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'Xtreme' Equipment That You Have Borrowed?
djupedal asks: "What's the most extreme type of equipment you've used from the lab/office/university, etc. for your own projects, etc.? Have you ever taken a piece of unknown lint into work just to check it out under the nuclear microscope? Ever used the UV curing oven on the production line to make custom wheels for an R/C car? Ever used the 100,000 ton press in the lab to meld a dime into a nickel just to have a present for your gf/bf on Valentine's Day?"
"Ever drop by the house on the way home from work and use your company's nuclear density gauge to check for hardpan in the backyard?
Was that you I saw driving a 50 ton crane into the sub-division just to have a platform to install a 3 meter dish on the roof of the garage?
Ever hog a T-3 so you could loop-logon on to your own box....after networking thru a minimum of 25 repeaters near the equator...just to see how much delay there is when going around the planet?
To get you started -- we used to work the night shift at a ski area - and when we found spare time, we would fire up a few of the $200,000.00 Kässbohrer PistenBully's and run off into the trees and play hide & seek in the dark, when it was snowing heavy and your tracks would be covered quickly. All lights out and nothing but iPods online, we would play tag until we either got lost, stuck, bored or the sun came up.
What's your best example of trivial use of some very expensive gear that wasn't yours?"
Was that you I saw driving a 50 ton crane into the sub-division just to have a platform to install a 3 meter dish on the roof of the garage?
Ever hog a T-3 so you could loop-logon on to your own box....after networking thru a minimum of 25 repeaters near the equator...just to see how much delay there is when going around the planet?
To get you started -- we used to work the night shift at a ski area - and when we found spare time, we would fire up a few of the $200,000.00 Kässbohrer PistenBully's and run off into the trees and play hide & seek in the dark, when it was snowing heavy and your tracks would be covered quickly. All lights out and nothing but iPods online, we would play tag until we either got lost, stuck, bored or the sun came up.
What's your best example of trivial use of some very expensive gear that wasn't yours?"
I once borrowed my boss's secretary!
I can't go into specifics ... but I once used the vacuum chamber of a sophisticated scientific instrument to freeze-dry a bouquet of flowers. Inside the clean room. A big ice-jam happened in the inlet to the vacuum pump. I also used the milling machine and lathe to make a smoking pipe.
I borg (install SETI@home) on very box I can lay my hands on, and I guess the total value of all those machines is weel into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
:-)
I also installed a Counter-STrike server on a server at my high school, and I think its been running for like 7 months and noone has noticed yet
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
I used my employer's T3 line to download "Fuck Pigs 5". That was really a nasty video. I recommend you only download nice, soft Andrew Blake "couples-porn" movies when you are at work.
I recently used liquid helium to freeze the memories of thousands of Slashdotters.
The answers are:
-yes
-maybe
-only if hamsters are involved
-no
Slashdot needs a general/open forum area for things like this and a lot of other garbage "news" posts.
The amount of noise here has increased dramatically over the last 12 or so months.
See also: Ass Clowns 1-3, Ghetto Bitches 1 and 2, and Cock Smokers 1-50(!)
Back when it used to seem like a lot (~1997?), we used to "steal" all the processing time on 4 Sun E10Ks and 7 frames of IBM SP/2 nodes and do SETI and Distributed.Net work on them when they idle between real projects.
What about cool home science gear that doesn't belong in a home? A guy at my office has 2 and a half electron microscopes in his garage he uses to peek at anything and everything that interests him around the house. I believe between the 2.5 microscopes worth of parts, one is actually running at the moment.
11*43+456^2
My wife and I have used her bosses desk to do a little photo shoot we submitted to a mens magazine (and a little something else that didn't get photographed.) Sadly, they(the photos) were rejected, like all of the informative articles I've submitted to slashdot.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
Do you like your doughnuts Krispy? Or your beverages "Clean?" Then you have fallen for nonsensical marketing terms. (What's in there? Mud? It'd better be clean...)
Those words, like "Xtreme" are purely "sensual activators," but as terms descriptive of the object they are just nonsense.
