Thursday, March 21, 2013

New safety sign at CERN!!!


 The CMS detector system administrator have made public today this new sign. It has been found at the P5 CMS experiment site. No previous warning or information from CERN safety team was made before. I guess they believed the sign was quite specific :D

The sysadmins are now crossing emails discussing about it and about its implications. One of the real emails being sent around says:

"Have we got icinga checks for the coffee machines ? To check water
pressure, coffee level etc etc..."


So there might be already plans for an important monitoring of the coffee conditions.

This is not really an issue to joke about, as we all know the importance of the coffee supplies at the CERN control rooms. Real eLog entries sent around by the detector shift crew in critical data taking conditions are of the kind of (yes, some were so hilarious that I saved the emails :D)

  • 30 August 2011 12:20 : No sandwiches +Coffee machine down: 
    Situation getting critical.
  • 28 July 2011 23:14 : Owl shift Jul 28-29
  • ps: RFMs: PLEASE make sure there is enough water, coffee,
    cups, and particularly sugar, this is part of your
     responsibility and paramount to shift morale!!!!!
  •  24 July 2011 06:00 : COFFEE CARD left with only 13 coffees
    Please refill it in order to keep a very high efficiency
    of the shift crew
  •  20 July 2011 23:16 : AND THERE IS NO COFFEE CARD
    see subject. Riots/Strike to be expected in near future.
  • 19 November 2010 21:19 :
    HELP! the night is going to be very long....
    our coffee card is gone missing after 20:00 and 
    we are left with a few capsules of "caffe espresso leggero"!
    Please take it back.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

There is no word in elvish, entish, or the tongues of men for what i want to say


That quote from TreeBeard, from Lord of The Ring, is the first thing that came to my mind when I arrived to CERN this week. Along with the images of the deforestation and the enraged march of the Ents that followed that feeling.

It is true that there was some advertisement. We all received the CERN email announcement about that. But, as usual, we just discarded it as junk email or ignored it, thinking that it would be some standard piece of useless information that we don't need.

Then, suddenly, one day you arrive back to work and see that almost all CERN trees have disappeared. This place, that in arcane eras was a legendary piece of old ugly buildings surrounded by old huge trees, it is converted into just the bunch of old and even uglier structures.

Before, our eyes could still afford the pain, as the wonderful trees managed to hide most of the ugly buildings. But now they cannot stop bleeding in pain, after seeing the reality. Yes, CERN is even more ugly now :D

Ok, I exaggerated a little bit, the previous pictures are not actual pictures of CERN :D I leave you here few real pics I did:



PD: my apologies, this was meant to be posted past week but I forgot to click 'post' and my 3 seconds fish memory took care of me forgetting about that forever :D