Winding Down... or Winding Up?

It's been about a week since I updated my posts here. The reason for this is, honestly, blogging just about every day for two months got very tedious. It was too much and I quickly found I had run out of things to talk about. But with my apologies in mind, stay tuned for my final few posts, they'll be worth the wait...

I should put that in my final paper on the blogging experience...

Moving on, today marks one week until my last day at SLAC. And am I winding down with less stories coming across my desk? NO! Ha, that's laughable. As you can imagine, they're going to get their money's worth from me before I leave! And honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way. I would absolutely hate just sitting at my desk for a week mindlessly waiting for my departure day.

So that gives me plenty to talk about. Hooray!

The McCallum-Turner articles have actually come along nicely. I have only a couple more to write for full-length website articles. Although, there are still plenty in the hands of my editors that I have to then get final approvals for, which means relying on others to read through them and send them back. This can be a hassle. But oh well.

Lots of profiles have been assigned to me as well. As you can probably guess, this makes me happy, because I enjoy them and I'm good at them. My editor apparently agrees since she gave me several to do before I leave... (that and she told me that I was)

I completed one recently on SLAC's Housing Office which was fun. The women in the office are extremely nice and very helpful, not to mention excellent at their jobs. I also recently did a story about the Pief Mobile. This is a cart that the first director of SLAC--a world famous physicist--drives around the site in. His assistant recently gave it a few modifications such as lightening bolt decals and special licences plates that read, "e-XLR8R 2." Cute, huh?

I've also got several science stories in the work. One I'm particuarly fond of. It's about trigger software at the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Basically this software has to decide whether a particle collision is interesting enough to record or not in 40 milliseconds. This is a tall task when dealing with complicated physical processes, some of which are still theoretical... Story to come soon...

So stay tuned. The next couple of weeks on SLAC Today will be the week of Ken!