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Search - "laboratory"
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Our current designer is convinced that 00FF44 bright green fits well with the rest of our soft purple/blue color scheme.
I am not a designer, but have worked in a color laboratory, so I've tried time and time again to explain CIE LAB color space, and how at least HCL is a good way to pick & group colors into palettes by using 2-3 luminances for equidistant hues while keeping chroma constant.
I've tried to tell him that the bright green almost physically makes my eyes bleed, because humans are quite sensitive to greens.
He just keeps using the phrase "but it makes the buttons pop nicely".
I just want to pop his skull open with my keyboard. 😫11 -
My first dev job was a paid internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But I wasn't in the computing division with the supercomputer and the 30-foot 18-screen wall display. In a way, I was doing something more exciting. I was in the Hollifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility.
That meant that I was working next to a radioactive ray gun that they fired at different targets to try and make new kinds of particles. To refine the beam components, there was a tower with the world's highest voltage Van de Graf generator at 25,000 kilovolts. I got training on how to put on a radiation suit, and was told that if I got locked in the wrong room and red lights began to flash, I had about five seconds to run to the far wall and push the E-stop, before I got irradiated and died slowly over the next five weeks.
But, I was reassured, that never happened. Radiation leaks are rare too (that's why we wore dosimeters). More likely, there would be a leak in the generator tower. To explain why that's bad, that tower wasn't filled with normal air. 25,000 kilovolts would punch through that like nothing, arc against the walls, and we'd lose the electric charge. No, instead, the tower was filled to a few atmospheres of pressure with sulfur hexafluoride gas. You know how helium makes your voice go up? This stuff makes your voice go down. It's heavier than air, and it kills you by displacing and starving your lungs of oxygen.
So, while I was happily coding away on PHP, CSS and the Bash shell, making a log book for all the ion gun settings and targets the scientists used in their experiments, I was keeping an ear out for the oxygen alarm. I had a blast!2 -
My company is providing cloud infrastructure to our customers. For research purposes we are running a little openstack cloud in our laboratory datacenter were we can test stuff before implementing it in the productive environment.
Last week the manager asked me to shut down the cluster over night and only power on the servers when we need it. (about twice a week)
The reason: it produces too much heat.
My answer was: No.
First off thats not how cloud infrastructure works, and how about a proper climate control?
Sometimes i ask myself in which parallel universum our managers live 😑3 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part I)
I've had several great mentors during my career. This is the story of the three most important.
1.- Professor E.
When I was on my first year (University - Computer Science), all my professors were 'normal' except for this one.
E. was the Programming I - Laboratory professor. And the most important thing he teached us was to think. To be independent, and to look for answers beyond simple solutions.
He was always pushing us beyond what was requested and to try new things, to try to improve our own solutions and to look at them as always improvable.
In a regular class, this would happen:
Student: Hey E. How can I do this X requirement?
E.: Use function xyz with A and B parameters.
S: Ok thanks...
...10 minutes later...
S: Hey E. that function doesn't work very good for my case.
E.: You have a book, you have internet connection. Don't waste 10 minutes trying to abide what I told you. Investigate, find a way or even a better way; use your resources.
Other example, in the first year all projects were requested to be delivered with text based interface (console projects).
What about E.?
"Well, you CAN deliver your project with a text based interface BUT you definitely SHOULD try to make a GUI, something simple but effective. Just so you learn more in the process"
Good E. He gave me strong foundations for this industry.2 -
3 in 1
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If your project needs more than three sentences to describe and the budget is not in the high four digits or preferably five, then you're clearly not fucking paying enough
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Clients that just write a "?" after you wrote a very detailed tutorial, which even a fucking skunk could do, if given a fucking mouse and keyboard, are just the fucking laboratory perfection made retards
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I just LOVE IT when my internet drops out for under a minute, so windows doesn't notify you yet and your sftp client trashes both local and remote files -
A brilliant letter Richard Feynman wrote to Stephen Wolfram:
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CHARLES C. LAURITSEN LABORATORY OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS
October 14, 1985
Dr. Stephen Wolfram
School of Natural Sciences
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ 08540
Dear Wolfram:
1. It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science
inhibits "complexity research" - I do not believe such an institution is
necessary.
2. You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing
that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in
- but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering
it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't
enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.
You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you
will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but
will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them
in an effective way.
Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people
as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my
friend.
Sincerely,
(Signed, 'Richard P. Feynman')1 -
"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." - Apple Commercial2
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tl:dr
i fucking hate that professor for whom i have to work on laboratory project right now.
reason#1
the project is using a stack full with java. JavaScript. react and some weird facebook api of which i have no clue about. not to mention the server side of this application which uses tomcat (ok its java after all) and sql.
well that wouldn't be not so bad if...
reason#2
we wouldn't have to fucking debug his mistakes he put into the fucking prepared code AND his fucking useless instructions how to set up the project for eclipse the first time. not to mention his fucking requirements which make no sense
oh yeah im a student. i can always go and ask him for help if i need any...
reason#3
i have another 70% mandatory course at the same time and that fucker refuses to upload hos sheets in moodle and answer even one fucking question via mail. not to mention no support if I am there unless i have eclipse setup. even through the projects should be build using gradle...
reason#4
oh. and have i mentioned that this course is only about design patterns? uts not like we could see several of them in a java only application. no we literally have to learn java itself. gradle. nodejs JavaScript Extended for react which i have no clue about at the moment... and yes i especially mentioned gradle and nodejs beccause we have to set shit up and not only use a script.
reason#5
and all that wont even give us a grade. no ita simply a pass or fail part of the module which the course is part of.
have i also mentioned that the whole shit should be done in 20 hours according to the schedule8 -
Sometimes I really feel humiliated in my lab.
