first impressions

The world machine whirs,
Spinning up, in a frenzy,
Crash, ye particles!

As far as I know, the LHC isn't actually working right now, but that's not really the point. Okay, here is time for my impressions from my first two days here!

I guess I should go with factual things first: yesterday started with my being shut out of CERN for poor planning. I guess I hadn't been entered in the database yet, so I had to beg a woman to look up the phone numbers of the people I needed to contact. I called them, but they were both busy for a little while, so I hung out in the CERN swag shop. If anyone's interested, there are some pretty cool CERN shirts for around $20 US.

After that, I met with my boss, Salvatore Mele. He's Italian, and super smart. I guess he's known since early high school that he wanted to work at CERN. He's also published on the order of 300 High-Energy Physics (HEP) papers. For those of you not familiar with "published," that means that he was involved in the experiments in some way, not that he necessarily did all the work himself. Some papers have 2,000+ authors, and often papers will list professors or superiors as authors when younger or more inexperienced students have written them in order to get more exposure for the papers. But, still, 300 is damn impressive.

I also met my team (Inspire) and saw my office. There's a dart board and a big plant (I'm not sure what kind yet, but it looks vaguely tropical, I guess) named Travis. Travis is Joe Blaylock (my friend from school who got me this job)'s boss at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in sunny California. I'm sharing with 4 grad students, and there are 4 more in the next room. They are from all over Europe, and hearing so many accents again is kind of fun. :)

I got a CERN id card, which has a photo of me looking very attractive and jetlaggedly exhausted. I now also have an official CERN email address: valkyrie (.dot.) arline (.dot.) savage (@at@) cern (.dot.) ch (sorry, I don't want to get spam for posting that thing). I was pretty excited to add myself to the CERN network on Facebook, hahaha.

Then I met my temporary team (Invenio), since I guess the guy I'm working with on the Inspire team (which they call "the library team" here, for some reason) is in India for another week or so. Invenio is one of the things that Inspire is building on; basically Inspire is a project aiming to combine Invenio and SPIRES and add some extra search functionalities.  I found out exactly what my project is going to be, and although I haven't had to sign an NDA (a fact which I suspect stems from CERN's seeming... lack of organisation), I think I'll not babble about it here on the interwebs.

There are like 13,000 "users" at CERN.  There are 3,000 or so permanent employees and 4,000 or so visitors at any given time, so this campus is HUGE.  It can easily take 30 minutes to walk from far end to far end.  It's also situated right on the border of France and Switzerland, so my hostel room and office are in Switzerland but my temporary office is in France.  That's sort of a weird thing to think about.  I guess I'm going to be living in Switzerland (in an apartment!  yay!) soon-ish.  The housing coordinator woman from IU told me it would probably take about 2 weeks to find something.  In the meantime, if any of you has an itch to send me mail, my desk is an okay place to send it:

Valkyrie Savage
CERN
CH1211 - Genève 23
Suisse

Technically, my desk is 3-1-021, but I think it should make it with just that much address.

Now, impressions!  For being such a high-tech place, CERN is really low-tech.  I had to scavenge computer parts from abandoned machines just to have a workstation, which was sort of amusing, in its way.  A lot of the buildings seem to be afterthoughts (I guess this facility has been around for a really long time...), and the numbering system on the map is really screwy.  For instance, building 3 connects to buildings 4, 52, 53, 22, and 26.  Next door are buildings 304, 602, 100, 510, and 63.  I walk past building 2013 on my way to my office.

I'm probably going to die of radiation poisoning just for being here.  I was trying to discover some kind of short cut through the buildings between my hostel, which is on CERN property, and my temp office, and I ran into several dead endings at rooms marked RADIATION HAZARD.  So... that kinda sucks.  :)

Swiss people, as I mentioned, have no idea what to do about snow.  My boss almost drove instead of taking a 10 minute walk with me yesterday because he didn't want to walk through it.  He also informed me that Genève once had snow plows, etc., but gave them to another canton (kind of like Swiss states) when they stopped getting so much snow.  Now their plan for when it snows is... to wait until it rains.  Great.

Not much happens around CERN.  This hostel is full of visiting-professor-types, and once people go home for the evening--which tends to be early; Europe largely sticks to a traditional 8-5 workday, which makes this really unlike any other CS jobs I've had, i.e. Google where people usually come in at 10 and stay until... maybe 9--there's not much to do.  I am continually irritated by the fact that grocery stores close so damn early here, though today I learned that the closest one is within 45 minutes by walking of my room, so I could reasonably go there to procure calories when need be (as long as it's before 19:00).  I asked one of my temporary co-workers what he does after work, and his response was that... well... not much.  I guess that a lot of the grad students in this group are planning to go skiing this weekend, though, and they invited me to join them.  Hoorah!

There are multiple parts to meals here, even lunch.  I did not know this.  Apparently, one eats one's entrée, then moves to a different location for dessert, and another different location for coffee.  And by "coffee," I of course mean "espresso," since it seems no self-respecting Europeans take their coffees "long."

Now that I've had that little babble time, I guess it would be reasonable to wrap up this post.  Again, I hope to put up pictures soon, and also to post a permanent-ish address.

Cheers!