It was an angle grinding sort of day

Got up, ate breakfast, fed birds, used the angle grinder to grind off the extra concrete lumps on the new aviary base, changes angle grinder head to metal grinding and spent the rest of daylight!!! grinding down welds after dad had welded bits. It really doesn't look like we did much, just extended the entry portal to the aviary - theres sooo much more to do & I go back to work next week. I didn't even drive my new car today :( I did however play LOTRO at lunch time and after dinner - Bindy is now 3/4 of the way through lvl45. My holiday resolution of getting him to lvl50 seems a long way off.

almost forgot

Woops, almost turned off and went to bed without blogging - my resolution almost crached and burned in three days.
today I finished shifting the budgies, did a little shopping and a lot of LOTRO. I also sorted through my old car files - I found the original receipt for the car I bought in 1995, I also shredded a lot of the paperwork. Thats it really. Perhaps there's a reason I forgot.

new car

Dad is impressed because the back seats can recline to several angles and they have an arm rest with cup holder. I'm impressed with the power of the airconditioner. That and I'm now up there with all the 4WD wagons looking down on everyone else. I also shifted a bunch of budgies and leveled Bindy to 45....oh, and I did some filing.

both day and night

...church, coffee with mum, 2 skirts and a new pillow bought at the 50% off sales, nanna nap in the afternoon on my new pillow, finished the mowing and played LOTRO. I also started cleaning up all the misc. paperwork in my back room and planning what to do tomorrow, apart from picking up my NEW CAR!!!!

and so it continued

Today I went shopping. I bought a book, some shorts and got a watch battery replaced. Then I got some photos printed - plus some screenshots from LOTRO. They turn out nice as photos. I ate sushi for lunch. After doing some reading, I scrubbed the bath and mowed the lawn...fun so far yes? I'm watching howls moving castle tonight between getting bindy to forochel to look for the behemoth again. More exciting fun planned tomorrow.

The week off adventure

I've decided to note what I do each day on my week off. This way you can see how dull my breaks are if I don't go away. Let's see how long this pre-new years resolution lasts.
Since I'm starting on the 26th and technically I started my break on the 25th, I'll briefly note what happened yesterday...
Up at 6:30am, church, opened presents (opened Andreas first in the privacy of my room in case she'd sent something highly inappropriate). She hadn't. Read my new Robin McKinley book till 11:30am. Went to Brother and Sister-in-laws place for cold Christmas lunch in air-conditioned comfort, opened more presents, ate King prawns, ham, gingerbread house and ice cream cake, spent the rest of my time putting together a 3D puzzle robot for my 6yr old nephew. All went well, both kids were happy, everyone was relaxed...I didn't expect it but am putting it down to aircon. Came home, read the rest of the book in a long soaking bath full of coconut bathfizzer from the Fellowses.
Today: Got up, watched the Seeker on DVD, finished concreting the base of the aviary & moved two budgies, took my mum post christmas shopping and spent $130 on miscellaneous stuff, came home, put away stuff (including budgie breeding boxes - I'm not letting them breed over summer, it gets too hot), installed my new zippy, glowy gamers mouse...so fast! Decided not to install Crysis until I do some more of the housework I need to do, avoided housework and surfed the web then typed this up...may do more cleaning and putting away now....or go try more bath stuff and reread The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper in the only cool spot around - the bathtub.

Previously on....

I've just had a week off to buy a new car. I bought (though I haven't had the finance go through yet so its not in my hot little hands) a Hyundai Tucson City. Not 4WD sadly. I like everything else about it. The 4WD version only comes in automatic v6 - boo hiss - neither of which I need or want & they cause the interest rate on the loan to go up. I also shovelled sand till I blistered and poured concrete till I threw up. Its really hot up here right now and it took longer than expected. Once you start concreting, you have to finish so we worked till 1pm, through the hottest part of a stinky hot day....in the sun. I really didn't get all that much else done...except the gingerbread houses, made from scratch, finished last night.

Ptang!