Xtreme is a marketing tactic that attempts to raise your adrenaline level while you're reading the ad so you are more likely to remember the product as something out of the ordinary, but it really describes nothing special in most places it is used, just like "Advanced" has come to mean nothing, (other than that it is being advanced by the marketers) and so, that part of the lexicon now being polluted, marketing people have begun abandoning it and chosen a different word to pollute.
Obligatory ontopic: That being said, no, I haven't used someone else's expensive facilities for my own research. Except maybe using large meetings to ask questions to find out how clueless a department director might be about the work going on. That's about the most fun you can have...
Yea, last week.
hogged 1/2 a T3 for 12 hours or so.
I used to work at a doctor's office when I was 19 and he asked me to take his Viper to go fill it up.
I took the long way to the staton
Yeah, I am on to you. Trying to get us confess about all those things. We are smart enough to realize doing things like you described would be illegal and cause for dismissal, you know.
nt
While building the subwoofer for my car, I found that I wasn't getting the desired output of the driver I had installed. I brought it into the lab at work to measure the output. Using the data I was able to find and use a driver that was better tuned to the box I had built.
Once I borrowed my boss's laser cannon and vandalized the moon! I won't tell you what CHA stands for, though...
"Derp de derp."
Ooo! I hope Dubya chimes in!
How long did you work for Dr. Parsons? Did he complain when he caught you humping the "laser" ?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Starbuck? Is that you? I bet those Vipers are much nicer to fly than those Cylon Raiders which are filled with wet corned beef.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
More than 20 years ago, a $MAJOR_CLASS1_RAILROAD celebrated it's 100th birthday. To celebrate, they borrowed one of their old steam trains from $MAJOR_SCIENCE_MUSEUM.
They had to ferry the train about 200 miles each time. Luckily, they sold tickets for those ferry trips, so we could enjoy riding the train.
At that time, my grandfather died; he lived in $RAILROAD_TOWN about 1/4 of the way between the museum and the rail office. He was a civil engineer, and one of his pet peeve was about railroaders calling themselves "engineers" because they ran the engines...
The day of his funeral, there was a steam trip scheduled. I was on the inbound trip a few days earlier, and I went to see the museum director (whom I have known for years before), and I told him that when they'll get back home, at $RAILROAD _TOWN, there would be my grandfather's funeral.
"We'll take care of it", the director said.
So, when the funeral procession went out of the church, there was the steam train, with crew at attention, saluting my grandfather... Later, at the cemetery, everyone was suspecting that I had a hand in that...
Okay - so let the slashdotters be the judge.
"What's your best example of trivial use of some very expensive gear that wasn't yours?"
It involves a tugboat, a large ship, and plenty of beer.
Once, I'd lost my Bic pen, so I snuck into the supply closet and took another one. I just needed to sign something.
I felt pretty bad about it, so I filled out the form to have my original pen replaced, and then I put the pen back in the box.
But then I thought about all the ink I used filling out that form. I thought to myself "did I really need to fill out all that stuff on the second page? They know me here.. but it's better to err on the side of caution".
So I wrote out an apology and attached it to the pen with a rubber band, then put it back.
Well, after a while I got to thinking.. they can recognize my handwriting, can't they? And then they'll put two and two together... how many people have filled out requests for new pens in the last week? I could really get in trouble.
So I snuck back into the closet.. except.. Jones was there. He was looking for staples, thank God, which are on the other side. I tried to act cool but I'm sure he knew *exactly* what was going on. Could he see my eyes darting toward the box of blue Bic pens? Just stare straight ahead. Thankfully, he just grabbed his staples and left.
I grabbed the pen and the note, ran back to my office, and wrote out my resignation explaining the whole thing. In Word this time.. by this point just *touching* a pen made me nervous.
Quite a crazy episode in my life, I tell you.. but sometimes you gotta go a little "wild" sometimes, eh?
I totally do not understand what the word "Xtreme" means here? Do you mean expensive? Do you mean "extreme"?
Wait, I know, you're a marketing person???
My roommate at college is an architecture student at UNC Charlotte. He recently used the college of architecture's 50 watt laser cutter to make a valentines gift for a friend of his. 50 watts doesn't sound like much, but it is. A 100 watt light bulb puts out only 2 watts of light.
