Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

I’m staying overnight in school for the second night in a row. The permit was actually made by one of my co-teachers who is working on her MS Computer Studies programming thesis, and I just asked for my name to be added to the list. It’s nice not be constrained by building shutdown time (and interrupted by the roving guards) when I’ve carried over so much momentum in internet research the entire day.

Of course, I’m also taking advantage of the opportunity to post on May 1 despite it supposedly being a holiday. At least I won’t skip another day because of Labor Day. And I was relieved to hear that the campus will be open on May 2 after all, despite the rumors going around. Process of elimination is that since there was no circulated memo or e-mail about Friday, we’re all assuming it’s a regular work/class day. Our secretary/reliever assured me about tomorrow.

It has actually been a long time since I’ve stayed overnight in this laboratory, which is in the Science and Technology Research Center – the only building in school with its own shower rooms that isn’t a gymnasium. It’s true what the Dean of the College of Science said during the Summer Camp about this place: there’s always someone working in one of the rooms, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In 1995, soon after this place was built, our senior students at the time (some of whom actually went on to teach with us) had started using the 5 rooms here assigned to our department for their thesis work. I was usually the faculty who signed their permits, and is required to accompany them in their overnights. Back then I remember there weren’t any equipment in most of the rooms, or lab tables, so we used any of them for sleeping.

Nowadays we can’t do that because some of the rooms already have delicate or hazardous materials stored, such as the furnace, the scanning electron microscope, and the digital microbalances.

The room I’m in right now, which used to be our “central headquarters” because we only stored the telescope here for use in the roof above (before the fourth floor was added –where two more labs were allotted to our department - and before the observatory was built), had been turned into a classroom, with chalkboards and whiteboards on half of its walls, then was assigned to the Medical Instrumentation program, and is now the students’ research room, with seven online computers for use.

Besides the digital microbalances (which by the way had to have their own suspension system installed as protection from possible vibrations from the engineering lab machines in the first and second floor that may affect readings) and the radiation room (which used to be a doorless alcove, but is now locked with the proper warning signs) this is still the room with the least equipment, and where most students and teachers like to hang around.

Wow, that was nice trip down memory lane.