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I set the computer to wake me up at 8:30, and I figured that I would be so excited I would wake up before then, so I was surprised when I awoke to a different song than I had planned. I had slept through my alarm and it was now about ten. That meant the others had left and I need to find my own way to work. I knew they took the Metra, so I decided to do the same even thogh from the map it looked like the Metra was going to go almost due north and then almost due south after an exchange, which was only going to save me about half my walking distance. The stop closest to the science and enginerring campus of UChile is Parque O’Higgins, which is really large, but unfriendly looking becuase there are lots of heavy iron fences around it. I decided to walk around it, rather than risk getting lost in the maze of fence.

The campus is very nice looking, though without a lot of space, because of the large number of buildings. They are a mixture of a kind of neo-gothic/spanish, and “modern university” styles. (You know the style I am referring to.) It was hard to find the physics building, but there are lots of stationed guards around who eventually pointed me in the right direction. The theoretical division is on the third floor of a very large and drafty building that’s reminiscent of many of the older buildings at the University of Chicago, but a little more dilapidated. Someone has to buzz you in to the area with the professors, and I found “F. Barra” easily enough. He buzzed me in but I walked past the hallway just on the right where his office is and began to feel lost. I did discover a rooom with some yellow and orange bohemian furnituture. I figured this was where the grad students took their dates to make out with them while simulations were running or devices were warming up. I had just gotten to the end of a hallway and another locked door when someone shouted across the central ourtyard to me. It was Felipe. He showed me his office and explained the simulation that he was working on, and also that he was having some difficultes and that he would like to try a different approach that was more thermodynamic and less mechanical. We spent about an hour talking about the prospects of this approach before Felipe said, “This would be a lot easier if I could figure out how to view these scanned textbooks that I downloaded from a site in Russia.’ He proceeded to show me a huge list of files on his computer in some format that I had never seen before. We got a browser program working so we could open them and sure enough, they were apparently just textbooks that some industrious Russian(s) had scanned into a computer.

After we came back from lunch, Felipe asked me if I knew how to install a second internal hard drive in a computer. I have had bad experience helping someone doing this, but I said yes. The problem turned out to be with the jumpers as usual and soon Felipe had doubled his storage space. I noticed that he was only using about 35GB on his original 80GB hard drive, so I asked him why he needed a whole new one. He told me that he wanted to install Tiger (the newest version of Mac OS X) on the other hard drive so that he could do a clean install without losing his files. Sure enough, he pulled out a bootleg Tiger DVD and popped it in. By this time, it was time to go home. When I got arrived en casa, Nathan told me that his work computer had about $2,500 in pirated statistics software. In my first day at work, I helped a professional physicist rip off a few hundreds of dollars of stuff. All in the name of science.