OK, I survived the initial defense unscathed. By both Molvig and Chris' accounts I did very well. There were no major qualms on the part of the MIT folks. So my ordres in hand are to polish up the document, flesh out the data section a little bit, and that's it.

Molvig is out for the next two weeks, so I can't get anything approved before then. After that there are only two weeks until I have to have a finished document turned in. So the likely train of events will be:

* I spend the next 2 weeks finishing the thesis document itself
* Molvig returns and we do some minor revision cycles
* I fly out to Cambridge and do a final defense on or around April 25th.
* I submit the thesis by the April 29th deadline and graduate on June 3rd.
* ???
* PROFIT!!!

The actual scheduling of the next month will be worked out tomorrow morning before Molvig leaves (to go skiing, ugh). I'll update you all on what the actual chain of events will be when I have more concrete information.

-----------

I did make a few minor mistakes in my talk, but the biggest problem during the talk was that somehow one of the MIT guys missed that adaption in energy space was my idea, so when I got to the end of my talk he wasn't aware that I had described anything new. He was asking me, "but what is your contribution?" and I was thinking, "...where have you been for the last hour?" Anyway, minor communication flub. Stemmed from the fact that I described the code's spatial adaptive mesh refinement system early on and he didn't catch that it only worked in physical space and not in energy space.

Just a few minutes to go... [dramatic chords a-plenty]

"shake it. shake it..." Thanks Dan....

OK, it is 11:15pm and I'm leaving work. I just sent off my slides for my initial thesis defense which will take place at 2:00pm MST tomorrow in the form of a phone interview with the MIT contingent of the committtee. Kim, Chris, and I will all sit around a table here in my building and Sydney and Jeff will connect via conference call.

The outcome of tomorrow will be:
* Whether or not I will graduate this term or at the end of the summer.
* The magnitude of the changes that need to be made before they will pass me.
* How stressful the next month will be.
* (hopefully) The date of my final defense.

It is an exceedingly important talk that I will give tomorrow (probably second only to the talk I will give next month at my final defense). The stakes are high, the ramifications huge. And I think I'm ready. I've already sent out the documents, so the only thing I can do between now and tomorrow afternoon is sleep and practice my speech.

John's funeral was last Monday in California where his parents live. This afternoon they held a second service here in town for his local friends. The bulk of the Atalaya Search and Rescue team showed up. Some of the Albuquerque Mountain Rescue Association was there, a couple guys from Cibola Search and Rescue, even two people from Aspen Mountan Rescue. One of the guides from the avalanche course he was participating in when he died was there. The Mountain Rescue Association sent their honor guard, which involved full paramilitary outfits and a bagpiper. Atalaya put together a scrap book of photos from team practices and missions as well as stories people on the team had contributed and presented it to the family. I think his family was overwhelmed by the support.

I was very impressed by the SAR community and I'm honored to be a part of it.

Even though I had my differences with John, I think I gained some respect for him listening to what people had to say at his memorial. He had very strong beliefs and stuck to them without making a big show of it. I respect John for that.

...unlike his pastor, who led the memorial. There were repeated comments along the lines of, "if you don't live your life for Christ then your life is wasted regardless of your accomplishments." I, of course, take a great deal of personal offense to statements like that. Also heard was, "luckily John spent his life serving God and was therefore happy, unlike the broken and pain-filled lives of the godless." What an asshole. So I guess I found some of the religious commentary inappropriate despite the family being very religious and the service being held in a church.

I was struck by the extent to which the memorial centered around Christianity and not John. At times I felt like the whole thing was a sales pitch for Jesus.
I wish it could have been a memorial that was a bit more inclusive for everyone that might want to remember John.

If I died and they had a memorial in which the central message was, "if you're religious then you're worthless," I bet more people would find it inappropriate.

So, just a note to those who are around when I am not: please have a memorial that
A) has a celebratory atmosphere
B) does not make people whose beliefs differ from my own feel excluded
C) free tacos for everyone.

Oh yeah, and at one point they unexpectedly asked the officers of ASAR to stand up and accept a plaque. I'm one of the officers. And my leg was completely and totally asleep. So I had to hobble up there in front of everyone like a total gimp. hehe That was a little embarrassing.

So between the fire drill and the deletion of my working directory... I managed to spend 16 hours yesterday sitting behind this computer. I got to work at 8:00am and left at 1:30am. I took a bit of time off to make dinner, but that's about it. I think that's a new record for my LANL career. Certainly for a Sunday. Definitely for a holiday.

