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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 recently used liquid helium to freeze the memories of thousands of Slashdotters.
The answers are:
-yes
-maybe
-only if hamsters are involved
-no
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
Yea, last week.
hogged 1/2 a T3 for 12 hours or so.
"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."
Careful! There was a story here a few years back about a guy who installed SETI on a network. He was then billed for all the run-time SETI used. The owners of the network used math a lot like yours to arrive at an outrageous number.
My advice? Watch your ass. I was nearly fired from a job once simply because I sent a text message over the network.
"Derp de derp."
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.
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...
I can see his response clearly.
"I once used the American people to push my and my friends' own financial objectives! LAWL!"
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?
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.
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 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.
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
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!
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
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, 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...
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.
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
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.
so he's from a porn site?
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
We have that tunnel under downtown, which has TV cameras mounted on the side.
One night, each TV monitor went out, one by one.
Turns out that there was this guy with the shovel on a flatbed. Every week, that shovel was brought somewhere else through the same tunnel. But that week, another driver was doing it.
He had loaded the shovel "backwards"...
Something was protuding that knocked-off the TV cameras off the wall.
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
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
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