The Blog

   When "SC" doesn't stand for "Sailor Coruscant"...

This morning started off with a rude awakening as the sun came up and I remembered that I hate summer mornings. 'Course, I hadn't realised that my room faced East before, and now I know. I met new people at breakfast, and even more people in the morning class.

I'm having an okay time. The lectures melted my brain, I got a cool tee-shirt, and I've met a bunch of people whose names I've promised to remember. There's Wendy who does medical physics in Adelaide, who's really nice and very pretty, but has never used Unix before and has since been thrown in off the deep end with regards to high-performance computing. There's Edan, who reminds me of James, in a hugely gothy, cigarette-smoking, little bit tubby and not that cute kind of way. But he knows his way around a computer like James, and in our little circle of peoples, he and I seem to know our way around the machines best.

So anyway, the lecture was horrible. I followed it, mostly, but it was kinda heavy maths and required mental muscles that I've been relaxing for the last few weeks. Still, I have a good background in this stuff and they gave us a folder full of course notes to follow, so I don't have to take many notes.

Then, after two hours of hell, we got to go and visit the source of all the fuss. And I decided that while supercomputers are cool (though actually hot), mass data storage systems are fucking awesome. This thing rocked my world so much that I completely forgot how cool the visualisation lab that came before it was. Let me back up.

The visualisation lab was full of macintoshes. That was my first impression, though really it was just the 30" monitors that caught my eye. Those things are excessive, aren't they? And, if I had a desk big enough for God to work at it, I'd want one too. Actually, one would look really good here on this big empty desk (I'm just using an edge of it as I was watching Buffy from bed). But anyway, we got to wear those 3D goggles where they work by synchronising the polarisation with a red LED that blinks a gazillion times a second, the ones that don't look like 3D goggles until you put them on and suddenly that odd fuzzy blob becomes a CAT scan of a little garden lizard and you're thinking "that's the coolest thing ever". The video was being played by the token windows machine (I guess when you're designing these things to run in other people's powerpoint presentations you have to make them run on windows), but that room was just so cool and the people who worked there were very cool (in an amazingly geeky kind of way).

*yawns* Okay, too tired to gush anymore. I'm going to sleep and write up the rest before breakfast.

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