I was home sick today, probably from the stress of getting ready for "M-Day" (aka Media Day), more likely though I finally succumbed to the cold that had been spreading through the Control Room. As it so happened, my laptop had been in the shop because it experience an "incident" (actually I just dropped it) last Monday (the week before Media Day), and I just picked it up yesterday.

Many collisions will be needed to unveil the secrets eventually hidden at the 7 TeV energy regime.

After decades of planning. After years of delays and immeasureable amounts of patience and hard work. The physics operations of the LHC has begun!

After ramping of the beams to 3.5 TeV and tuning, final checks, and some emotions due to an unforeseen beam dump, the 7 TeV collisions finally appeared on the on-line monitors of the ATLAS Control Room.

During this morning LHC has been working to give us the beam conditions for collisions.

If you call Jean-Baptiste Blanchard by his full first name, try it the French way and drop the ‘p’. But he generally goes by JB.

So how will this whole "First 7 TeV Collisions" event happen? Well, here is my (somewhat naive) understanding of what will happen.

This Tuesday, if all goes according to plan, will mark the end of a very long journey for many High Energy Physicists. The first 7 TeV Collisions will signal the end of the the commissioning period of the LHC and its experiments.

Last night a new very important milestone has been reached by the LHC: two counter-circulating proton beams have been accelerated for the first time to 3.5 TeV, the energy that they should routinely reach in the 2010-2011 running period.

The first physics results from the ATLAS Experiment with proton-proton collisions at an energy of 0.9 TeV in late 2009 have now been accepted for publication in the journal Physics Letters B.

It has been a BUSY weekend! The LHC has been working around the clock get the machine commissioned, and ATLAS has been enjoying the many Firsts that have resulted.

Today ATLAS celebrates the role of women in physics its own way. ATLAS has encouraged its staff and users to place as many women as possible on shift in the control room and to serve as guides for official visits.

As he munches on an all-American breakfast – fresh juice and a bagel hand-delivered by a friend from New York – Jim Degenhardt is the first to admit he’s not a morning person. It’s the aftermath of the 9 a.m. Run Meeting, a daily appointment for Jim as co-run coordinator of the TRT, but the NY-themed sustenance seems to be doing the trick.

At approximately 2:40 am Central European Time, ATLAS saw particles from the LHC for the first time in 2010. As in previous LHC turn-on periods the first thing we see are beam splashes from the LHC beams as they slowly thread the beam through the LHC ring for the first time.

The Control Room is quiet. The configurations are set. The trigger menu is uploaded. The shifters are ready. All that is left is for the LHC to deliver beam.

ATLAS has been taking cosmic rays data this month exercising new features of the data acquisition, including protocols to start and control the run.

For Rolf Seuster, there’s no place like Victoria, Canada. Located on Vancouver Island, about 90 km south of this year’s Winter Olympics, Rolf believes it’s one of the nicest places in the country. “It’s the size of Switzerland, and there’s maybe half a million people on the whole island,” he says.

It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to think of ATLAS and CMS as siblings: competing, trying to get ahead, but ultimately friendly and supportive of each other. But for Germán Carrillo, the analogy moves over into the literal, because while he studies for a PhD on ATLAS, older brother Camillo is a six-year CMS devotee.

Today ATLAS has started the integrated runs. This has happened before, nevertheless this is the first time ATLAS subdetectors get together after the winter break, a lot of work has been done since then.

When the time came for François Butin to do his military service for France, he wasn’t interested in the armed forces. Instead, he chose to become a “cooperant”, working for a longer period in research or engineering. “In the old days, if you wanted to do your military service in an intelligent way, that was one of the good opportunities,” says François.

Attila Krasznahorkay has physics in his blood, the son of a nuclear physicist and a physics and math teacher. He was also introduced to the traveling life style at an early age, moving from his Hungarian homeland to Groningen in the Netherlands at eight years old when his father began work in the city’s university. His young, agile brain managed to pick up the Dutch language, but now, although he recalls the experience of being fluent at age nine, he struggles to think of words.

High Energy Physicists have been waiting for many years to see the LHC turn on. Now that it has been turned on, the network of physicists around the world have quickly been harnessed. It can be considered a phase transition in particle physics.

Thorsten Wengler can still remember exactly where he was when the Berlin wall fell in November 1989: on night guard, sitting atop a pile of arms and ammunition in the woods outside of Potsdam, Germany, alongside three of his fellow East German soldiers.

This early morning Dec.14 at 2.40, after a 8 minutes ramp, the energy of the two LHC beams has been brought up to 1.18 TeV again.

At 21:32 pm on December 8th, the LHC did something that no other accelerator has ever done before.