Wait, what were you doing at CERN? PLEASE TELL ME; I'M NOW VERY INTERESTED.
My uncle is a technician at Fermilab, and I get occasional tidbits about their work and some insider stories about some other accelerators, CERN naturally included. It'd be awesome if you could elaborate on your experience there a little more, Dragon.
I was there on a trip with my class. We spent two days in Geneva, and the first day was pretty much entirely spent at CERN. The tour was pretty much a standard tourist fare, but there were some really interesting parts. We've seen LINAC 1 and LEIR, magnet testing hall, the control room, the computer center and the ATLAS control center. Among other things, there was a small exhibition with a computer which was the very first WWW server (a small black cube with a plaque on it "This computer is a server. Do not turn off."

). Unfortunately, aside from seeing the startup process from the control room, this exhibition, and the CERN newspaper I picked up, there were few things I didn't already know from other sources. The trip could've been better if they gave us any hard data instead of generic statements you usually see in newspapers, but it was still a very interesting experience.
On a side note, I found that despite hiring over a thousand people from Italy, what they call "pizza" in their cafeteria is little different from what is served in "fast food" pizzerias here in Poland. It costs as much as a real pizza in a gourmet restaurant over there, but that's it. I don't know how they get away with that, considering how close they are to Italian border.