The end is in sight, though. Initial conference call pseudo-defense is Thursday afternoon. Then it is less than one month before I have to have the finised, defended, and accepted document submited to MIT.

I'm starting to feel excited about the prospects of actually being done, after seven long years. Everything depends on what the committee says in regards to my Thursday presentation. Wish me luck!

I'm the only one in the building at 10pm on a Sunday night...

...so a fire alarm is rather disconcerting. Usually the fire alarms here are due to someone doing drywall or something else dust-inducing near a fire sensor. Repairing the constantly-broken elevator factors highly into the fire alarm catalyst function as well. But when no one is around to do anything, it increases the liklihood that it might actually be a real fire.

So I get to use the seldom-traveled emergency exit, and I go to my "muster area" which is somewhat of a misnomer when I'm the only person standing outside the building. Having nothing better to do, I timed the response. It took about eight minutes between when the fire alarms went off and when the fire truck was parked at the entrance to the building and the firemen were heading in. Mind you, the fire station is literally across the street. The problem is that there is a security fence inbetween them and my building, and they have to drive way around and get past a security checkpoint. Would be ironic if we actually had a fire, but of course...

The firemen come back out of the building and leave. And I'm still standing there... Safety procedure indicates that we go to our muster areas and the all-clear will be sent over the radio to the muster chief who will tell us we can go back in. Well I'm the only person there and I'm not a muster chief.

So I walk over to one of the other guard posts and ask what the deal is and they tell me to go back inside. Once I get back into my building, I can smell a lot of smoke in the lobby. Turns out one of the guards on duty managed to ignite a pizza in the microwave.

Well that was fun... another hour gone from my rapidly-lengthening night.

Turns out that 'rm bla *' isn't the same as 'rm bla*'.
Furthermore, it turns out that executing an rm * in your working directory that contains all of your thesis code input decks is "bad."

Yeah so I just nuked all of my input parameters. It was high-adrenaline there for a minute. I found a recent copy of an input deck in an email and was able to re-construct the missing lines from memory.

Oh, and I just backed up the 151GB of data I have.

Now the supercomputer folks here back my stuff up for me, but I don't have access to those backups at 8:00pm on a Sunday holiday. And I have a dry run for my defense tomorrow morning, so I have to get the last of the data done tonight. Luckily, the data itself was somewhere else. I just lost an hour reconstructing this input deck.

I had some dividend money left over at REI and they had a "20% off a single item" sale that was about to expire, so I bought myself one of these. It's basically an over-engineered minimalist backpacking cookset. Here's a quick run-down of the features:

A 1 liter titanium aluminum cooking pot with integrated high-efficiency heat sink, neoprene insulation, anti-spill cap with drinking hole, and convenient carrying/drinking handle. A small/light fuel cannister and no-priming-needed burner with integrated piezo igniter (no matches!!). All components fit inside the cooking pot. Total weight is 15oz. 22oz. with a full fuel cannister.

Sounds impressive...

My friend Steve showed me his at a recent caving meeting and I was impressed by how compact and light it was. I was skeptical of some of the claims about how efficient it was, how quickly it would boil water, that it would still work pretty well even if it tipped over, that the neoprene cozy wouldn't melt, etc.

Then I read this review which includes some reasonably scientific comparison tests between the Jetboil and other stoves. It demonstrates a remarkable increase in efficiency over other stoves (including the one I have been using for the last few years). They also have two videos - one of the stove continuing to work without spillage while sitting on its side, and the other that follows the entire process from fully-stowed to boiling water with Ramen in it - in under 2.5 minutes.

I'm sold. And between my coupon and dividend, I got it and five fuel cannisters shipped to my door for significantly less than the cost of the stove.

I've always had this idea in my head that it would be fun to spend a winter in Antarctica... but having a whole winter to spend doing this sort of thing isn't really likely to happen for me anytime soon. Besides, I'm not qualified for any of their positions except cook and/or general handyman/physicist.

I was wandering around the web during my lunchbreak and found this. Basically it's an application for being a "summit volunteer" at Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. They have a permanent staff of researchers and weather observers up there and they bring in a new volunteer every week to do the cooking and cleaning and general maintenance of the place. I'm totally qualified for that, and it doesn't take an unreasonable amount of time. You have to do it for a week in the summer before they'll let you do it in the winter... but still! I totally want to do this some year.

