Science doesn’t take a holiday (or at least it doesn’t in my new catchphrase) but many scientists do. As a result, my boss and I are doing significant projects while most people are out of their labs.

Last Friday we re-wired most of a network closet. It was tedious, but since very very very few people were using the network at the time it didn’t really cause any problems with ongoing research, and the results are considerably prettier and easier to work with than the old ‘wherever it fits’ approach. I’m not sure when we’ll finish that closet, though.

We’re also working on a new file server for one lab in particular. They have a lot of proteomic data, so they need quite a bit of storage: twenty terabytes. (I am quite certain we’ll all laugh at this capacity in ten years: “OMG can you believe that we thought that was huge?!”.) My first task was explaining what a terabyte is; all these scientists deal with milli- and micro- and nano- and pico-, not with mega- and giga- and tera- and peta-, so the scale of the new array is a bit beyond them at the moment.

The new server arrived fully assembled from the vendor, but apparently nobody warned my boss that the package would weigh about 150 pounds (i.e., as much as me). Turns out he’s never done any sort of weightlifting, so I had to kind of walk him through a rudimentary squat move so we could get it off the floor. I will confess that I found his expressions pretty amusing; however, his cursing remained in English and did not slip into French, so apparently he didn’t find it that bad. (He did revert to his native language once we got the stupid thing into the rack: a curt “Bon.” summarized it for both of us.) When it came to installing the new server, though, I wound up climbing very carefully through the tangle of wires behind the rack to connect the new server to everything. Joy. I don’t mind the small spaces, but I HATE thinking that my misplaced foot is going to knock out a cable and therefore destroy fifteen years of research data.

I might have some interesting news on the work front soon, but I officially know absolutely nothing of the situation so I won’t comment here. In the meantime, though, I still have plenty to work on, so I won’t lose myself to speculation.

At work, we’re expanding our server room by bringing the entrance wall about a meter forward. This will give enough room so that both my boss and I can stand comfortably in there at the same time; it will also allow us to get behind and around servers as necessary. However, while the room is under construction, I can’t use my desk for all the plastic and dust and equipment flying about.

I spent yesterday camped out in a conference room with a laptop. Students tend to go there to take breaks from research (no food in the lab, dontchaknow), so I actually got to talk to them about something other than computers or their data or their pending conference presentation or thesis defense. It was also nice having the refrigerator nearby, and somebody left a bunch of very tasty Rainier cherries on the table for public consumption.

Today the laptop is inadequate for the work I’m doing, so I’ve commandeered a storage room with an Ethernet jack and made it into my temporary office. I’m going barebones here, though, with just one monitor on my beloved Gentoo box. It’s going to take some getting used to.

When the room is not under construction, we’re taking advantage of the summer lull as a chance to upgrade infrastructure. First on the list is a new server to operate the tape backups on a new jukebox. It’ll be using the mobo, CPU, and memory that we removed when we upgraded the offsite file server, a hard drive that has been collecting dust in a drawer, and a new external SCSI adapter. Hopefully I can fold it into the budding distcc cluster without too much trouble.

Last week, the lab across the hall from my office held a sort of “labwarming*” party to show off their recently-renovated digs. Food, drink, conversations, et al.

Reason #A to love this job: Beer at the party.

Reason #B: When the party officially began, I was setting up the PI’s new network printer. The process was smooth and straightforward, but it was a little time-consuming to configure everything. While I worked, though, three different people offered me a beer at three different times, even suggesting that beer is useful as a “testing beverage”. (For the record, that is very true.)

Reason #C: Chocolate fountain at the party. Seriously.

Reason #D: Because food and drinks are not allowed in the lab itself (to prevent cross-contamination of food/drink, equipment, and supplies), the hallway was lined with partygoers eating and drinking. That made it very easy to mingle — just walk down the hall…

Reason #E: Somehow, I impressed a few people by pointing out the Mendoza region of Argentina on a nearby world map. This somehow led to a great conversation about the Shackleton Antarctic expedition and their numerous ordeals.

Reason #F: I got to meet or at least come to know of a bunch of spouses and children. I’ll think twice before calling any grad student or postdoc a “kid” again.

