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When speaking of secret places around Purdue, the conversation will invariably turn to the particle accelerator underneath the engineering mall. No one seems to know how to get there, and even fewer have ever seen it. I was one such person up until Tuesday evening when I went with my dorm floor's faculty fellow and a three other students to get a tour of the fabled facility.

It turns out that the rumors are mostly true; the acclerator is housed in a several thousand square foot "building" buried below MSEE and the eastern end of the engineering mall. The main room is about the size of a small gym with the trailer-sized, orange acclerator at the far end. Inside the orange tank, a gigantic Van de Graaff generator creates a stream of particles energized to several tens of thousands of volts. From there, the particles travel down two pipes at opposite ends of the tanks to where the experiments take place.

We were lucky to visit that day. The acclerator was getting repaired, which gave us the opportunity to actually go inside and see the internal machinery. Instead of using a fabric belt to carry the charge like smaller Van de Graaff generators, the accelerator uses a pair of metal chains, each strung along opposite halves of the tank.

After Professor Elmore, my faculty fellow and the directory of the facility, explained how a lot of the internal machinery worked, we all exited the tank and followed the rear pipe into a second room. There, it appeared the particle beam split between three branches of pipes each terminating at some scary-looking electronics. In addition to the accelerator pipes, the room contained all sorts of spare parts, experimental equipment, tools, instruments, and other physics flotsam. It looked like a mad scientist's garage. We made our way through the room and finished the tour with a demonstration of a small Van de Graaff generator and a gigantic cement door so big that it could flatten pennies as it rolled shut.

I'd like to thank Professor Elmore for giving me and the rest of the floor the opportunity to see something most students have only heard of. Should I get the chance to go back while the accelerator is running, I will definitely take it. That, or I hear there's a nuclear reactor underneath the EE building...

All Pictures

I feel I should mention several small items of non-news that have cropped up over the past day or two.

• I finally took the time to fix the archives so that they now display the months in the correct order.
• I posted some pictures to accompany an upcoming post about my trip to the fabled Purdue particle accelerator. I should have the whole story posted within a day or two.
• Upon the death of my old Super Nintendo, I turned to Ebay for solace and won an auction for a new (to me), undamaged console. More news on that as events warrant.
• Finally, I'd like to share a conversation I had with my floor faculty fellow's fourth-grade daughter after last night's floor dinner:

  Her: I just got a new shirt. Do you like it?

  Me: Oooo. Very nice. Is that Versace?

  Her: No! It's cotton!

I went home last weekend for a checkup. The checkup went normally, I got two wonderful home-cooked meals, did my best to relax for a day and a half, and came back yesterday with my old Super Nintendo that's been sitting up in the spare bedroom for about six years. The suitemates gave me the idea to bring it up. They play Jason's original Nintendo all the time, and when I mentioned I had a Super Nintendo, their eyes just lit up. I had forgotten how many incredibly cool games I had:

• Super Mario All Stars: All three original Nintendo Mario games plus the unreleased Japanese version of Super Mario 2, all updated for the SNES with better graphics
• Super Mario World & Super Mario Kart: The quintessential Super Nintendo games
• Super Metroid: A fun alien shootemup
• Secret of Mana & The Legend of Zelda: Two classic RPGs
• Street Fighter II: I was amazing at this game
• Starfox: I beat all three (four?) paths
• Donkey Kong Country I & II: I Beat both of these, too
• Plus a dozen others...

I stopped playing not because I got tired of the games, but because my dog decided to claim the Nintendo for himself. The console hasn't worked since. Thinking I could repair it after all these years, I brought it back to the dorm, bought some rubbing alcohol, and planned to clean it out as best I could. There was one problem: Nintendo used crazy star-shaped screws to keep people like me from messing with the innards of the machine. So I did the obvious thing: I sawed the corners off of the casing and cut through the plastic screw shafts that held the two halves together. (You can see part of one of the shafts in the second picture.) I then got my first look at the befouled inner workings. Rather disgusting.

I continued disassembling, first removing the the eject lever and then the metal cover that had rusted to the side of the cartridge port. A few more screws, and I was able to extricate the main circuit board and begin cleaning. Periodically, at the request of the suitemates who were watching like a surgury audience, I would plug the board in and see if it worked. At one point we even heard some theme music. I was amazed.

I continued cleaning, alternating between q-tips dipped in rubbing alcohol and a wire brush. I removed most of the corrosion, but never managed to get anything more than random colors to show up on the TV. Eventually, the red power light quit working. I think something finally short circuited and burned out.

Now, Michael and I have a nifty piece of modern art hanging on our wall. Even though I wasn't able to get it working, I had a grand time tearing it to bits.

All pictures

I live in a rather nice dorm building. It's new, the rooms are large and bright, and each four-person suite has a private bathroom. Every week, a service worker comes to clean the tub and toilet. Our service worker, it turns out, is quite the joker.

Last week was only three days long, but it contained the work of at least two normal weeks. Last weekend's trip prevented me from working on the latest CS project, so I was forced to devote Tuesday and Wendesday to almost solid programming. The class had to implement a 2D convex hull algorithm and display it using OpenGL. Like most of the class, I had never used any kind of graphics with C++, so it was an interesting two-day crash course.

