(no subject)
Due to mutual timing issues, I'd never seen our neighborhood garbage truck until this week. I've been completely missing out. When it flew past me earlier I discovered it had a 20 inch superman attached to the grill. His arms were upraised in flight, naturally, so he could properly zoom around with the truck.
I went to work the week of New Years. This was a mistake, and yet it was so temping... No interruptions, no waiting for equipment, just a nice empty lab were I was going to be very productive. However, Monday I ran into problem #1: the reflooring work in my office, to have been completed the week before, was not finished. I had suspected this would be the case and had preemptively squirreled away important things so they would accessible. It wasn't possible to hide everything in my desk and file cabinets, so this inconvenience was still an inconvenience. I also forgot to take my lab notebook out of its desk drawer, so I resigned myself to taking interim notes on a legal pad (which is a very good way to make sure that something vital gets accidentally torn off, at least for me). And of course my computer was off-line and in a corner. But I soldiered on.
Tuesday I discovered we and another lab group were swapping three laboratory rooms. I wasn't told about this beforehand, but it didn't involve any of the rooms that I generally work in. It did include the room that contains all the random connectors so whenever I needed to get from bottle A to piece of equipment B I had to solder together fittings C and D, even though I knew connector E (made of identical fittings) was there. In one of the 20 boxes. Or possibly in one of the other rooms. Or the hallway. Nonetheless, I was still undaunted in my desire to Get Work Done.
Wednesday, I set up my computer at (relatively) clear spare desk so I could do some analysis. I checked my e-mail and read a bit of news, settling down to some proper work. Just then about 1,000,000 warning messages popped up, informing me that my computer had caught a virus (and a worm, and a trojan house, etc). No problem, I thought, I did a full backup just before I left for the Christmas. I'll just wipe everything and start again. The observant reader may feel a sense of foreboding at this point, because were would I keep all the system/program CDs? That's right, in my desk, now packed in random boxes up and down the hallway. At that point I made sure my overnight experiment was running without problem, finished up some other things around the lab and went home to celebrate the new year by watching all three LotR, extended editions, wear my pajamas, eat ice cream and generally not interact with the more problematic aspects of my world for a while.
I went to work the week of New Years. This was a mistake, and yet it was so temping... No interruptions, no waiting for equipment, just a nice empty lab were I was going to be very productive. However, Monday I ran into problem #1: the reflooring work in my office, to have been completed the week before, was not finished. I had suspected this would be the case and had preemptively squirreled away important things so they would accessible. It wasn't possible to hide everything in my desk and file cabinets, so this inconvenience was still an inconvenience. I also forgot to take my lab notebook out of its desk drawer, so I resigned myself to taking interim notes on a legal pad (which is a very good way to make sure that something vital gets accidentally torn off, at least for me). And of course my computer was off-line and in a corner. But I soldiered on.
Tuesday I discovered we and another lab group were swapping three laboratory rooms. I wasn't told about this beforehand, but it didn't involve any of the rooms that I generally work in. It did include the room that contains all the random connectors so whenever I needed to get from bottle A to piece of equipment B I had to solder together fittings C and D, even though I knew connector E (made of identical fittings) was there. In one of the 20 boxes. Or possibly in one of the other rooms. Or the hallway. Nonetheless, I was still undaunted in my desire to Get Work Done.
Wednesday, I set up my computer at (relatively) clear spare desk so I could do some analysis. I checked my e-mail and read a bit of news, settling down to some proper work. Just then about 1,000,000 warning messages popped up, informing me that my computer had caught a virus (and a worm, and a trojan house, etc). No problem, I thought, I did a full backup just before I left for the Christmas. I'll just wipe everything and start again. The observant reader may feel a sense of foreboding at this point, because were would I keep all the system/program CDs? That's right, in my desk, now packed in random boxes up and down the hallway. At that point I made sure my overnight experiment was running without problem, finished up some other things around the lab and went home to celebrate the new year by watching all three LotR, extended editions, wear my pajamas, eat ice cream and generally not interact with the more problematic aspects of my world for a while.