:)

"Popstrology is a system for achieving self-awareness through the study of the pop-music charts -- specifically, by determining which pop song was No. 1 on the day of your birth" -- bounced from kottke

Well, crap. I was born during a very dark and sad time for popular music. The #1 single during the week I was born was Saturday Night by the Bay City Rollers. <shudder>

So I wanted a collection of star charts for my astrophotography habit. Bob has the SkyAtlas [which, due to a questionable choice in ligatures on the front cover looks a lot like the Skatlas] 2000.0. It's a great chart, with huge pages and full-color non-stellar object symbols, etc. However, it's really unwieldy out in the field. It has a huge footprint when it is open and takes up a lot of space. We basically need most of a table to use it. The chart's limiting magnitude is 8.5, which means it has 81,312 stars listed.

I decided to pick up a copy of Uranometria 2000.0, the major competitor to Skatlas. The limiting magnitude on Uranometria is 9.75, which means it has over 280,000 stars. It has a much more reasonable footprint (it consits of two hardcover books, each with a 9"x12" footprint). As a result of the considerably smaller page size and the increased resolution (18.5mm/° vs 8.2mm/° for the Skatlas) , there are many more charts - 220 vs. 26. Each chart covers a relatively small area of sky, but with this book it is the detail which is important.

The Uranometria is a really great reference book and I'm glad I got it. The only problem is that I bought "Like New" used copies from Amazon 3rd party sellers, and one of them neglected to mention that they were selling me the first edition from 1988 rather than the current second edition from 2001. The second edition includes a new spatial decomposition, so the chart numbers don't line up and the index (only available in volume 1) doesn't work for anything in my copy of volume 2.

Between the volumes, editions, years of publishing, and the stellar reference year in the title, this can be rather confusing: I have Uranometria 2000.0 Volume I Second Edition (2001) and Uranometria 2000.0 Volume II First Edition (1988). The two do not play well together. I'll probably have to go buy the second edition of volume 2 and sell my first edition. Oh well.

More science vs. government.

I like this.

These are brilliant. Visual aids for a speech on buying a car. All characters bear a striking resemblance to the speaker.

So this morning I'm reading this article about Pakistan testing a medium-range ballistic missile. I get distracted by an ad in the lefthand column that is for Western Union or something. The ad is demonstrating that WU will deliver anywhere fast by showing a map of the world with little lines shooting out from the United States to all over the world. It looks exactly like the animated graphics from the climactic scenes of the movie WarGames. The lines follow perfect ballistic trajectories and everything.

Maybe there's something about Western Union that we don't know. Or perhaps this is one of those swords-to-plowshares programs to use up excess cold war delivery platforms. "Your package delivered anywhere in the world in 30 minutes or less or your money back. Package integrity not guaranteed."

So I'm part of this experimental internet radio station project where the listeners have complete control over the que of upcoming music (it's in beta, so don't ask me for the URL). Yesterday, there was a conversation on the station chat regarding the fact that someone kept putting silly songs at the top of the que in the middle of someone else's serious album. I thought it would be funny to go to the "300 Sound Effects" album in the library and que some goofy 10-second sound of ducks quacking or something.

So I find the album in the library and click on it, expecting to get a listing of the tracks, but nothing happens. So I click on it again. I wasn't really paying attention because I was following the chat. But then I look over and realize that I just clicked on "Play Album" twice. 600 sound effects tracked queued up in about five seconds.

They had to go into the database to remove them all manually. OOPS.

The following is the conversation that ensued (my comments in italics):

GAH i fucked up. umm... i accidentally queued up the entire 300 sound effects album... twice. eh... is there an easy way to kill all of that. (sorry)

mysql.

dude. talk about pilot error :)

yeha wow. i wasn't paying attention and thought i was clicking on the album title.

whoa
i just tuned in
what did i miss?

me being an idiot... check the que. heh

yeah, i saw the q and then asked questions.
nice job. :)

we used to have a confirmation when queueing albums. maybe we should
bring that back.

so i'm officially a tool. can someone help me out here? or do i have to hit
remove 600 times?

I'll fix it in the db. Hold on.

I can do nasty things with mysql, but am not 100%
comfortable with the db.

thanks. and sorry again

Ok, geoff can deal.

If I can find/remember the password :)

you did it twice? muahahaha!

yeah i know. wow am i embarrassed.

heh, no worries. it'll get fixed.
i just think it's funny, yo.

maybe a special que functions page is in order, for bulk deletion, etc?

a clear queue button with Mouser written on it in big
friendly letters.

