Weblog Entry - 08/01/2003: "What I Did On My Summer Vacation (or How to Hate MS Access)"

Today was my last day of work. Towards the end of last semester I got an interview to do some kinda internship with the county. I went there in June at some point and they explained it was some internship the county organized every year for college students. Essentially as long as you weren't a complete moron you got to pick from this bigass pool of county jobs, on a first come basis (people who participated in previous years also got priority). So I picked working for the county Bureau of Emergency Services, which is the office in charge of the county paramedics, fire departments, ambulances and hazmat team. Whee.

Essentially all I did was this big dumb database for eight weeks. You see, there's a nuclear power plant around 10 miles from my house (slightly more than 10), and for years (but especially after 9/11) they've been coordinating with the surrounding counties within a 10 mile radius for evacuation, security and all that in case something bad goes down. So anyway, after 9/11 people started to panic that some terrorist might fly a 747 into one of the reactors (which are these big steel reinforced concrete domes) and we'd be goners. Of course that probably won't happen, but mentioning the words "terrorist" and "nuclear" in the same sentence tends to start mass panic since nobody seems to understand a goddamn thing these days.

So anyway, to remedy this panic, the plant issued these "magic" pills (tablets they're actually called) that protect whoever takes them from radiation. They're entirely made of KI, which is potassium-iodine, which your thyroid gland will absorb like Sally Struthers absorbs chocolate cake. In fact one tablet will saturate your thyroid with KI for around 48 hours. This is helpful because one of the deadly gasses that could potentially be emitted by a leak in the reactor is radioactive iodine, which your thyroid also loves to absorb (like Opera absorbs...well you get the idea). So the idea is, take the tablet and your thyroid will be so saturated with non-radioactive iodine, it won't be able to absorb any of the evil radioactive stuff now in the atmosphere thanks to Mohammed Al Sheed Sharif Gaskujem crashing his freshly hijacked airliner into one of the reactors (there are three, though one is inactive). Obviously you can spot the problems right away. For one, radioactive iodine isn't the only thing leaked into the atmosphere, and secondly it's not like the rest of our bodies are lined with lead or something. On top of that they don't even work properly if you're over a certain age (50 or 60 I think, I forget exactly), but apparently it's worked because people line up around the block to get these fucking things. Every person is allowed two tablets free of charge from the state (they can't be sold anyway) but only one is issued at home, and the second given out after you evacuate. Every person is required to sign a waiver with their name and address and all that jazz, which was what I had to shove into my wonderful Access database. I input exactly 3175 records in eight weeks (I could have done a lot more, but slacking off is fun).

The best part of that was after 1000 records had been input Access decided to take a big shit on the database and corrupted it. I was able to view it in hex mode in Ultra-Edit, and I could see all the data, but there was no way to get Access to open it. So after looking over the file for a while I wrote a program that would extract what might possibly be data (was pretty accurate) and shove it in an easier to read text file. The major problem here is Access files are fucking random and the format is the sloppiest thing I have ever seen. I did this six weeks ago, but from what I remember each record started with 0xEEFF and 0xEEFF was also before every entry, so that wasn't too hard. However, there was absolutely nothing that denoted when a record ended, so I had no way to sifting out extra garbage that came after the last entry in the record. Also, for whatever fucking reason, if an entry has two or less letters, Access combines it with the previous record. This was hell, because people's ages were always 2 chars or less unless it was for a person under a year (so I'd put: 10 mos), and the person who distributed the tablet either signed his full name or had two or three initials, so my program got tricked into thinking there were one or two less entries in some of the records. Ugh. So, lucky me, I had to do a fair bit of hand editing of the file. Next I wrote another program that would take all the crap from the new file I spent a day formatting by hand and put it into a nice neat text file which I would now import back into a clean Access database. That took me two days, which isn't bad considering it took me two weeks to input those first 1000 records (I was much more efficient in the beginning).

That aside I didn't do much else, most of the time I either worked on that stupid database or some other thing, usually having to do with the 911 database (911 is the number you call to get cops to show up pronto here in the states). By far the coolest thing I got to do was go to Indian Point, the power plant I spoke of above.

The first leg of that trip was a bunch of historical stuff about the plant, how old it was, what previous problems it had (not many) and some basic info about nuclear power. Being the nerd that I am, I found it all pretty interesting. Plus there was free food. Free food is good. Next we went on a short tour of the plant. We got to see one of the turbine rooms and the control room for reactor #2 (#1 is the one that's offline, actually it's retired because all the equipment in it is out of date). We had to wear earplugs in the turbine room because the damned turbine is so loud, and we got to see a spot where there was a small fire (apparently around 8oz of grease or something caught on fire a couple days before we were there) near one of the turbines. The turbine room was fucking gigantic and hot as hell thanks to the bigass turbine spinning at 15000rpm (I think). The control room was pretty cool too, and it actually looked like all the control rooms you see in the movies with a million switches and buttons lighting up and all that stuff that you think is Hollywood making shit up again but it's really what it looks like. I was kinda freaked out to see the manned computers were running Windows (win2k it looked like) but I suppose they'd be easier to maintain and win2k is stable enough, I was just expecting some ancient version of UNIX or something.

So yeah, that was about that, and now I'm a jobless bum for a month, life am good. Oh yeah, and I'm coming to #doomcon2, sucka! So hide your daughters or something. Yeah. Thanks for reading my longass rambling. Unless you skipped right to the end, you jerk.