Getting settled at work

I am getting settled at work, with my Swedish laptop and a fairly brutal HP workstation with dual NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 cards (geek mode on). I also ended up with dual screens, which is kind of nice and very easy to get used to. ;)

There are a lot of nice people here and I am starting to get to know more and more of them - I am sitting in the middle of the Space Sciences volunteer area so there are many people passing by doing different tasks and presentations for the Space Odyssey exhibits (that is the name of the space exhibit area).

Working in a museum really is a very nice environment - one minute you are working at your desk, tapping away at the keyboard, and the next minute you are out walking by dinosaurs, spacecrafts or Russian gem statues (!). Yesterday I was just about to finish a meeting with Marieke (geologist from Holland) when her boss Bob came around and asked us if we wanted to see a 30-minute movie about Antarctica - "sure" I said, and thought we were heading for a lecture of some kind, as has happened before.

But instead he set forth towards the IMAX and I realize that as a worker at the museum I can achieve free entrance to the IMAX shows if I just show up at the last minutes before the show starts. So I ended up seeing a really inspiring movie about the adventures of Shackleton and his crew of 27 men, surviving 17 months lost in Antarctica, both on land (ice) and sea. A story almost to amazing to be true, but it is supposed to be based on a true story, and after hearing about them ending this massive quest by walking across a totally uncharted island filled with mountains and ice, without any serious climbing equipment, and without having slept for 6 days and had fresh water for 2, you'd be pretty hardcore not to be impressed.