This is the sound my heart rate datalogger made after it fell off my belt at the same time I pulled the mower backwards. The Ptang noise was the sound of a logger shooting off in pieces from under the mower :(

I wasn't using this because I have a heart problem - its purely exercise. I have discovered that mowing my 1/4 acre property with a push mower actually burns more calories and keeps my heart in the cardio zone better than walking up and down Castle Hill. Now I can mow instead of going for a walk :) Of course, I also need a new datalogger. My heart rate monitor watch only gives me totals, not minute by minute logging :(

day off

I had a day off yesterday and had a massage and lots of naps...plus some supreme farming and cooking on LOTRO. I feel rather floaty and relaxed today. I'm wondering if this is how I should feel normally and I've just forgotten due to long periods of stress and overwork. Sad really. Did I used to be floaty and relaxed?

blah

headache, stiff neck, queezy, tired. Doesn't bode well for seeing Australia tonight

rain rain and more rain

I took possession of some more birds yesterday. Five peach faces and four budgerigars. Maybe the timing could have been better. I put their cages under trees and so it rained last night. At 3am I went downstairs with a torch and checked on them. They were still pretty dry but I put some marine ply on the top of the cages anyway & then I went back to bed. At 5 am I got up again and pulled out the powerplugs since the rain was gushing down and the thunder was very, very loud. I was glad I'd done the covering earlier. Then the power went out...woke at 7:15am to the news our street was flooded and I wasn't going anywhere. This gave me some time to wander round in the rain making more thorough covers for the quite damp birds and taking out all their food, which was an inch deep in rain water. By that time the road had cleared..so now I'm at work...Its very black out west, so this might be a short day.
There were hour long delays on the highway north of Townsville this morning for the people coming in to work. My office mate decided she just wouldn't bother. There was also a truck jackknifed on the university round-about, but it had been cleared away before I got there. I only saw one car up on a median strip this morning. So it can't have been too bad, but several cars that were parked on the road in our street have several inches of water in them.

new software

4th times the charm.
I finally got round to installing Dragon. I was testing the tutorial and it took me 4 tries to get the test question right. Even so, overall its better than my typing skills or lack thereof.

Harry I heard that you were starting a new job in San Francisco, Wenders's new jobs start? I would love to have lunch with you before you leave.

Harriet I heard that you were starting a new job in San Francisco, Wenders in the new job start? I would love to have lunch with you before you leave

Harriet I heard he was starting a new job in San Francisco. When does the new job start? I would love to have lunch with you before you leave

Harriet I heard that you are starting a new job in San Francisco. When does the new job start? I would love to have lunch with you before you leave

marking exams

must..stop..procrastinating

must..stop..blogging

I wos robd!

Someone stole money from my top drawer at work....in an envelope at the back of the drawer. It was most likely after hours through a locked door since my purse was not taken from my open handbag that would have been in view during the day. I also keep my door locked when I'm not there during the day, so it probably wasn't someone just walking in. Someone across the corridor had the same thing happen (probably same night). She too had her handbag in view during the day. We both had stuff like digital cameras and new mobile phones etc etc (also computers) and none of this was taken.
I now lock my drawers as well as the door. There are very few keys floating around that will open my door, so I thought I'd be OK with just the door locked. The other woman who shares my office suggested we get a guard snake...she has a python we could keep in the office, but its a bit cold for it.

roll on wet season

It rained last night. I hope its the start of a lot more. I stayed up waaaay too late reading, so I got to fall asleep to the sound.

Science note: the smell of rain that you get after its been dry is caused by Actinomycetes . I'm not 100% sure of whether the spores have their own smell, or whether the geosmin they produce is fully responsible. Theres also a few other causes, such as petrichor, but the smell I like is Actinomycetes related.

Basically, when the soil dries, actinomyetes bacteria form spores. The new rain aerosolises these spores and they enter the atmosphere where we breathe them in.

I haven't read it...but I have

This time I got a book called "The declaration" by Gemma Malley
I start reading it and something rings a bell....I've read this before too - argh - but I know I read it many years ago and I thought this one was newly published.

