WITH DOUG ROBERTS***image1***SFR: So the next manager of Los Alamos National Laboratory was announced Dec. 21 and you followed by saying your blog
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would come down in July. Had you always planned to take the blog down, regardless of who won the contract?
DR:
Yes, I had always planned to take it down shortly after the new contractor took over, which is June 1, so I thought I'd leave it up for a small grace period.
Did you expect to create a forum that would receive so much national attention?
No, I was surprised by that. It was created on Dec. 28, I was down in Albuquerque and the lab was having some significant problems, the director had chosen to shut the entire laboratory down the previous July 16, but without telling anyone he'd also ordered LANL Public Affairs to stop accepting submissions to their online letters to the editor of their news bulletin, or the LANL PA decided to do that on their own. At any rate, months later a number of us compared notes and realized letters had been submitted and just fallen into a black hole. So, back to Dec. 28, I pulled into a fast food restaurant; they had a big plastic sign advertising free wireless Internet. I went in and pulled out my laptop, thought about it for a while and two hours later I had created the blog.
And then?
And then I just sat back and thought about it for a couple of weeks because I did know this was going to be highly visible inside the laboratory if word ever got out…I finally told a handful of acquaintances about the blog site-maybe 10 people-and it did take off quite rapidly after that. [Then] the Albuquerque Journal did a story and the hits ramped up dramatically and then in May, 2005, the New York Times picked it up and the hit rate skyrocketed. It peaked at around 22,000 page views per day and the New York Times was crosslinked on the Drudge Report and I had another massive spike of hits. Every time there was news about Los Alamos, and there's been a lot this last year, the hit rate went up.
Before you started lanl-the-real-story, were you a rabble-rouser?
No, I had been there for 20 years and up until the last year was pretty happy with my work, with the job and with the environment. I was doing things I enjoyed doing, high performance computing, developing simulations that could model things like avian bird flu. It was very topical, exciting work, doing state-of-the-art computer science. It was only during this last year I became significantly unhappy.
A lot of people posting since the UC consortium got the bid have thanked you for creating this forum. Do you feel like you accomplished something?
Perhaps. It may be-there's no way of knowing-it may be the blog was instrumental in expediting the departure of the last director [G Pete Nanos]. However, he wasn't the only problem at the lab. The problems that led up to these series of incidents occurring and the management response can be attributed directly to the contractor, the University of California, so the other half of your question, 'do I feel I've accomplished anything?' Not really, because I'm deeply disappointed in the DOE [Department of Energy]'s decision.
It seemed many people like yourself were convinced Lockheed was going to get that contract.
I was astonished.
Did you have money riding on it?
I did, not as bad as Brad Holian, my co-maintainer on the blog-he bet an 18-year-old bottle of Scotch. He forked out 189 bucks. I think I only lost $20.
So you're now in private business. Are you done with the government?
Well, they are still one of my customers. The company I am working for is a private company, but I'm doing essentially the identical work I was doing with the lab; we open-sourced one of our software products and are now doing epidemiological work for the National Institute of Health.
And you do rescue work with parrots. Can you talk about that a little?
Parrots don't make very good pets, but people don't realize that until they've had them in their house for maybe five minutes. They're noisy, they're dirty, they toss their food, they learn obscenities. If people don't understand parrot psychology they don't realize they have to establish dominance over the bird or the bird will develop biting habits. For all of these reasons, people buy a parrot, bring it home for a while and then realize it's not for them. Unfortunately many of these parrots find themselves in abusive situations. So over the last 18 years, I've been taking in rescue cases…I have 14 parrots right now, ranging in size…
And you're also a musician.
I play the baritone saxophone. One of the bands is mostly a Los Alamos band, the Los Alamos Hillstompers. And the other band is called Samba Fe.
So computer science, animal rescue, a musician with two bands, plenty to keep you occupied. Will you miss the blog?
Hard to say. I'm pretty tired of certain aspects, particularly the unpleasant contentiousness people seem compelled to use to put emphasis on whatever point of view they feel is the important one. But then, after working up in Los Alamos for 20 years, in particular taking a good look at it, it's a bit more contentious than it needs to be. I guess that's how people respond to stress.
