Mo' 45
I might as well start with my office, since that's where a lot of this stuff originates from. My department has most of it's space in a nice, modern facility originally built as part of the Star Wars program. Their co-op's, however, are relegated to what amounts to a trailer park on the edge of the parking lot. Now why a well-funded government lab insists of using trailers for the majority of it's buildings is beyond me, but what really gets you is the euphemistic name for our trailer park: The Redwood Center. Then they call the individual ones Mobiles, such as Mobile 45, or in the vernacular: Mo' 45.
Inside isn't all usual partitioned offices and cubicles, a good third of it is a former conference room, which is now co-op central with the addition of some ergonomically incorrect desks and a bunch of bottom of the heap computers (we get the 68k Macs and IPX Sparcs instead of the G3's and UltraSparcs). It was home to six people at one point, though it thinned out to three co-ops after the first month or so, plus our post-doc buddy in the cube next door.
One of the decorative features (besides the rec room wood paneling) was two huge whiteboards, which were always filled with important formulae and theories. At least until we got there, and they became home to the Question of the Day, bike migration tracking, and the diskhogs scoreboard. More ambiance was provided by Jim's Neve Campbell milk ad, Sam's kelp forest of cans, and Matt's giant OpenBSD sandwich poster.
Your Girlfriend?
Jim's mentor, Kan, was a frequent visitor to our humble abode. Though he'd also call a lot, too- greeting whoever answered the phone with "Kan speaking," followed by ten minutes of only slightly discernible English before Sam could get a word in to let him know that Jim wasn't on the other end, and, in fact, wasn't even in the office. So anyway, this one time, he comes in and as he's standing behind Jim's desk he sees the Neve Campbell milk ad and asks Jim, without a hint of joking, "Is that your girlfriend?" Jim just smiled for a minute before answering...
Question of the Day
Not being in school for the semester, we didn't want our minds to get dull, and so the question of the day was born. The first was whether coffee or soda had more caffeine per dose. After surveying everyone in Mo' 45 and some of the surrounding Mo's, we sought out some reliable data, namely the contents of a Mountain Bike magazine article on post-ride drinks compiled into an Excel spreadsheet. Expresso led the pack by a wide margin, with Jolt being the most caffeinated soda. Other mind-broadeners included "Should you be afraid of a tarantara bite?" and "How many cans are above Sam's desk?".
Cans!
Sam's mentor was a firm believer in laissez-faire mentoring, and left Sam to pursue his own destiny for weeks at a time. Taking the initiative, Sam began an in-depth study of the structural and aesthetic aspects of suspended soda cans. Using empties from lunch, his experiment grew to several hundred cans, all suspended from the ceiling via paper clips. It was truly a sight to behold. Our department manager, Paul, came in once and was mesmerized by them for a good five minutes, much to the mine and Jim's amazement.
Saddlin' Up the Hogs
One of the things that makes Sandia a unique place to work is the bikes. The site is pretty well spread out, and technical people naturally need an efficient way to get around. Of course, being a Deptartment of Energy lab, they had to go with the environmentally correct choice of baby-blue beater bikes. Big tires, big basket, one gear, and a coaster brake. Some of the bikes even had these high-rise, chopper-style handlebars, and if you lowered the seat and stretched waaaay back, you could create the illusion you were riding a Harley at the site bike speed limit of 15mph.
Tarantulas are Everywhere!
One of the fun facts we learned in our first week at Sandia was that it was the height of tarantula mating season. Matt's mentor Mark was really into this, and compelled everyone to go up to the park south of town to see for ourselves. Which we did, on several separate occasions, only never to see any spiders. So one Monday, Mark calls me up and tells me to bring the other guys over. Out comes this tupperware container, with a live tarantula inside! We let the little guy out and watched him wander around for a while before deciding that maybe we should be doing some work.
The following week, Sam returned to the office with a pet tarantula of his own. The official mascot of Mo' 45, LBJ was named for Sam's presidential idol, Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ was a real hit around the site, making cameo appearances throughout the Redwood Center.
Viva Las Vegas
One of the great things about the Undergraduate Research Semester program that we ended up taking part in was all the field trips. We got to see the Monterey Aquarium, Stanford's Linear Accelerator, and all kinds of local attractions at The Lab (Sandia) and That Other Lab Across the Street (Lawrence Livermore). It should be noted that the folks at Lawrence Livermore consider themselves "The Lab", but some have a slightly different viewpoint.
All these trips, however, were eclipsed by our three-day venture to Nevada to see the nuclear test sites. The added bonus (as if we needed anything else with a three-day paid trip) was that we were going in and out of Las Vegas and would spend a night there. And so our trip began with us being let loose on the strip for the night...
Candy!
