Meanwhile, Gordon Watt's laptop's power brick emits "a soft buzz, a bright blue spark, and a puff of smoke," he writes. He replaces it, but before he can celebrate, he goes to a bar and loses his wedding ring and credit card. "The fun was not worth the pain," he writes.

Peter Steinberg empathizes with Gordon's losses; his photo/music archive disk recently died. Recovering the data would cost thousands of dollars. "They have you over a barrel, for sure," he writes.

What's on your mind?
Stephon Alexander's head has been spinning with thoughts about about the cosmological constant and parity violation. "I'm in my typical state of mind -- not feeling too smart," he writes. We guess theoretical physicists are human, too.

Debbie Harris juggles her experiment's concerns about money, an internal review of a detector subsystem, and her kids' week off between camp and school. "Who thinks up these schedules that assumes there's always a parent who can be home for random weeks during the year?" she writes.

Caolionn O'Connell explains her team's recent paper on plasma wake field acceleration. "I feel it is well within my rights as the lowly graduate student to brag," she writes.