Most recent thing is taking our 64 bit servers and installing UT2k4 on them for the latest lan party.
Also, we used to generate rainbow tables using our tech lab servers. I'm thinking about doing it again before I leave (next semester is my last semester) and selling the tables on eBay or something.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Well, there's all those years I spent as an announcer at various AM and FM stations. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I used the virginal quiet little Chinese librarian at my University as a cum receptacle. Tell you one thing... her reserved manner turned into screams of "fuck me!" when I stuck my love rod into her slip 'n' slide.
I work for a large telecom in the back end software devision and the team I work on develops the operating software for the network. My usual test environment is a cluster of 64 Sunfire servers with each of those servers containing 8 processors and 32 Gb of RAM. Including the infrastructure, Myranet optical lines, and NetApp storage boxes this brings my setup from the uber to the l33t.
The other day, I wanted to see how fast this cluster could encode The Matrix... it took 4 seconds... I was pleased.
We're upgrading to 256 IBM Blades soon so it should get fun then. I'm a big fan of blades... the Sun blades we use are tremendously fast and perfect for what we do. need more processing power? chuck in another 64 blades into that rack and there you go... Those blades are the same that are used in the MareNorstrum cluster in Spain... that would be the 5th most powerful supercomputer in the world (and is at par with the Earth Simulator, costing 10% as much heheh)... damn I can't wait to get those going...
For some reason, when I get home, not having all that power and an internet connection to match just feels wrong.
while(1) { fork(); };
then the fire started.
An M915 is a tractor trailer, think an International or Freightliner you see on the highway but painted OD green.
While I was in a class at AIT an instructor told me to find a truck with a working battery.
He failed to say where from.
The one I found was on the other side of the school and, as it turns out, was one that another class was going to use that day. When they got to their bay, the truck was gone and so all the instructors were called to find it.
My instructor knew where it was because he had gotten tired of waiting and found a 2000lb Skytrak on his own. Which he then proceeded to use in raising the back end of "my" truck up off the ground in case I "decided to run" with it.
This happened on a Friday. Over the weekend, my drill sergeant's IROC was stolen. Guess who she grilled about it on Monday. In formation. In front of the whole company.
R(k)
Back in 96, I hacked into a bunch of SGI's at the university I was going to (a nice, well-known university for computer science and other engineering stuff). I cracked about 40 of them, and my friend used them to serve out pirated software.
:)
Needless to say, we got caught, the FBI came, and we were kicked out. The school let us back in after a stern talking to and a promise not to do it again.
When it's 1996 and you have 40 SGI's at your disposal, it's a pretty damn cool thing. Well, until the FBI comes after you and sits in front of your house for 3 days in a black suburban.
My dad used to work at a nuclear pharmacy. There was a very cold freezer there, somewhere aroun -200 F. One time he stored some ice cream in there before he brought it home. They were as hard as bricks.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Clusters of computers. More than 100K computers. For trivial use.
:).
They even give you an API.
Doh
I work at a company that makes LCOS devices (liquid crystal on silicon), so we've got some fancy microscopes custom-made for looking at pixel arrays under a wide variety of lighting conditions. I also happen to be hacking the PV2 disposable digital camera and didn't know the sensor resolution. So, we popped it in and found it was a 1.3 megapixel camera, even though it was claimed to provide 2 megapixel quality.
We've got a laser that can cut metal traces in IC's; I've been dying to find a use for it. Or the NMR machine.
I also used to work at a small startup company that decided, for some interesting good reasons, instead of programming, they should play Civilization on-line 8 hours a day, for 2 months. So, if you lost to three really good players in early 2002, they weren't cheating -- just really determined and on company time. Too bad that was a couple months before I started there.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
...amongst the many fun toys at work is a truck with about 20U rack space in the trunk, power generators, etc. --- the perfect venue for the world's fastest lan party...
Using the 700lbs LOA(low observable antena) use for ground following radar on the B1-B to cook hot dogs while it was hooked up to an anochoic chamber.
Moral of the story,800+ watts = burnt hot dog in under 1 sec.
I SHALL RAIN DOWN MISSILES-IN-A-BUN ON YOUR PITIFUL CITY'S!