All this from a couple hours on a Thursday in February. Score!

*Have you ever stood near a PCR thermal cycler? Those suckers get hot, fast. This lab has several of them close together, and they get heavy use, so that part of the lab stays toasty warm year-round.

Just as the pain and swelling from the one tooth subsided, another tooth elsewhere in the mouth started making trouble. In a lovely little bit of placement, though, this one is on the jaw itself and has a sharp edge that scrapes up the left side of my tongue. Scraped-up tongues tend to swell, and that has made the sharp edge even more difficult to avoid, which causes further scraping, further swelling, etc. Swollen tongues also make ordinary speech very difficult to understand, so I’ve had to get wildly exaggerative with my facial expressions and the non-lingual bits of consonants.

A friend of ours gave Fred a great suggestion for a temporary fix, though: melt candle wax, let it partially set, and pack it around the sharp bit. It’s an odd taste and an even odder feeling, but it works, as evidenced by my mostly-coherent speech and my renewed ability to chew and swallow without pain. I’m being extra-cautious about the temperatures and textures of my food, though, as I don’t want to melt or mangle my improvised crown.

I see the dentist tomorrow morning and again next Wednesday. Hopefully we can work out something a little more permanent.

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Nigel is still out of service; apparently his tires would have to be ordered from a warehouse, which delays things somewhat. I don’t really mind riding the bus to and from work, but it would be nice to Just Go sometimes without all the extra planning for transfers.

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Speaking of work, it was eerily quiet these past few weeks, but now that the winter break is over it’s picking up again. The quiet was kind of nice — made a bunch of patch cables and got a few other large-ish projects done — but it’s even nicer to stay busy with “real work”.

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Did the bulk of the whole Yule thing with Fred’s family on New Year’s Day. We had had a preview showing a few days earlier when my father came by to have me check out a computer issue (isn’t that how it always is?); he brought a couple presents, including a Roomba, which will be the first member of my robot army once it finishes the living room rug. Fred’s folks outdid them, though, giving us (among other things) a bread machine and electric grill which will need to find a home in our crowded kitchen.

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The Powerbook named rupaul got rebuilt with the Gentoo “hardened” toolchain and a different file system. Unfortunately, hardened is very very shaky on PPC, so I’ll probably go back to the regular toolchain for now and switch again later once the herd stabilizes a bit. Sticking with XFS, though, as it mounts faster and seems to perform better on this hardware than reiserfs.

I have a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card and an external hard drive enclosure en route. Once they arrive, the old server (“pangloss”) will be going down, and all of its data will be backed up off-site (woo-hoo rsync and a fat pipe) before the big drive gets re-partitioned. Since pangloss manages DHCP and DNS for the local network, though, the transition will require a little more reliance on the sometimes-flaky VOIP router (which is going to get replaced soon, just you watch). Since pangloss also hosts a local mirror of the portage tree, the transition is also going to stall some tree updates on my work box until I can get rupaul settled.

Also, I’m very tempted to sing “you bettah WORK!” every time I reboot rupaul to try a newly-modified kernel.

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Chorus rehearsals started Monday for the spring show. We weren’t there for the big chorus, but we will probably be doing the small ensemble again once that starts in a couple weeks.

School also started again Monday. This semester I’m taking a sociology class and a short fiction class. I’d much rather be taking something more major-specific, but there was nothing available that I hadn’t done and for which I had all the prerequisites. (boo.)

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So, caucus and primary season is upon us. I find it fascinating that the turnout so far is a smidge higher on the Republican side and a whole fucking lot higher on the Democratic side, yet all our “liberal” media can talk about is “HILLARY WAS EMOTIONAL THEN SHE WON OMGWTFBBQ”.

That said, it is extremely tempting to look into being a delegate to the DNC this summer, if only to see for myself how it all goes down.

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More later, I think.

Where to start…

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Had the chorus show. It turned out a hell of a lot better than I expected — apparently a lot of guys had been cramming lyrics ‘n’ tunes all day both Friday and Saturday — and the audience was very responsive. The snowstorm kept a lot of people home on Saturday night, though.

