I had to rush a bit in my trip from Urbana Champaign to Detroit Metro Airport today. Originally, I had planned to leave at 10:00 (Eastern) to make my flight at 7:22 (Eastern) in Detroit about 360 miles away. I figured six hours on the road making cell-phone meetings plus lunch on the road, followed by an hour in the Worldclub catching up on E-Mail would be a good way to spend the day and get to Washington, DC in the evening.
Well, lots of little discussions started up and when I realized what time it was, it was 12:40 Eastern and I had not left yet. Yikes! There goes lunch and the Worldclub. I had to hightail it – I made good time until I hit Chicago where at the junction between I-80 and I-294 the traffic Stopped for about 40 minutes. There was an accident at the junction of I-294/I-94 and I-80/90 (this is pretty much the most congested intersection on the planet). I was frustrated watching all of the spare time I had slipping away while I was not moving.
Once I was moving again I had to step up the pace a bit. I will let the reader do the math, but I finally arrived after parking, taking the shuttle, being first in line at security(Tuesday is a slow night) – I arrived at Gate A65 at exactly 7:10PM.
I had to go to the bathroom since about 4PM, but figured that I could not afford the time to stop. I was right.
Whew!

Well the long trip has begun. The first stop is at UIUC to kick off Integration Week for the NEESpop version 2.2 – We worked on lots of little things – did some design reviews of upcoming software and generally kicked the tires on the stuff in 2.2.
One of these pictures in MINI-Most and the other is a design document of how to build a new DAQ-control capability into CHEF as part of the experiment browser as well as how to store data from the DAQ into the repository in the most natural way and using Data Turbine as the transport for the live and/or stored data. It is a lot of software, but we are finally starting to come up with tools that both work technically and fit the user’s needs and work-style requirements. There is a LOT of work left to do but the hardest part is understanding what to do – this picture may look simple but it took a lot of work between the IT folks and engineers on the project and experience with our earlier versions of the NEESpop to get us to the point where the way forward is clear. There are a lot of people who get credit for getting us to this point: Kincho, Jim, Jun, Ken, Tim, Drew, Chen, Jerry, Paul, …
Today I have to leave and go off to Washington DC tomorrow for the NSF PI Meeting for the NMI Portals project. That should be fun – for the first time, I will see the rest of the NMI PIs and get a sense of how we can best fit in.