We have several presentation/discussion groups in my lab that meet once a week or so where members present their progress reports. Generally people in my lab are not so enthusiastic about them. Which is okay, I also don't like doing presentations, but you know, you have to improve somehow and get feedback somehow.
So I've been in a really passive group for a while and I decide to join this other group since they seem to have good discussions, but nope fuck me.
The first time I present, the professor doesn't show up since he has some meeting, so obviously nobody cares to show up. And I'm there presenting for a guy who is half comatose. Alright, I guess that's the price for joining a new team, it's gonna get better next time.
Second time. Spent all night to prepare my presentation and been training my model for two weeks. I am actually really happy with the results of my networks. But the enjoyment of showing some good results, I shall not have.
Meeting leader doesn't show up. Two guys who should present don't show up. Professor doesn't show up. A different professor substitutes him and has no idea what I am talking about and asks stupid questions that don't really have an answer. Fuck me, I'm so angry, this shit is a waste of time. If you don't show up, care to fucking send an email or a message on slack, but guess you're too fucking retarded to even do that.
I'm so done with this. I've gotten better feedback from reddit, than what I've cumulatively gotten from my laboratory. I'm a moment away from walking up to the meeting leader and telling him that the meetings are stupid and a waste of time. Don't get me wrong, my professor is really nice and knowledgeable, but he fails to see that some people in the laboratory are shit.
What do I do? How do I deal with these people? Right now they're planning a trip! Why are you planning a trip? WHAT ARE YOU REWARDING YOURSELVES FOR? YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING IN WEEKS? omfg3 -
I happened to come help with a project that deadline was in two weeks. It was hardware project for customers with UI.
They said to me - help us 2 weeks and it’s done. It only needs polishing. There was nothing working and we finished it after half a year.
Hardware was crap and drivers wasn’t working. Managers called me stupid when I tried to explain that this is hardware team fault. They used to say that it was tested in laboratory and there is no defect. Laboratory my ass fucking assholes never released anything from scratch.
I got depressed after this project for a year. It was fucking nightmare.
Everything, literally everything was rewritten 3 times cause of stupid decisions that I questioned all the time. At the end of project most of those assholes stopped commenting my decisions. I believe we released impossible product that was crap but based on usage rates I got later when I left it returned expenses.
I lost like 2 years of my life and about 20kg during those 6 months. Never again. -
It's not necessarily code related, but ever since I was a kid in grade school, I've wanted a lab where I could solder and build and mix chemicals and build rockets and brew beer and blow stuff up and do all kinds of science that would ruin my carpet and/or otherwise go horribly wrong if done in my living area. One day soon (I hope), I'll have enough space to have a proper lab, just not today.
I daydream about that shit.1 -
My coworkers and I work in close quarters in a laboratory all day. We all get along well, and since we don’t have “offices” and often work together on things, we are a pretty close team.
We recently got a new member, Jill, who is 22, and this is her first job out of college. She lives at home with her parents, who are incredibly well-off, and has lived at home all through college. The rest of us are late 20’s to late 30’s. Jill is very nice but also very sensitive and somewhat immature, and I’m not sure if she’s just not 100% sure how to deal with people in professional settings yet or what’s going on, but almost everything that comes out of her mouth has to do with money, mainly how much money her family has. If it might offer some context, Jill and her family are not from the U.S., but have been here since Jill was a teenager.
I usually just kind of inwardly roll my eyes and change the subject, but with the holidays it’s gotten considerably worse and Jill is driving my team and me crazy. Some examples of things she has said just in the past week are: “My dad’s buying my mom a new car for Christmas!” “I’m going to buy my mom a Gucci Keychain for Christmas. It’s $225 dollars!” “I’m so excited, my mom is buying my puppy a Tiffany collar for Christmas!”
The thing that sent me over the edge was when a male coworker asked for ladies’ opinions on a very nice coat he was considering buying for his girlfriend. My opinion was something along the lines of “I like it, but I would go with the gray because white coats get dirty very easily, in my experience,” whereas Jill’s opinion was “It’s not even a name brand, you should go with either a North Face or a Michael Kors.”
I am honestly not sure if Jill knows there are people in the world who are not as well-off as her family is, and that people who aren’t as “fortunate” don’t want to hear these kinds of things every day. We are not paupers, but we are definitely not buying our dogs Tiffany collars. Is there a way that I can tell her to please stop talking about how rich her family is, without sounding jealous or mean, or causing a lot of friction on my team? Like I said, she’s a nice person, but money is a touchy subject in any capacity and I think this might hinder her professionally in the future, not to mention that we’re all sick of hearing about it!3 -
Professor: surprise, now you are the member of the laboratory.
Me: what!?
That's what I start coding, and love it! -
Warning - Not IT related.
Long ago, I had a chemist professor who told us a story. She worked in a laboratory where they have studied cristal formations, so basically made a liquid highly capable to form cristals, and they watched them forming, doing tests and so on. In the meantime new building of the campus opened and they had to move the lab to the new location, which was a fourth floor of newly made building. Few of them started to work there even before they moved the old materials and equipment and they started few cristalisation studies, the interesting part is that the cristals didn't formed. She said that at the end they had many cups with prepared liquid and apsolutely no cristals for weeks, but one day the lead researcher arrived with the old, already formed cristals, from the old lab, and toon those inside of the room with prepared cups all the cristals started to form at the same time. After telling us a story she asked us not to tell this to anyone because the science currently doesn't accept this phenomenon and we will be demonised and looked fools it the scientific community.
This story made a hole in my brain...
It was like 10 years ago, and as a problem solver I still have sometimes some weird ideas about it, and strange explanations comming from nothing, and without any deep understanding of quantum physics or even cristalisation. :D1 -
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