We won’t be able to sing with the full chorus for the next show, though we may be able to go with the smaller ensemble. The same interim director will be conducting, though, which should help stabilize a few things.

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Nigel had a flat on the way home from the chorus dress rehearsal! We managed to make it home (it was very late, the streets were slick with rain, and we were very close anyway) and got him in his usual spot that night. Then it snowed 8 inches or so, and things were unpleasant enough that we delayed changing the tire even further. When we finally got to it, we discovered that the tire had multiple large-ish breaches and would therefore need to be completely replaced. At this point, between shop closures and year-end financial obligations, Nigel is going to have to wait at least another week before he gets a new tire. It continues to make me sad.

In the meantime, I’ve been getting rides from Fred or taking the bus or train to work. I haven’t done that regularly since the pre-Nigel days, and I have to admit I sort of missed it a tiny little bit. If I catch the right bus, it takes roughly the same amount of time to get to work; it gives me a chance to unwind afterwards without having to deal with too many idiot drivers; and the University sprang for a Metro pass for me, so the bus/train doesn’t cost me anything. Finally, running for a bus is wonderful exercise — I get lots of cardio, and my motivation is built right in — and at this time of year a morning jog is invigorating.

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As of the day of the chorus’s opening night, though, Fred drives a slick 1997 BMW, in gorgeous condition, with purple leather seats. (It’s a very dark purple, such that it appears black except in direct sunlight.) This is not the first car we were eager to buy, but in retrospect it’s better that we got this one instead: it’s cheaper, it’s in better shape, and unlike the first one that was too insulated for my tastes this one lets the driver feel enough of the road to respond accordingly. As we discovered the night of that snowstorm, though, the new car (named “Klaus”) has rear-wheel drive, and though it does beautifully on virgin snow, when it hits ice it fishtails rather nastily until somebody sits in back.

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Said snowstorm was more wind and fury than actual precipitation. That said, we still got 8 inches. (Actual inches, not gay.com inches. cue that rimshot.) Most fell Saturday evening during the chorus show, so while the roads were so-so on the way to the theater, they were atrocious on the way home. (This is mostly because the city didn’t plow anything until Sunday morning.) The extra-sucky part about our trip home from the theater was that all of our available routes involved some combination of bridges and long uphill grades, which are rough going in any sort of wheeled vehicle. We insisted that Fred’s mother stay the night

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Had finals in both classes, and nailed ‘em both. I kinda sorta broke the curve in the programming class (101%, sorry). Didn’t do quite that well in physio, but I won’t complain about that. (Physio was one of those “lecture four hours straight” sorts of classes, which I actually enjoy in a perverse way. It’s the virtual labs that made me groan in disgust.)

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The departmental holiday party was the night of the programming final, so I didn’t get to stick around. The food looked amazing, though I couldn’t eat much of it (time was short, also the tooth was starting to flare up), and it was refreshing to see everybody there with their spouses and partners et al. and kids. The music was a little interesting, though; one of the postdocs from the dept chair’s lab (who bears a striking resemblance to Justin Timberlake, no fooling) and another postdoc who had once been in our department sang and played guitar. Apparently they switched to karaoke later on, once the booze kicked in, but I’m not sure how I feel about that. Great moment, though, was attempting to explain the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” — WHICH THEY ACTUALLY PLAYED AT THE DEPARTMENT HOLIDAY PARTY, this obviously still blows my mind — to those unfamiliar with that song.

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You know about last Wednesday. Swollen cheek, broken tooth, new gay dentist, etc. Been on those meds ever since, and though the antibiotic occasionally gives me a headache (especially in the presence of fly food) I haven’t had any further problems. I can chew again, which is a relief even if I do have to go easy on the left side of my mouth.

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Thanks to the dental condition, we postponed holiday observations until at least after the New Year. Don’t ask me what I got, because I really don’t know yet. We spent both the Solstice weekend and Christmas Day at home, putzing around and watching “Labyrinth“, “Elf“, episodes from season 2.0 of “Battlestar Galactica“, and snippets of “A Christmas Story“. (No vacation time for me yet, so I had to work on Christmas Eve. I did cut out a bit early, though, because nobody was there.)

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Food and geekery posts to follow.