Didn't we add "dequeue album" already?

absolutely. if there is a dequeue album button, it should absolutely
be renamed after mouser.

or maybe if you deque a whole album it should bring up a picture of my head
and play a sample from Napolean Dynamite saying, "Friggin Idiot!!"

a demouse button?

unless you are already all set to delete stuff, I can manage it.

there is currently no dequeue album stuff. it wouldn't be that hard, though.

there ya go.

[hides in corner]

dude, no problem :)

mouser: when I first saw it, I thought you had done it on purpose

mouser: no worries. it has happened before. actually, the worst was
when I added a 'play' button to contributors in the search page, and
people weren't sure what it would acutally do.

hah no. sadly, i thought i would be clever and sneak in a goofy sound
effect at the top, after john's comment.

hee hee.

re a special queue function page: that is actually on the list. the
'queue' button at the top will one day bring up a spiffy queue editor.

i suggest a hall of fame on that page for people who have accidentally enqueued the most crap.

I'd include purposefully too.

Wow, it snowed another 8" or so last night. The lab is closed for the whole day for the second day in a row. This time I actually somewhat agree with the decision, as what were just wet roads yesterday froze overnight and now everything is slick.

And for the second day in a row, I'm at work on time in the morning. And the cafeteria and local cafe close when the lab closes, so I'll go home at lunch. Geebus. Welcome to the arid desert of New Mexico.

Oh, and happy Ides of March. Et tu, Nanos?

Friday night after work Bob and I went to the star party at the El Rito observatory. Most notable was the fact that the alignment pins were installed on the 16" scope, and Bob and I were able to track down some software setting errors leading to a pretty well-aligned scope. The tracking on that thing was a disaster before Friday; now it'll hold an image in the FOV for at least 15 minutes or so.

Next time I'm going to do a drift alignment and we're actually going to correct the pier azimuth - this involves rotating the entire 250kg assembly very precisely and will require lots of beefy lads. Right now the scope is acceptably aligned for modest exposure length photography and more than sufficient for any visual work. I'm pressing Roger to get the Losmandy rails and counterweights so I can hook my photo gear up and take some pictures.

Saturday and Sunday were both excellent weather. I did a lot of work, but managed to work in a short geocache hike with Robin on Saturday. Finally watched Citizen Kane, which I recognize as a landmark film but in a modern context I didn't find it all that impressive. Sunday I got my hair cut down in Santa Fe, bought two new cookbooks (Pasta and "High Altitude"), bought the Donnie Darko DVD, and did a couple of quick geocaches within the city. Watched Soylent Green when I got home. SG is infinitely better than I was expecting. Somehow, because the final dialogue is so heavily parodied, I figured that the movie must be schlock cliche or something. But I loved it! Heston Factor 12!!

After I went to bed last night, the weather went to shiz and it snowed 7 or 8 inches on us. When I woke up everything was heavily blanketed. They delayed the lab opening until 10am to plow the roads. I went in at 8 anyway, only to find that they had closed the lab for the whole day. I guess they're expecting futher shiz.

I'm staying at work because I've got way too much to do to take a day off, but I figure I can take a few minutes for writing journal entries. :)

Let's see... it's March 14th, so here's my yearly attempt to recite digits of Pi (note that I have not prepared for this in any way and I am not cheating):

3.1415926535862698...

Now, I'll look it up and see how I did:

3.14159265358979323846...

Well, I got the first 9 digits past the decimal point correct, which is more than enough precision for almost any real-world task. What I find interesting is the similarity of patterns in the digits I got wrong when compared to the correct digits. I got the ABA pattern, followed by XY where Y = X-1. All of the digits past #9 are wrong, but there are recognizeable patterns. This illuminates something about how I go about memorizing things. It's all about patterns for me.

It's unclear if I was matching the patterns I described above, or if I simply misplaced the 626 that occurs 8 digits later, and transposed the 89 at digit 9 and tacked it on the end. Probably the latter, actually. I memorized 30 digits of Pi back in 2001 for a Pi party that I went to in Cambridge. I haven't put any thought into retaining these digits since then. So in four years I've lost 70% of it. Still at acceptable levels, though. :)

Anyway, enjoy a nice arbitrary holiday today. Reflect for a moment on the fascinating harmony of the universe and the beautiful symmetry of Pi. Or just eat a sandwich and go to work, I don't really care.

