Fon Kaos

That was the password to get into the speakeasy at the prohibition party last weekend. I'm not quite sure what it means (what the hell is "fon"), but that's not really important. What's important is that last weekend was awesome! For a few hours on Saturday it looked like the weekend was going to be complete and utter suckitude, but that changed over the course of half an hour in the early afternoon. I was able to stop moping and get back to celebrating my acceptance into the Ph.D. Nuclear Engineering program at UT.

Oh yeah... I got into grad school! That's such a HUGE confidence boost! I've felt since graduating that I may not have gotten a lot out of my undergraduate education, but both working in the lab and getting accepted to a Ph.D. program has made me at least consider that maybe I know a thing or two about stuff. This is one of the few issues that I'm a bit shaky on when it comes to self-confidence. I'm getting much better about it, though :D

I was really happy with how the prohibition party turned out. The party we used to put on, Heaven and Hell, was essentially focused on making oneself miserable. The External Affairs committee decided to switch things up a bit and they did an excellent job! There was an initial shock when it was announced that the Prohibition party would replace it, but this situation just goes to show that trying new things is awesome! I was also super excited that some of my burner friends came. They're a couple of years older than most of the people there, so I was worried that they wouldn't fit in but that wasn't the case at all. It's always nice to have two separate groups of friends hit it off so well. Those friends have showed myself and other Psi U's good times before and it's nice to know that we can do the same in return.

JJ and I will hopefully start doing further leak testing today. We've got a set of two filters that purify the helium going into our recirculation cart. I was surprised to see that when the Radiation Control Technician (RCT) checked the filters, they were clean of radiation. These filters would be the most contaminated components in our system, however since it's been many years since they were last used whatever radioactivity was there must have decayed.

We've also got to start designing some electricity safety interlocks. Almost the entire helium jet system will be held at around 30,000 volts. Because of this, we've got to have a metal cage around our entire system so that people aren't running around and getting their asses melted by arcing electricity. There will be three doors to get into this area and we need to design an interlock system such that if someone opens one of these doors when the system is turned on, they system will shut down. I would also like to place a bucket of feces above the doors because if someone were to ignore the sign saying something like "IF YOU ENTER DURING OPERATION, YOU WILL EXPLODE" as well as the giant red light, I want them to suffer a bit for shutting our experiment down. I don't think the bucket will end up happening but one can dream, right?