I've spent a lot of time working in a few physics-research type semiconductor fabs. Because yield is typically not a big target, they tend to be a bit down-and-dirty.
Needless to say, this makes it easy to make a few (carefully degreased) [gold,platinum,irridium,palladium] evaporated [coins,paperclips,ants], and the chance to make a copy of your favourite logo 1um x 1um in metal on silicon never goes astray. It's provided countless tiny presents for S.O.'s, etc, complete with, in the later case, micrographs taken with the machines they were beamwritten in.
WTF is your militia doing with such a puny arsenal ?
Geeks really need to address the mental disability that hinders their ability to procreate.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Su root, uncomment the entry in /etc/services and lo ! Friday night were turned into combat-mode flight simulator lan parties.
That was of course 10-15 years before lan parties were invented, of course.
[Pruneau
- Cowboy Neil
- Breasts
- 1?2?3?4Profit
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Every Slashdotter knows CHA stands for Charisma.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I have a part-time job driving heavy trucks, and it's kind of amusing to use those 3 or 4-trailer 120-tonne monsters to collect small loads at garden or hardware shops; the rig usually stretches across the entire car-park and blocks both gates, and parking inspectors won't issue infringement notices because it'll take them ten minutes to climb up and stick it on the windscreen... ;-)
Well some of my more complex electronics projects require BGA packaged style FPGA's. These are almost impossible to solder at home so i usually do that at work.
First baking them for 48 hours at 40 degrees in a large oven of about 20.000 euro's. Thats to prevent from moisture to violently evacuate the package, cracking the packaging.
Then it goes in their new brandspanking reflow oven that costs about 150.000 euro's. Not to mention the liquid nitrogen the oven uses (special atmosphere needed when reflowing with lead free alloys).
But usually i just take a lift of a currently running production run. It would be madness (and get me a lot of problems) just to run the machines for one little PCB with a BGA432 on it.
Well, does ethanol count? Especially if you add in a hot college girl every now and then? That's a yes? Good!..
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
When "outreach events" like international astronomy day come up, a few of the "younger" (read thirtysomething) and "not quite as professional-looking" (read: myself included) sorts at the Institute are deposited behind a pair of tables with a dewar of liquid nitrogen and... hmm. Our current list includes flowers, tennis balls, pennies (and a metal block, plastic bags and ball-peen hammer), graham crackers, wire springs, balloons, and... hmm. I don't think the marshmallows worked. They got crunchy, but did nothing else interesting. The gummi bears at least shattered interestingly.
:)
:)
As the one who first brought the graham crackers, I have a bit of a reputation now. Of course, this past week one of our eager young participants was on the news statewide, appearing to exhale clouds of smoke while to munching an unusually cold cracker.
The hard part arises when we're asked to explain the scientific relevance of this. We can, of course, but we're more getting the kids interested in astro as a field where they can do crazy weird cool stuff.
I still have to learn to run an instrument or two on the scope I operate, so I can get some actual images of stuff in the very rare spare moments.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
When in college in the Late 1970's, we brought some liquid nitrogen from the main science lab back to the dorm. After pouring (IIRC) 150 proof vodka into ice cube trays, we used the LN to create "vod-cubes". These, when added to a class of Collins Mixer, made for an interesting drink - the longer we waited the stronger it got! Also used some of it to freeze popcorn and Fig Newtons(TM)... It sure was neat to see a Fig Newton *shatter*!
...where I used to work, I borrowed their huge laser powersupply to try experiments with nonstandard lasing devices.
I also borrowed a toothbrush, some of the boss' expensive pens, his chair, and his desk lamp.
We discovered that, given enough energy, you can make just about anything lase.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
spook radio receiver that a govt. agent had shipped instead of hand carrying as required. Naturally the shiping company lost it and it ended up as freight salvage.
Long story short.
It could do things that commercially available products of today can't. Two agents flew out from Langley and collected it from me.
They were very surprised that I'd figured out to operate it well enough to pick individial phone calls off commnications satellites.
If I told you any more, I'd have to kill you.
After hitching a ride to the pier, I walked up behind friends and family waiting for me while the ship was still tieing up.
