Friday on shift

I came in for shift. For the first time I traversed the route I had in mind: didn't have to make last minute corrections when I realized I was lost. On the other hand, I stalled 3 times--in daylight with no steep hills. Unlike yesterday, when I was in the middle of Cessy trying to turn left without crunching the car behind me while pointed uphill onto a half-blind intersection. I stalled there 7 times, and rolled backwards (and got honked at) 4 times. I suspect riding with me would turn your hair grey. I have come to detest roundabouts: I feel like the can in a paint shaker after driving through St. Genis.

Shift started and so did the alignment meeting and so did a bunch of configuration questions and the DCS shifter asking "Why is the DCS monitoring of your detector halted?" and the main shift leader asking when we'd be done flashing our firmware. (It turns out that the Xmas monitoring system that is under CSC control can and does stop the DCS monitoring of chamber voltages. And restart it again without burdening the DCS shifter with details. Actually, I suspect that every subsystem has some skunkworks method of bypassing DCS. Probably makes life very interesting for him, since he's nominally responsible for monitoring the safety of the whole system.)

After the chaos and flurry, it is dead. ECAL isn't working, and they've tried several times to start new runs--failing each time. The warnings are not beeps and wheeps as at Fermilab, but clips of pop songs: "I think its stupid and sad that everything turned out so bad" or "Don't stop me now, I'm having such a good time." and "Its a kind of magic" I gather the last one is for starting the run, and at least one of the first two is for a run ending.

Actually, CDF's beeps and wails are for subsystem warnings. The Run Control's messages are computer-generated and nearly unintelligible readings of text error messages. You can imagine how acronyms come across.