The following morning found us being herded into vans for the hour drive north to the test site. About half way there, it came up that half the people hadn't eaten breakfast, so we stopped at a convenience store along the way. Sam proceeded to load up on all manner of sugar gobs and climbed to a serious sugar high. It was a good thing, too, because the rest of the day was spent on a bus touring the remnants of above ground nuclear tests and the cratered landscape that's the only visible mark of dozens of underground tests. This began to lose it's excitement after a while, and lunch wasn't anything to rave about, either. The "boxed nasties", as they were less-than-affectionately dubbed, were these government-issue cafeteria-grade boxed lunches which weren't very palatable. Meanwhile, Sam was still pretty wired, bouncing off the walls carrying on about "caaandaaay!"
A Night at the NTS
Our second night in Nevada was spent at the Nevada (Nuclear) Test Site, in the "dorms" they keep for visiting staff. There wasn't much to do, save for the bowling alley, which was closed, and the steakhouse, which only kept us busy until we finished dinner. But in wandering around, we did find some interesting stuff, such as the vending machines. First, they sell beer in the glass-drop dispenser. What really got us, though, was the machine next to it, selling microwave able dinners. The lighted panel at the top read "Nukeables" with a big mushroom cloud in the background.
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diskhogs
Most of our work at Sandia (at least for myself, Ken, Jim, and Sam) was done on a nice, fast SGI Origin 2000, which was safely nestled in an earthquake proof vault, while we resided in a trailer about as stable as a tin can. The fun part was that none of us really knew Unix, so we just muddled along as we went. At one point, somebody pointed out to us that you could use 'diskhogs' and get a list of who the top ten users of disk space were. Imagine our surprise when we found we were at the top of the list, sitting on piles of data files that no one had given us a place to back up.
Using the diskhogs command as a scoreboard, we ran a contest of sorts to see who could stay at the top. Round One ended when I got a backup account and had to start cleaning up, but not before taking First Place with over 20% of the disk space and immortalizing the event with a printout taped to the whiteboard. Everyone got themselves off the list to begin Round Two. Ken, the post-doc, then took Round Two with a sweeping victory when he accidentally produced a data file that filled up the entire machine and crashed it. There wasn't much of an encore to bringing an Origin 2000 to it's knees since we didn't have accounts on the ASCI Red machine in New Mexico (which pulls about 1.3 teraflops), so that also marked the end of the contest.
Stone Cold says, "It's time to wrassle!"
For reasons that totally elude me, at some point Andy and Adrian got on this huge wrestling kick. Every night was a constant barrage of WCW and WWF Thunder, Nitro, Enema, etc. After a while, it wasn't enough to watch people getting beaten with chairs and shovels, buried alive, or making really obvious fake hits. They had to get in the action, so our living room became a wrasslin' ring.
It couldn't be avoided at work, either- we racked up several hits on Stone Cold's website. Sadly, we had to leave before we could arrange any mentor-protege tag team matches. It kept going strong till the end, when Andy was presented with a Goldberg bumper sticker at the awards breakfast. My favorite, though, was the guy in the audience with a sign that didn't read "John 3:16" or "Austin 3:16", but "Stoned 24:7".
Edward Teller, Jedi Master
One of the more hyped seminars that we had for the URS (Undergraduate Research Semester) was the Edward Teller talk. He was involved in the creation of early hydrogen bombs, and despite being 90+ years old, still talks to students each year about his experiences and opinions. He's quite a character; he walks with a bit of a hunch and carries a big stick. We kept waiting for him to look at the cookie crumbs falling from our mouths and go, "How do you grow so big eating food of this kind? Mmmm... Mine or I will help you not!"
After a rousing discussion of nuclear policy, Star Wars systems, and such, we had to get some pictures. In addition to the token group shot, Teller wanted one "with the pretty girls". One of them, hoping to spare him the strain of getting up offered, "we could get down on our knees..." You can bet he woulda loved that, if he didn't have a heart attack first.
What do they call a Whopper?
Having a bunch of computers on Sandia's network meant each one got it's own name for sharing files. Some of them had creative names, like Sukari (my Sun workstation), but for the most part they were pretty lame, like Mac1, Mac2, and TJSun. After a while, this started to stiffle out creative juices, so we set about finding them better names. Sticking with the "mac" theme, BigMac, MacDaddy, DaddyMac, and BigMacWithCheese were all christened. We were starting to run out of mac puns, so I suggested "MacDatHo", but we didn't think other people browsing the network would go for that. An interesting side discussion arose concerning the proper spelling of Mac/Mack in daily usage. Jim pretty much settled it, though, with this argument: "Well, if I went, 'I'm gonna go mack some ho's,' I'd probably put a 'k' on it."