My ship, USS America, was towed out to sea last week and will be sunk this week.
Well, let's see.
There was the time I was working on an amateur radio repeater that was co-located with several commercial systems, including a commercial FM radio station. We had my COM-120B (a US$20,000 piece of test equipment). At the same time the FM radio station's engineers were out working on their gear, with a IFR-500S (a decade+ old US$10,000 piece of gear that cannot do half the things the 120 can). It was kind of funny watching those guys look over at us with envy.
Then there were the times a friend of mine borrowed the telephone company's bucket truck to help me put up my tower. Of course, he used to own the phone company, so....
www.eFax.com are spammers
Three words for you
Battery Operated Sawzall.
Cut the door locks off very quickly.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Snot under the elctron microscope. I'm sure it's been done many a time before.
Haven't had many opportunities other than that.
Unfortunately I didn't get to see my own spunk.
A blog I run for the wealth
(Posting anonymously for obvious reasons)
There was this guy who didn't like my dad and threatened him.
To deal with him I borrowed some election commissioners in Florida and got myself appointed President.
Then I borrowed the military (very much against the wishes of most of the American people, but who cares?) and sent them overseas to take over a whole country and find that guy.
I work in a Free Electron Laser (FEL) center. The FEL is a few-million-dollar machine which is about 25 meters long, stem to stern. We have occasionally used it to carve Lucite blocks to present as going-away presents for departing associates. We figured that, since the operating budget of the machine (note: not the incremental cost of this task) runs about $500/hour, these could be considered $1000 gifts!
We also use the laser for demonstrations for visiting high school students (etc) to carve hot dogs and to engrave names on tongue depressors. I think it is fairly memorable for the students to see a building-sized apparatus used for this. The only hope is that it gets some of them excited about science.
Once some friends and I wanted to watch a movie, so we ended up tripple stacking projectors (2100 lumens each) and using a two fairly large JBL VerTec Line Arrays (we had one on each side of the house) and four 18" subs for a nice low end. We had originally setup the system for a touring group in my high school's auditorium, and it was mostly made up of rental equipment (we nabbed the projectors from classrooms). It wouldn't be a very big system outdoors, but our highschool has a small 700 seat auditorium, so it was "full" sounding. Heheh..
All together we estimated the system cost to be about $300,000, and the full rated power of all the amps was close to 40,000 watts. The screen was 70 ft. diagonal... It was a nice "home theatre" setup...
I used a Sun E3500 with 8 processors and 8GB of ram to run a GwebCache. It didn't really perform as well as I had hoped, so I moved it back to it's normal cluster of 3 intel machines.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
The navigator of a multi-billion dollar nuclear submarine needed to come up with a track (a course) to follow in an oparea to kill time.
Across 150 miles of ocean we wrote "Go Navy Beat Army".
lubricant and some flavored condoms. (Oh and I forgot the surgical gloves...)
My cup is empty , I am bereft, my coffee, my sanity, I have none left.
One day in the RF and Microwaves lab, we wanted to listen to some radio programme. Now, there were several kinds of receivers lying around, but most of them were in the higher frequency ranges.
Except for the HP140 series spectrum analyzers. These had a range going to 110 MHz, just right for FM broadcast radio.
So we made a simple antenna from a pair of wires that we stuck onto one of the windows, and connected this to the input of one of the HP-140 series spectrum analyzers. In addition to the convenient range, they had all kinds of nice filtering functions to limit bandwidth to an FM radio channel. We could even see the various broadcasting stations on the display.
These analyzers had a vertical output, to which we hooked up a linear power amplifier that originally was designed for driving a tele-coil system for the benefit of the hard of hearing. We hooked up this to a speaker that originally had been in someone's car but became surplus when they got a new stereo system.
By stopping the sweep and tuning the spectrum analyzer a little to the side of the frequency of interest, we got slope detection of the radio signal, and we got the sound of the station of interest.
Of course, the sound quality wasn't the best, obviously not stereo; and we noticed that the spectrum analyzer would slowly drift into and out of tune with the temperature variations of the day, so frequent readjustments were necessary. Fading was also noticed, but this wasn't too bad. Still, this set-up remained in use for quite a while, something around a year.
