Soaked!

You'd think that by living far, far away from dangerous things like rivers one would be less prone to casual flooding events. However, just that happened today.

I was isolated snugly in the basement of my building during a meeting, when one of my coworkers poked his head into the room. He was dripping water head to toe, and proclaimed that it was raining cats and dogs outside. Shortly thereafter, our vacuum technician reported flooding in our basement floor and led a team of undergraduates to circumvent the problem.

Downtown Madison and the areas near my lab were hit hardest. My girlfriend was trapped in her car as the roads were flooding. Fortunately, she was able to get off the roads safely. Afterward, she took pictures to show just how bad things were. (These were taken after the water had receded by eight inches!)

A local newspaper reporter also got a chance to snap a picture of her, too!

Yikes!

LVM Is Fun

There's nothing like starting a long weekend with Linux nerdery. To wit: the main server at kravlor.com now has an aggregate shared storage block of .8 TB, providing on average 1 TB of storage to machines on the network! (It turns out that MythTV eats a lot of storage, especially when one gets a chance to watch TV every few months or so!)

Niftier is that hard disks in the set can be reshuffled in and out with little repercussion. (On production-scale servers, for instance, drives can even be hot-swapped, avoiding a reboot!)

Also, the photo gallery has been provisionally fixed. It has been on the fritz since I nuked the kravlor.com server following a compromise. (Moral of the story: mod_rewrite is difficult to debug.)

(Fun - Sun) + Work in San Diego

Bullseye!

That was where my conference was held today, on the General Atomics campus. I've been attending a conference on active control of plasmas in today's modern tokamaks, and otherwise getting in touch with a lot of people actively involved in the research community that I am particularly interested for my work on Pegasus. (It's pretty nifty to be in a spot that is so clearly distinguishable from space. Ok, pretty super spiffy.)

It being my first time in a higher-security DOE facility, let's just say it was impressive. Very impressive. The control room was laced with many, many operator/data visualization stations; several large-screen projectors with machine status information, etc.; cool blinking lights; and more.

It would appear that people from MIT are interested in the work that I've been doing to make interfacing C, LabView, and Igor programs with their data acquisition/storage/retrieval system, MDSplus.

I look forward to seeing what the final day of the conference brings -- as well as my return for a week-long stay in early June.