My heart skipped a beat the other day when I checked out Electoral-vote.com. The report from Sept. 20th was looking quite grim, but today seems a bit better…

My girlfriend and I have gotten in the habit of going to Blockbuster to see if any of the “guaranteed to be in” movies aren’t in. Then we get to watch a free movie. We don’t even care what it is. The only part that sucks is asking the person at the counter.

Me: “Umm, hi, do you guys have any copies of Man on Fire?

Them: “No, we’re all out.”

Me: “… … …”

Them: “…”

Me: “Can I get a rain check on it?”

Them: “I guess so.”

They are just so unwilling to volunteer that free rental. Everyone involved knows why I am asking for that movie, but the employee invariably never wants to bring it up.

Speaking of Blockbuster, I just noticed they are running a deal like Netflix. I wonder how that will play out… According to Mark Pilgrim, the forecast says that Blockbuster will triumph.

Oh my god. I just had to take my GET¹ again today. Every national lab requires training for all employees that work there; hence the name. At the end of the training, one takes a multiple choice test. This training has to be renewed every 3 years, so mine was up again this month.

Anyway, the training “class” used to be nothing more than a booklet of PowerPoint slides. It was pretty dumb, but you could skim through the book, take the test, and be on your way.

Now it’s all changed. Gone is the booklet, in comes the multimedia extravaganza. Otherwise known as a PowerPoint presentation with a narrative. I had a couple beefs with this format:

1. It took too damn long. I had to sit there and listen for a good 45 minutes. I could have been through the same content in printed form (screen or otherwise) in about 20 minutes.

2. Unlike a good presentation, the voiceover usually didn’t mention the points in a given slide, but instead brought up points that were semi related. Thus, one was forced to either listen or read. Nevermind that fact that when the audio was following the slide, they were often out of synch with each other, kind of like watching a film strip with the audio one frame behind.

3. The slides themselves were poorly organized. There was one sequence talking about the ethical use of computers, and then bam, a slide on precautions one should take when traveling abroad, only to return back to ethical use of computers.²

4. Since the presentation progressed from slide to slide on its own, often times it advanced way too quickly for me read the full slide.

5. The content of the audio track was quite poor. The lady reading the script didn’t go back to correct any of the numerous mistakes she made, nor did were her lines timed right. More than once, her audio was cut off as we moved to the next slide, or there was a long pause (as in a good 10 seconds) at the beginning of a slide before she started speaking. I also heard phones³ ringing in the background. Several times.

How stupid can you get? Then again, on my way out of the testing room, I did see a training booklet called Laser Pointer Safety. Wow.

¹ General Employee Training.
² I heard at least 2 distinct ring tones.
³ To be fair, when I went to the internal Human Resources website and downloaded the training presentation, the slides were not in this order. Something must have gotten munged in the copy on the training computer.

I work at PPPL, known to the outside world as the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. When I say “work,” I really mean slave away at graduate student wages, fixing all sorts of broken equipment that is usually older than I am. Seriously. Well not about slaving away. I know a lot of graduate students who do put in 14 hour days, but that is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of a government workplace. Nine to five is the rule around here.

The part I was serious about is the fixing of broken equipment that is older than I am. I’m 25. I know its not that old, but when most the equipment you use has an FY-78 sticker, you get the idea that your place of work isn’t exactly bleeding edge. Shit, we run our research project off of a Sun Ultra 5, Bullwinkle. You can buy these guys on E-Bay for pennies. Well, maybe not pennies, but 2 for $30?

We used to have a second one named Rocky. Rocky started getting mighty flaky about a year ago, so we set off on a search to replace it. Someone at the lab had another Ultra 5 lying around and just gave it to us. That one died too and was replaced by PIII Dell.

Anyway, I’m sure I will talk about crappy old equipment quite a bit in the future. To go on a bit more about my research, I should mention the research project that I am a part of, CDX-U. CDX-U is about to be no more as we move onto the next phase of its lifecycle, LTX.

CDX-U is a tokamak, or technically a spherical torus. To the outsider, the distinction between the two is small, but there are some differences in the physics that occur in the two configurations. Think of a standard tokamak as a donut, where as a spherical torus is more like a cored apple. Small aspect ratio.

The CDX-U site I linked to above is pretty bad (and ancient). I’m not on there, but my advisors are. I should really get around to changing that…