PS: it's also Einstein's birthday. So... leave your hair messy and ride a bike in a silly manner while sticking your tounge out. Or do something really really... smart.

Celebrate nerdosity.

So once a year the building managers in my building have to do some test of the fire alarm system that involves examining each of the klaxons while they are active. It's a big building and there are a bunch of horns. So they're going to have the fire alarms running... all day tomorrow. Needless to say I will not be here.

As a result, I think I will go to the star party tonight. This is the optimum night for doing a Messier Marathon this year, and the weather is currently terriffic. So why not. I probably won't make it through the whole catalog... but well it's something to do. And I don't have to feel bad about it since I can't go to work in the morning anyway (unless I have "approved hearing protection").

A friend is learning F77 for work and had the following to say:

f77. suxxor my nutzzors.

have to port some antiquated satellite shit to linux and this
big-endian/little-endian crap totally barfargled out shit.

amen.

So last night the search and rescue team had a memorial gathering for John at Reed's place. Reed had some first-hand information about the accident and went over the specifics of what did and did not happen. Most of the news articles I've read have been flawed in one way or another. One thing is for sure; the people on the scene did everything right in response to the avalanche. The retrieval of John from the debris field was exceptionally quick. One of the team members knows one of the guides that was leading the avi training and vouches for his competence. It just sounds like it was an unwinnable situation - everything that could be done was likely done, and done well.

We went around the room and shared our thoughts on the situation and memories of John, etc. I didn't have a lot to contribute here but it was really good to hear what others had to say. I was very impressed with how the team came together to support one another. This is really an exceptional group of people and I'm lucky to be a part of it. I just hope that soon I'll have the time to get out on some searches and do my part. By all accounts, John was a tremendous asset to the team and part of what made it great. I regret that I was too busy with my studies to get to know him better.

Ann made some exquisite homemade lasagna (including homemade noodles). We passed around some pictures that John had taken at various team training events. We also read some emails that other SAR teams had sent to us as condolences. Overall it was a really great get-together. The only thing I didn't like was this minister guy that Ann brought along. I found his comments to be exceedingly inappropriate. He basically said that trying to get the facts about the accident was a bad idea; that knowledge only hampers our ability to deal with the tragedy (I'm not exaggerating here... he said that). And that the reason we feel bad is that "we are weak," and that our only recourse is to turn to God. My thoughts on the mind-rotting effects of faith aside, I found his advice to be in very poor taste to such a general audience.

Anyway, speaking of my studies... I had a video conference planned for next wednesday - sort of a "pre-defense defense." The idea was that the committee would all get together and hear what I had, then produce a finite list of what needed to be done before they would accept it. If I was lucky, this list would be short enough that I could do the necessary work and then defend before my end-of-april submittal deadline.

Unfortunately, the schedules of the various committee members didn't mesh well and there were various vacations that overlapped, leading to a one-day window next week for the videoconference. This ended up not being feasible to someone and they postponed it until the end of this month. This is cutting it pretty tight - but on the other hand, it gives me a lot more time to prepare for the initial defense. I was sorta worried about my ability to produce something worthy in only a week. It didn't help that the network was down last weekend.

And it definitely doesn't help that part of the code that I need to use my stuff is currrently broken. On saturday they're testing the fire alarms here in some way that requires them to have the horns on continuously for the entire day. So... I won't be working Saturday either. Maybe at home.

A guy I know died this weekend in an avalanche up in Colorado. Ironically, he was there taking an avalanche safety training course. I am left in an odd emotional state. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't close with him at all. He was a very nice person but I didn't enjoy his company and tended to avoid it. However, I am coming to realize that his death still leaves a mark on my conscience.

I guess there is some assumption of permanence we make in our relationships with people our age. John was my age and his death reveals my own mortality.

Also, for reasons I don't understand, I feel bad for not treating him better when he was here. He was in my house Wednesday night and I more-or-less ignored him. This was the last in a series of such events where I would avoid having to spend time with him. Now I feel that somehow I have missed an opportunity - exactly what I don't know.

I think what saddens me the most is that I never spent the time to get to know him, and now I'm left mostly ignorant of the good aspects of his life. I've always had this idea in my head that mourning someone's death is non-productive and that instead we should mark someone's passing with a celebration of all that was good about them. In John's case, I forfeighted the chance to get to know him and now I can't contribute much to the collective memory he deserves. I can't tell you anything specific about what a good person he was, and it's not because he wasn't a good person. I guess I feel like somehow I've let myself down in not doing what is required to stick to my own principles.

