Well, I am back in California. After a very pleasant two week trek through the upper Midwest (driving a total of 2300 miles from Minneapolis, to Soudan, to Park Falls, Oshkosh, Milwaukee, Madison, Fermilab, Milwaukee, Park Falls, and then Minneapolis), I am picking up my life here at SLAC. But, the complete collection of my photos from Wisconsin are here:
“steve.cooleysekula.net/photos/Wisconsin-Aug-2006/”:/photos/Wisconsin-Aug-2006/
The presentation at Fermilab went phenomenally well. I also had a ton of fun there, catching up with colleagues on their lives and their science. I also had a one-of-a-kind speaker experience. Instead of the typical speaker dinner, I was an actor in a ruse for one of the physicist’s surprise birthday party. Jim Simone, a lattice QCD expert, was the recipient of this surprise. I certainly had a lot of fun meeting many of the QCD experts at FNAL, enjoying the wonderful food prepared by Jim’s wife, and having a chance to decompress after several weeks of preparing for this seminar.
We then headed back to Milwaukee for my mother-in-law’s birthday party. This was a chance for all my wife’s siblings and their loved ones to get together, barbecue, and have a few drinks. I also had the added plus of playing captain computer maintenance. My in-laws brought the linux PC down from Park Falls, since it had apparently experienced a file system error which I suspected was a dead drive. I also had to figure out why my sister-in-law’s Windows PC was slow as hell.
The computer experiences were interesting for two reasons. The first was AG computers. This is a used computer and parts store on 76th Ave. in Milwaukee, run by (I believe) two brothers. The day we stepped in their shop, looking for obscure parts for an AT motherboard, their mother was manning the floor. She introduced us to the store, was a great help, and in the end we picked up two hard drives (8 Gig and 1.7 Gig) and an AT keyboard for about $12. I haven’t paid cash for computer parts in half a decade. I was then quickly able to install the drives, install Fedora Core 5, and declare the machine a victory. I pulled their home directories off the old drives, and the whole thing was essentially the same setup as before with better hardward and a more recent Fedora release.
As for the Windows PC, this was a sad case. The machine had grown slower and slower over time. My brother-in-law-in-law was so pissed at it – and rightly so – he blamed the computer for the problem and was ready to toss it and blow cash on a new one. The problem, in the end, was a combination of Windows XP’s promiscuity and the malicious behavior of people on the internet. Windows had, over a long period of time, admitted a series of spyware programs into its startup folder. A recent Sony Camera purchase had also led to the installation of its “always on” daemon in the startup tray. The combination of malware and bad Sony Windows software meant that there was a ton of disk access. Thanks to AVG anti-virus software (free.grisoft.com), spybot and AdAware, and CCleaner (“Crap Cleaner”), I was able to remove the malicious programs from startup. The PC then ran as designed – smoothly! Again, if Windows wasn’t so goddamn promiscuous, this wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place.
So the end of my vacation was . . . well . . . less than a vacation. Home again here in California, I am taking a little vacation from my vacation (and some work done, too).
