Gallery:
http://www.gtluke.com/gallery/v/workpics/2008-01-28/ 

i've been busy as hell at work, here is what i've been doing.

most of the week i'm now working at greystone, the mental institution. they are installing this state of the art facility with my nj tax money. its insane, the amount of control and functionality that all the staff has is seriously insane. a quick rundown on what the nurses can do with a touchscreen at every one of the 20 nurses stations. open/close/lock/unlock every door, visually see on the screen if every door is opened/closed/locked/unlocked and if the key swipe card was granted or failed. they can call any one of 700 cameras to any one of the 50 monitors in the building. if any door is held open for longer than the set time (nurse adjustable) and isn't shunted (nurse adjustable) or in one 3 bypassed time zones (nurse adjustable) an alarm sounds, the area camera turns on, the monitor in the nurses station lights up with that camera, the security guard gets the monitor and camera, and if the camera is movable, it swings and zooms to the door that is open. i'm doing all the control to do all of this, its NUTS. oh also if you pick up the intercom and call another person, your monitor shows the location of who you are calling, and visa versa. anyway, pics of the joint camera cabinet coax cable for cameras my tax dollars at work who i've been working with, the lady irena works at my office also one of the 12 control cabinets i've been working with nurses station 600 million dollar building, holds 600 people this basically comes down to a 1 million dollar apartment me spazzing out in my offtime from there, i've been starting up a packed tower aeration building in hempstead long island. its basically a giant silo that you power water in on the top, and rush air through the bottom to aerate the water to strip any volatile chemicals out of the water looks like this: inside, my control cabinets on the left, blowers to the right, booster pump up the stairs outside, air stripper tower to the left, water tower where the water then goes to the right okay now for the accident. about 15 engineers and townie workers came out to do the final blessing on this site. evidently the existing water in the tower froze over the last few weeks of in operation well the tower filled with water when they turned the well pump on, but it must have been filling about half pace, because the clearwell below was also rising in volume so nobody noticed. well at some point which i imagine was when the tower got totally full with water (never supposed to happen) the ice in front of the AIR vents broke. there is never supposed to be water filling the tower, so the air vents are like 3ft above the bottom of the tower. well that ice broke, and WATER filled the AIR VENTS at lightning speed. it went from normal, to TONS of WATER pressure in the air vents and fans INSTANTLY. panic ensued, as i ran for my camera overexposed in panic you can see the pressure this is under air inlet to fans! okay about 2 minutes later, all hell broke loose, i gather that the ice broke in the route from the tower to the clearwell FAST. the clearwell rose about 5 feet in a matter or seconds, it passed the overflow pipes and started pushing out with pressure out of THREE 14" pipes there is actually a WAVE forming outside now to compile on this, even after someone RAN and turned off the well, the water kept coming. nobody knew where but it could have been a siphon effect. i estimate this at something like 300,000 gallons of water out into the field/lot in a matter of 10 minutes. one of those pipes outside can flow over 2,000 gallons a minute, and 3 of them were going full bore for about 15 minutes and then still poured out for about an hour. one of the craziest things i've seen at work to date.

we stopped at what we though was our stop, it was our street name. we didn’t do much planning ahead of time so yeah… we came out of the subway and jumped in a cab and $6 later we were at our BALLER hotel.

we dropped off our crap and went to get some food. we found some decent bar down the street and were shocked to see how early everything closes in chicago.
crappy pic

we passed out, and woke up to find this view out of our hotel room

then we went downstairs and found the most amazing breakfast. pancakes with blueberries rolled up in them, all kinds of food. it was awesome. we stuffed our face.

then we went swimming on the 19th floor, it was AWESOME. panoramic view of the city and swimming by ourselves in this pool. the view was awesome.
nws ladies

here are some shots from our hotel room
plasma ftw

then we went to check out the navy pier, it was cool.

then we went and found some lunch, we found gino’s east to try some authentic chicago deep dish pizza

it was good, a little sloppy but good to eat. cool place, it was 2 levels and had a lot of character. our waiter was awesome, he was insanely quick with my diet cokes and answered and researched all our tourist questions.

some scenery

then we found this, its the most amazing thing in the world. some kind of art, it was fucking awesome.

then we came across some skateboarders, this guy had some balls

more of the city

married with children fountain

L-train

shit taco

then we went on a boat tour, it was really cool, got to see the city from the water

this building is so big its breathtaking. it held the record for a while, i think the only other larger building in the world is the pentegon

blurry, but i’m on a boat, deal with it

then then we took the red line train all the way north to the last stop in some uber ghetto that resembled east orange. i didn’t take my camera out for obvious reasons.
my friend myles came and picked us up, and took us to a burger joint out in a suburb to check out the car scene.
met up with another galant guy doug (oldhairybastard) and another galant guy chris and some other galant guy with black one whome i don’t know.
chris drove us back to chicago in style, following chris.
it was really really cool to do this, in style, at full bore

whacker underground, around the lake, under the city

blurry, out of white balance, deal with it

then we passed out, and woke up early the next morning with like 4 hours of sleep. walked into the breakfast room and the marathon was on tv. oh cool, the chicago marathon… whats that sound? looked out the window haha

we caught it JUST in time to see the 1st place guys run by but my camera wasn’t out so i missed them.

had killer breakfast again, and went outside

then we took the red line train all the way to the south to the industry museum. we got there too early so we walked around a bit first.
we got passes to the star wars exibit, it was pretty cool.

then we went for a helicopter tour…
j/k

then we checked out the U505 sub exibit, it was bad ass

enigma

boat
we got a tour in the boat but i wasn’t alowed to take pictures
bastards

then we went and got some more pizza at lour minoti’s (we pronounced it illuminati’s)

then we went to the john hancock building and i took this from the observatory though the glass

steve decided to wash the windows or something

we passed out back at the hotel, and had to wake up at like the ass crack of dawn and we called a car service to take us to the motorola factory because it was out or reach of the transit system. we get downstairs, and a stretch limo is there. wtf?
we hop in and the driver is like (thick russian accent)
ONLY IN AMERICA CAN YOU CALL FOR A RIDE TO WORK AND TURN INTO A ROCKSTAR EH????!?!
it was awesome, we went from our baller hotel room to the plant like pure rockstars

the rest of the week was training. what i learned was that you should sell your stock i motorolla if you have any
but really we learned about radio plc’s, and that next year we are probably going to las vegas and telaviv
awesome
what a trip, it was fuckin fantastic