So this is how to make a set of $~10^4 equipment sound much like any old $~1 radio as found at flea markets, garage sales, or thrift stores...
Same sound for a 40 dB increase in price...
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
The power output of that radar must've been more than 800 watts - Most consumer microwave ovens have power outputs of 1000+ watts, and since all of that goes into a shielded chamber, it all eventually goes into whatever load is inside that chamber. (Whatever you're cooking.)
Also, large directional antennas usually don't have that much near-field gain. It's only until you get far away from the antenna that the gain becomes apparent.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
On the way we would get a buzz on and take the things off-roading in the desert hills on base. Wonderful US Army 5-ton ten-wheel-drive tracter trailer rigs.
First gear on a good incline and these beasts would just dig straight down.
The conceit was we had to warm them up to get the oil flowing
Peace,
PFC Burton (ret)
bamph
So we pulled around a car, chained together two jumper leads (the battery isn't exactly conveniently located in one of these) and let it charge for about 10 minutes with the car running. Tried to start the plane, just about stalled the car and had no joy on starting it.
Left it to charge another 10 minutes or so, and managed to get the plane started. No problemo!
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
My friend had a gathering at his house to sit around and enjoy the company of geeks, and maybe play some Doom (I). We were all encouraged to bring PCs and since I worked at a company that wrote finite element analysis stuff, and some visualization on heat flow, I borrowed the presentation computer.
A $10,000+ SGI Indy with all the trimmings. Xtank ran well. The screensavers were also a huge hit.
- Dan
Hi Andy,
The LOA is a strange beast of an antenna indeed, imagine a large white oval facing down ward at about a 45 degree angle. The down ward face of the antenna covered with many small white circles each seem to be a small LVA's them selves to allow the radar to sweep without having to move the antenna to sweep except during a bank( watching something that big rotate suddenly 70 degrees usually scares the visitors to our shop.)
Its realy more of an array than a large solid antenna, I'm not sure if that's what casuses the the large near field gain we get out of or not, as for the wattage my handy dandy power meter on sample port of the input wave guild shows 800 watts from the transmitter, however I'm not sure of the actual gain form the antenna, there bench checked on automated equipment and very rarely fail due to output power concerns so I don't usually see the values for the output. Now I'm all curious and I'll have to find out next time I get one in the shop to mess with.
I SHALL RAIN DOWN MISSILES-IN-A-BUN ON YOUR PITIFUL CITY'S!
I stole a red swingline stapler. They kept moving me around, but I kept the stapler. They switched to the bostitch, which I didn't like very much.... But I love the swingling
to check the purity of various "recreational pharmaceuticals" we or our friends had acquired. :)
"Another way to look at this is that I'm simply describing the psychological borrowing of the public's mental facilities by the marketing gurus, in order to cause reactions they think are desirable. There is very little difference, conceptually, between that and sneaking onto someone else's facilities to try some interesting experiment (See, and some of the mods thought I was offtopic.)"
Geeks do the same when they "borrow" a word from the common language. All professions do. It's the nature of language to be borrowed.
Not really stealing, but "exploiting", I guess...
:-). Anyway, there's a sliding door that uses a card reader- it's the entrance to where we store our servers and equipment. One day, I forgot my card, and I needed to go in and out of that room a lot, and hardly anybody else was there. So, I timed it out, and figured out it took 15 seconds for me to walk from my cube to the door, and set the scripting thing in Win-Pak to wait 15 seconds and then open the door.
;-).
At work, they had me clean up a card-access system (Northern Win-Pak 2.0, yuck...) and I still have admin access on it since it's still messed up
So, now I walk in and out with no card, with the door sliding just as I walk up to it, without even breaking my stride. Our fridge and microwave is right next to the door, so I can't wait to mess with people's heads. Maybe I'll tell them we just installed retina scanners
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
I used to use a $20,000 FID Gas Chromatograph to determine the concentration of ethanol in my home distilled bathtub gin, until I figured out that a $3 proof and tralle hydrometer worked and was accurate to within 1%. Considering the hooch was always about 140 proof, this was acceptable, although not as exiting as using just one microliter and a huge instrument.
boozebox
Wow, the USGS... that must have been a big stone!... geological in scale ...
