glee!

Every morning when I get to work, I open up a new Mozilla browser. In it I always load my flist, the main page of Wikipedia, My LJ, Gmail, and Hotmail. Generally, all but Gmail get closed within a few minutes as I catch up on comments, check for birthdays, read the last couple of entries, and see what the featured article on Wiki is.

Today's featured article made me grin...and then start reading it to make sure that it's accurate. The topic is Sequence Alignment, also known as That Thing I Was Doing For My Doctorate (or, at least, the thing I was basing my thesis on, but that had a lot more work to prove that it was right). It's a pretty good article, and does a decent job of explaining one of the primary techniques in biochemistry and genetics.

And once again I am reminded of how much I miss learning and talking science, but not so much the insane politics and hours of mind-numbing lab work.

you've just gotta laugh

Here at the Evil Empire, we drink a lot of coffee. A LOT of coffee. Both full strength and decaf, black or with the flavored creamers provided, hot, cold, anywhere in between. Developers turn coffee into code, QAers use coffee to catalyze their test plans, and tech services use it to stay awake during the Conference Calls of Doom.

The application I work on got to move into the Brand Spanking New building last week. We were distressed to find out that both the kitchens on our floor had coffee dispensers, but only one had the machine to brew said delicousness, necessitating several trips back and forth. This afternoon, I almost hugged the maintenance guy who installed a coffee maker in the kitchen nearer me.

One of the other serious addicts on the floor instantly started making a fresh pot. He sent out an email shortly after to warn that hot water was shooting out of the side of it and that he's sorry for exploding a coffee maker again (this happened a couple months ago in our old building, too, though we'd been abusing the pot for 6 months before it melted down). I walked down to put my lunch back in the fridge and saw the ginormus arcs of coffee (covered in paper towels) all across the kitchen. I stepped carefully so as to not break my ankle and looked at the pot: it was brewing.

"Hm." Thought I. "This is interesting." I looked closer at the pot and saw that the level reader at the front looked higher than usual. "Uh-oh."

I walked down the hall to the QAer's office. "So, you weren't kidding when you said it exploded...did you know that it's brewing right now, the pot looks pretty full, and it's showing no signs of stopping?"

"It's brewing? But it's unplugged..."

o_O "Right."

He then looked out his office door and pointed to a line in the carpeting. "Unless the flood of coffee reaches that line, I'm not going to worry about it. There's still some coffee in my cup, so I'm not going to worry until that's gone. But, we have a pot down here now, so that's a good thing...just not when it explodes."

Who knew that exploding coffeepots would be one of the hazards/perks of this job? You've just gotta laugh at these things. To do otherwise would be to not show company loyalty, which could well bring about the end of the world. But you didn't hear that from me.