he was worried they hadn't found anyone.
Restaurant 1 was serving horse as one of its options last night. I had chilli con carne instead, as I wasn't so hungry I could eat a horse.
Today was my second working day at CERN, although I didn't get to do much work. I did get to read some documents about the sort of programming I'll be doing, and I think I'm going to like it. But most of the day I was just reading unrelated stuff for something to do. Until about 3p.m. my computer was sitting there halfway through having Windows XP installed on it, while the person doing the installing tried to find a license key for it. For the rest of the day, he was trying to figure out why it couldn't be added to the CERN domain, so I couldn't log in to my newly created CERN computing account in order to do anything productive.
On the subject of my newly created CERN computing account, with it I could at last register my PowerBook to connect to the CERN network. So now I can use the internet whenever I want.
This evening I went to the Microcosm exhibition on robots. It was interesting, but not extremely so. There's an aeroplane weighing 30 grams which can fly around on its own avoiding obstacles, and some robots that can climb over all sorts of obstacles. And then there's the robots that position many tonnes of equipment for LHC to a precision of about a tenth of a millimetre.
That's all for now... I'll upload pictures soon. Rendez-twos
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2 April 2005
Today I went into town and found out the price for a yearly bus pass for Geneva. It's very good value, and even cheaper for 'juniors' under 25. I didn't get one, because until I get a card and some money for my Swiss bank account, I'm using cash withdrawn using my credit card. That's fine if my account is in credit, but if it isn't I have to pay a cash advance fee. Once I get internet access I'll be able to transfer more money to my credit card account, but until then I'm limited to the credit that's on there, which might not be enough for an annual bus pass.
I also intended to visit the history of science museum, but the bus which my map says goes there seemed to have mutated into a train going somewhere else, so I decided to return to CERN before my ticket expired. Tickets are valid for an hour so I could go back on the same ticket I went into town with... although nobody ever checks that people have tickets anyway.
I told you there weren't many people at CERN over easter. Well, there was one guy I kept seeing around the place while going to the restaurant and back. While I was waiting at Gare Cornavin for the bus back to CERN, he turned up with bags full of bread, and sat to wait for the same bus. We finally introduced ourselves... it turns out he's a programmer from Bulgaria, also working on CMS, and he's been here, staying at the CERN hostel, nearly a week longer than I have. We exchanged notes on Geneva, CERN, housing etc. He told me there's a library here at CERN, so I'll have to check that out later.
When I went to the kitchen to cook my noodles this evening, the Canadian from Christchurch, called Carla, was there again. She told me that Microcosm has a special exhibition on the first Monday night of each month, and the one this coming Monday is about robots. I'll have to go to that. She wanted to know the Maori word for warrior, and I just happen to have brought my Maori dictionary with me (because I'm unlikely to find one here) so she's going to come around tomorrow and look it up. She might also let me use her computing account to check my email etc.
We also got onto the topic of the shortage of housing in Geneva. I mentioned that the guy at the housing service said that it's probably cheaper to buy a place than to rent, so maybe I should do that. She said that her husband and herself had considered buying when they moved to NZ four and a half years ago, but decided not to since they were only going to be there for two years. Now the houses that were about $135 000 back then are worth over $200 000. They're going to buy a place straight away next time they move countries.
So maybe I'll buy an apartment in Geneva or France. It would be easy to sell again later. The guy at the housing service said that his landlord bought the place in Ferney-Voltaire (France) where he lives for about €65 000 a few years ago, and now it's worth about three times that. The prices would go way up if the region ever gets a decent bus service -- there's one bus an hour to CERN, and that's it.
Wow. I just went to the CERN library. It's the most awesome library I've ever been to. Shelves and shelves of books on computers, mathematics and particle physics, and more shelves full of dictionaries. There's even a two-volume English-Bulgarian dictionary... I wonder if my Bulgarian friend noticed that. And they have the entire Oxford English Dictionary. Not just the Shorter Oxford (which in itself is two hefty volumes) but the full version. I didn't look for a Maori dictionary... but maybe I didn't need to bring mine after all. I'm going to like it here.
I've gathered together my perceptions of the various airlines I've travelled on onto one page. Perhaps I will do the same for hotels and hostels, but I haven't been in as many and there are plenty of websites rating them already. I have also made it so that a lot more links are automatically added between the different sections of my travellog, so if I mention Rob, for example, it will be automatically turned into a link to his section on the people page. A link is also created if I mention, say, Air Canada, or my Dublin to London flight. I've also made certain words automatically link to external sites. It's sort of wiki-like, sort of blog-like, all wheel-reinvention, but fun anyway. Next Page |