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The best I ever did was install the distributed.net client on the live production servers of a MMOG. (Yes, one you've heard of.) It did practically nothing while the game was busy, but it absolutely screamed during the school day when the player count dropped.
But I'm just a software guy; a friend of mine is a mechanical engineer. Most recently, he used the rapid prototyping machine (sometimes called a "3-d printer") to build some miniature props for our D&D game. Teeny little dead monsters and decapitated orcs, out of a machine intended to create aircraft parts.
About a year ago, I was moving into a new house, and had lots of stuff to throw away, since I lived in a farmhouse that my Grandmother lived in. She was one of these people who raised a family during the great depression, and refused to throw anything away. After the relatives went through all the stuff and took what they wanted, and I combed through what was left to keep what I wanted, I was still left with a huge amount of unwanted, and pretty much unmarketable stuff, not only in the house, but also in the barn, tractor shed, chicken house, and dairy shed. We are talking entire closets stuffed with broken venetian blinds and window shades, spoiled canned goods from the 1970's, you name it! Of course, being a packrat is hereditary, and I had my share of crap to part with as well.
I had already filled a 20 yard dumpster's worth of stuff the year before from the outbuildings, and ran 7 additional truckloads to the dump, but there was still a huge amount to get rid of. Luckily my builder rented a 30 yard dumpster, which was twice as big as he needed, the new house was nearby, and he agreed to let me use it. In goes another 5 loads of stuff, but the dumpster was full but my basement wasn't. Already exhausted from packing up and schlepping all that stuff already, I didn't look forward to hauling stuff one truckload at a time over to the landfill, a 2 hour round trip by the time you wait in line and unload.
I explained the dillema to my new neighbor, who was also my temporary landlord, and he volunteered a very effective solution. He is a used heavy equipment dealer, and on the neighboring farm he has a number of old tractors, backhoes, and bulldozers which he buys, fixes up, and sells. A few minutes after he goes home, a huge Caterpillar front end loader, the type that can fill a tandem-axle dump truck in 2 scoops rumbles up the drive. He maneuvered the giant machine into position, and with the pull of a couple of levers, he increased the dumpster's capacity by at least a third.
BTW, he also uses it to set wooden fence posts. He just smooshes them into place.
Trashdot: News for Redneck Nerds.
Not quite taking the kit home, but rather bringing your own kit in to use the work kit 'at home'.
I've driven those, and for those of you who haven't, let me tell you they're MASSIVE vehicles. They can pretty much go where where you please, at least as long as the place is wide enough.
... how the devil do you get one of those stuck (besides purposefully sliding it between a couple of trees)? And how much effort does it take to get it unstuck?
So
"Good news, everyone!"
At an HP manufacturing site at which I worked many years ago, we had several large environmental test chambers. These were used for subjecting various equipment to extremes of temperature and humidity, and would let you dial in the desired temperature to the nearest 0.1 degrees C. Naturally, on Friday afternoons we'd load 'em up with tinnies...
On one project I worked, the AF test pilots were required to fly a certain number of hours a month to maintain proficiency. They'd check out a T-38 from Edwards AFB in California to fly to a program review in Texas - and return the same day.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
We snuck into the universities nice new Dolby Cinemar (with full sized screen, ect) and hooked the very expensive projector to an N64 and played golden Eye on a ma-hu-sive screen.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
I used a 400 watt college radio station to broadcast the audio from that damn "badger badger badger" flash animation for about 45 minutes. We then proceded to hook the internet stream of the station back into the mixer while playing some Usher. By messing with some stuff you could sync the echo/feedback to the beat. Eventually when we got bored, we cranked it all the way up and made all the radios tuned in feedback for about 10 minutes. Best part was a lot of stores in town would have the station set to play as their instore "music".
A coworker "borrowed" six brand new RS/6000 F80's loaded with CPUs (before they were put into active duty) to bump up his SETI@Home distributed computing statistics. In one day he'd bumped out everybody but some Linux supercomputer in Germany. I wish I would have thought of it.