Work work work....or in my case, study study study. It's pretty much agreed that I'll have to spend the first fortnight of my internship just learning the ropes...getting the hang of Unix, learning up on stuff about interstellar dust, figuring out how to use a program used to model interstellar dust (which my mentor co-wrote). As I said, I seem to be a bit out of place in our office, as I'm the only one not hammering away at the keyboard, with lots of intimidating numbers and jumbles of alphabets on-screen.

There are usually 5 of us in the office...Rafael and Esteban from Colombia, Scott, and American, and Tom, the French guy. We were sitting around the office doing our own thing yesterday when Tom suddenly started going 'Grrr...' and clenching his hands. As we looked over at him, he exclaimed 'My machine's hung on me...', he moved his mouse around and indeed the cursor on the screen didn't move at all. As I mentioned before, all the computers in the Institute are Sun workstations running Unix. These machines are almost impossible to crash or hang unlike Windows. Now, Tom is a pretty short guy (about my height), and he is the spitting image of Niles from 'Frasier', both in appearance and mannerisms, i.e. he's a bit stiff and high-strung. So, we were all laughing at this, both at his feat and at his reaction.

A few hours later, Tom went 'Grrr...' again, and to our joy and amusement, he managed to hang his computer again! TWICE IN A DAY! Now, we've a little message written on our whiteboard: 'No. of times Tom has crashed his computer: 2'...