The story continues at DecemberBlog
My friend and colleague DjbClark invited me at his parents' house for thanksgiving. It was a new, pleasing experience for me.
My impression is that it is a family reunion very much like a second Christmas, but without the inconvenience of presents :-)
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DaSnake uploaded some pictures of the places we visited together on Flickr:
I'm back in Boston with DaSnake. He's been my guest for just one day. Then he had to be back in FNAL for the shifts.
I really had urgent business at work, so I left my friend alone sightseeing Boston for the day.
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Flought Went to NewYorkCity with DaSnake. Finally got to visit the AmericanMuseumOfNaturalHistory. Pretty impressive!
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A few days ago, my old friend DaSnake appeared on IRC and told me he's was an intern at FermiLab National Accelerator, near ChicagoCity. I told him I was at OneLaptopPerChild, in CambridgeCity.
So we decided we were "close enough" to visit each other's workplace and do some tourism together. So, on Friday morning, I took a cheap UsAirways plane to ChicagoOHare through Philadelphia.
Refer to the Fermilab map. My friend lives in a coed apartment in the Fermilab village, which is surrounded by several little lakes with gooses, buffalo and various other animals. Indeed, a very pretty natural park.
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On Saturday, I took a bike and rode on the bike path to the main laboratory buildings. I took a guided site tour, starting from the museum. They have lots of real-scale models of the accelerator parts and really working equipment such as scintillators and Geiger's counters.
Then we visited the Wilson Hall, a 16 floors building shaped like Goldrake's and Mazinger's atomic base.
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Q: ma cos'è tutta questa neve:è una cartolina? E tutti questi uccelli?
A: e' una foto presa a caso dagli archivi del FNAL :-)
Then... WAH! They guided us inside the Linac! The Linac is the LINear ACcelerator facility, the first stage of acceleration that produces protons for the MainInjector. It was like entering an old science fiction movie. You know, like Frankenstein or Buck Rogers: with giant Tesla generators, panels with flashing lights and indicators...Buck Rogers The continuous buzz reminded us that the proton beam was shooting through this long corridor next to me.
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Finally, we visited the MainControlRoom, from which they run the whole thing. The room looks like the bridge of an old starship, surrounded by monitors, with a bigger chair in the middle for the captain.
FermiLab is no doubt the most amazing place in the world:
To beat this place, next time I shall visit the NCC-1701A!
Yesterday we went to ChicagoCity's downtown. Wow... I was told the skyline was really magnificent, but the real thing exceeded all my expectations.
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We walked around a little, then went up the John Hancock Center, the third tallest skyscraper, for a breathtaking view of the whole city by night.