On the other side of the programming spectrum, I spent this weekend coding a PHP/MySQL application for one of my EPICS groups. Our client, the county historical society, wanted a "This Day in History" database, so I put together a pretty nifty application that extracted the data from six gigantic text files (which I had to first convert from Word documents), stored the 3,200+ events to a database, and then allowed the user to search through them using almost any kind of plain text date, i.e. "October 19, 1900", "19 October 1900", "October 1900", "1900", "October 19", "10/19/1900", "10/1900", etc. That was another solid two days of programming, but I found it surprisingly enjoyable. The application will go live by the end of the semester, so I'll be sure to post a link to the finished product.

The student body has two days off for fall break today and tomorrow, and with the trees at their peak of their color, there could not have been a more beautiful time to take a road trip— especially an all expenses paid road trip to the corporate headquarters of a very large and well known insurance company with which there is the strong possibility of a summer internship.

Thanks to last month's Computer Roundtable and subsequent on-campus interview a few days later, the company invited me to visit its corporate headquarters for a second interview and a tour of the facility. Yesterday night I arrived at my (free) hotel room in time for a delicious (free) Italian dinner with four company employees and five other internship candidates. Today I had a full day consisting of the second interview, a tour of the sprawling complex, a free lunch, an informational seminar or two, and finally a tour of the medium-sized city surrounding the company. After two summers of work in a 25 person IT/software company, I found the tour of the several thousand person complex especially impressive. Cubicles as far as the eye could see.

I don't plan on finalizing anything until after Christmas break, so I don't want to say too much beyond the facts just yet. However, I can say that the visit showed me that the company has an impressive internship program that I would be more than happy to be a part of.

3... 2... 1... Fall!

Last Thursday, I dropped off my car at Mc Cord By Pass Goodyear (1500 Sagamore Parkway, Lafayette, Indiana) expecting them to replace three tires and fix a broken axle. Upon talking to the guy at the front desk, I found they had ordered only two new tires. Strike one.

On Friday, I returned to pick up the newly-shod car during the two hours between my math and French classes. I took a cursory glance at the new tires and entered the store to pay. The bill was about $100 more than I had expected from the quotes given me a day earlier. Strike two.

As I was driving down the road about a quarter mile from the repair shop, I heard a metallic thump followed by what sounded like a flat tire. I pulled off into the turn lane, put on the emergency blinkers, and got out to check on the car. Everything appeared to be in order; no flat tires and the new axle appeared intact. Slightly shaken, I got back in the car and decided to return to the repair shop. I crept forward about five feet before the front left corner of the car fell to the pavement with a horrendous scraping crash.

Oh crap. The tire had fallen off. Definitely, strike three.

So I called the shop:

"Mc Cord By Pass Goodyear. This is [some guy] speaking."

"Hello. This is Brett Daniel. I just came in for the red Celica. I'm about a quarter mile down the road and the tire just fell off."

"Oh dear. We'll send someone right out."

"You do that."

Three people stopped in the half hour it took the tow truck to arrive. Luckily, the second had a camera, and he snapped some pictures that he later emailed to me. The third was a police man who also called Goodyear to lend his authority to the incident. Finally, the wrecker arrived, and after some initial troubles getting the sling under the significantly lowered front bumper, we drove the quarter mile back to the repair shop.

There, the workmen managed to extricate the wedged the tire and inspect the wheel assembly. Amazingly, the only problems they found were some scratches on the lower ball joint (the heavy metal linkage that had ground against the pavement) and a bent left fender and wheel well. I attribute the small amount of damage to the fact that I was going so slow. Any faster, and I could have lost the whole front of the car, or worse, gotten in an accident. I'm thankful neither happened.

The workmen deemed the wheel assembly roadworthy, but they still needed to test the wheel. In order to do that, they needed some more lug nuts (a tire store with no lug nuts?), so they sent one of the workers to a neighboring store to get some. 45 minutes later, he returned— without the lug nuts— and said he couldn't find the right road. After a quick discussion with the manager, he and another worker left to look for lug nuts once again. They returned 10 minutes later, attached the wheel, tested the fit, and told me the car was ready to go. In all, I spent probably two hours in the Goodyear waiting room, causing me to miss my French class in which I had a paper due. Strike four

I spoke with the manager before leaving, and he assured me that I would hear from their insurance provider regarding the body repairs. Never once did anyone at the shop say they were sorry for what happened. Strike five.

I met a guy today who had five exams this week. Poor fellow. I, thankfully, had only two: physics yesterday and math today. Physics went well. The class hasn't yet progressed beyond what I learned in my high school physics courses, so the test was between a breeze and a strong gust. As usual, it was obsessed with blocks sliding around and people throwing things. Math, meanwhile, was more of a howling wind. I feel I did okay, but I should have known some stuff better than I did.

After the math test, I finally took the time to take my car in to get the tire repaired.

"I've got some bad news," the serviceman said, "the flat can't be fixed."

I must have really hit the curb hard. Luckily the rim was ok.

"And your front two tires are looking awfully worn. You'll need to replace those, too."

This came as no surprise. The front pair had been on quite a bit longer than the rear.

"Oh and your front left half shaft is broken."

"D'oh!"

He pulled out a small flashlight and showed me the problem. Even to my untrained eye, it was obvious that something was indeed wrong. The rubber sheath surrounding the joint between the wheel and the front axle had split open, spraying grease all over the underside of the wheel assembly. The parts shipment arrives on Friday, so with a sigh, I agreed to return then for all three repairs.