---

Some news articles on the tragedy:
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20050307/NEWS/103070007
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/20050308/NEWS/103080008
http://geosurvey.state.co.us/avalanche/Default.aspx?tabid=44
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/11305.html
http://story.denversun.com/p.x/ct/9/cid/c5561a463525350d/id/ee0ee84632e04b9d

So my copy of Gran Turismo 4, which I ordered in September and was scheduled for delivery on November 14th, arrived last week (note: this wasn't Amazon's fault; Sony delayed the release of the game for some reason - presumably to avoid that pesky christmas season and it's horrid money-making). Anyway I'm really enjoying it. It has fixed a number of the issues I had with GT3 and introduced a ton of new features that make gameply even better.

B-spec mode is probably the most significant change - you can "race" from the director's point of view, letting the AI do the driving of the car and you basically give it behavior cues like "Speed up," "Overtake," and "Pit." However, the game will pit for you if it absolutely has to be done. So if you race B-spec with a car that is considerably better than all the rival cars, you can do an entire race without any interaction at all. Now this obviously sounds like no fun, BUT there are these 24-hour endurance races... and there is just no way I'm going to play this game driving around in a circle for 24 hours. But with B-spec, I can leave it on while I sleep and just reap the rewards. It also has the ability to speed up game time by up to 3x, so the 24 hour race only takes 8 hours. (still: geeeebus)

OK, so that is somewhat silly. But right now it's the only reasoanble way past a problem I have encountered - the only races I have access to that I haven't won are endurance races and a small number of races for which I cannot afford a car good enough to compete. For the top series in the American races, I bought a Ford GT and pimped the shit out of it... and it is still no match for the Panoz race car, the Corvette race car, or that weird jet engine car. So I need an American race car to compete. And there are no more general or American races that might give me one as a prize... so I have to buy one. And the only one that is for sale is the Panoz at $4,500,000. And I have a few hundred thousand dollars. And this is the fourth sentence in a row to start with "and."

Anwyay, I have to do the endurance races because they give major payola. The 24-hour Nurburgring race has been going since last night all on its own. I am currently 11 hours into it and I'm getting lots of work done on the side.

Somehow this is an interesting commentary on my life right now: I let my gaming system play games by itself while I work. Ugh

A good friend of mine just got fired. He was a unix admin type here at the lab, and in my experience he is the most capable unix person I have met at the lab. My guess is that there are some other comparable unix geeks here, but he's on the short list to say the least. Oh, and we do an assload of exceedingly important things with unix here.

The timeline of events goes like this:

The contingent worker program is announced and he is forced to convert from a UC subcontractor to a UC employee. Doing so subjects him to a six month "probationary employment" period where it is easy for management to fire him. Despite this, he is looking forward to it because the benefits for UC employees are pretty good. However, when he converts, he realises that they have cut his gross pay to the tune of $6k/year. Naturally, he gets a little excited about this when he picks up his offer package from HR, and the HR lady takes his aggitation the wrong way.

Then, earlier this week, he is removed from his team, his keys are taken, and he is escorted out of the building. Asking why, he is only told that they can't tell him.

He is forced to sit in an empty cubicle for two days until his meeting last night with his management, their management, and the internal security people. They inform him that he is being fired. When he asks why, they tell him that he was observed in an online forum saying that he worked for the lab and had a clearance. In theory, this makes him a target for espionage or something.

Nevermind that this was the same online formum on which he was recruited for this job, and that other people on his team had been recruited from. The practice of recruiting in this manner has been an established practice in the team for years. No one else who has been recruited or done recruiting on this forum has been persecuted for it.

In my opinion, the whole thing was a set up. Someone with a lot of influence didn't like him and had it out for him. Everyone at the team level speaks highly of him, his former team mates say that he is the most capable person available for what he was doing.

I've got bad news for lab management: hardcore unix nerds who are obsessed with security are very hard to find and don't tend to act like "normal" people. He has a tendancy to come off a little odd, but that's because he is significantly off the bell curve in terms of background, capability, and dedication to his principles. I remember meeting him for the first time - he struck me as sorta bizarre, and I can see where someone who just takes a first impression of his attitude could get the wrong idea, but that should not be the basis for someone's employment - particularly when they are in such a valuable position.

The team he worked for is worse off without him. Bad call.