I check the publication date...it is new. This makes no sense. So I start stretching my mind back. The other book was darker, less young-adulty, and had a different basis for the "unwanted children locked in institution" theme. The other book had an overpopulated earth being run by an AI that was trying to drop the population. This book has a resource poor earth with an immortality drug that means you can't have children because they won't replace you, they'll just add to the demand on resources. The other book also had more complex twists and a male protagonist. But its interesting how many of the little events at the start of the book are similar or identical.
If I remembered the name of the other book I could compare them.

some people go grey

I'm going silver. I seem to be shedding the occasional hair that is not so much grey as glowing whiter than white. I'd assumed I was going grey (I have Elvira streaks at the temples), but I think I'm going to go straight from brown to silver. I shouldn't be surprised. All my mums siblings are silver haired. If only it would hurry up, I could have that expensive Norwegian blonde look without any effort.

When you can't remember what books you've already read, you're doing too much

I already have "Dark Alchemy" edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (with stories by Garth Nix, Eoin Colfer and Neil Gaiman), I'd be happy to pass on the second copy I bought the other week.

The internet has some truly weird sites

16

Created by OnePlusYou

masques and other social events

Today I nipped out at lunch and bought a mask and trimmings to make up a fancy doohicky for the Melbourne cup. We're having competitions for the best dress, hat or mask. I'll put pictures up when I've made it.

I also slipped into dymocks and bought a book of short stories. Now that I've had a flick through, I recognise at least some of the stories. I've either bought it before or read some of them in another collection. I will check my database. Stay tuned. If it turns out I already have "Dark Alchemy" edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (with stories by Garth Nix, Eoin Colfer and Neil Gaiman), I'd be happy to pass it on.

After lunch I went to a biosciences trade display and spent 2 hours just going round the tables...I think the bags of freebies and catalogues weighs about 15kilos. The Biorad guys took advantage of both my hands being full to drape about 6 lanyards around my neck. There was also cake :) Then there were draws from all the trade displays where you had left your details to get them to send you information. I missed out on the bubbly, chocolate and giant teddy bear, but I did win a roche bag with a hat, pen, scribble pad and a book of lab FAQ's - really handy for new students.

are zombies a good model of infectious disease?

The other night I dreamt about zombies. In this dream the previous zombie outbreak had been contained and a large wall built to stop any future infestation. But there was a break in the wall and one small zombie rose from under the ground and shambled in my direction. I realized we could stop this quickly if we could contain it, destroy it & reseal the wall. As is usually the case in dreams, no-one else seemed as concerned to act quickly. By the time I got people moving, the numbers had increased. They continued to increase logarithmically and we were too slow to enact the required responses at each stage. The responses changed based on the numbers you had to oppose. Before I was rudely awakened by a phone call, I was at the stage of locking up the non-zombified in a fortress to keep them alive and worrying that one of them would have been bit before getting in, thus infecting the others.
During the dream I was thinking how interesting it was that zombie numbers were increasing on a standard logarithmic curve...afterwards it occured to me that it looked just like a disease outbreak where no-one had immunity or recovered even down to quarantines and other outbreak control techniques.

high tech..er

I'm now running off two monitors at work. I got a new computer to replace the loud, DVD drive is dodgy, USB drives don't work, blue screen of death computer I've had for 5 or 6 years. The new computer came with a new monitor. I kept the old still working monitor and can now have files I need to look at open in one window and files I'm typing into on the other. I feel very techy. Its brain-numbingly simple to set up. I've even got them at different resolutions as they are different shapes.

:D

High school? Really?

Movie Reviews

I was sorta expecting primary school given the usual level of brain-dead free association typing that goes on when I write this.

Two new budgies, two new brake pads

Completely unrelated but at the same time.

One is a latino (pure yellow with white cheeks). The other is white and grey.

The brake pads are a greyish colour too.

I found out that the squealing of brakes when they wear out is intentional, and if you buy cheap brake pads they won't do it. Its to warn you that your brake pads need replacing soonish...or now.

The squeal is caused by a folded strip of metal (P shaped) that vibrates if the brake pads are worn to the point where the stem of the metal strip rubs on the disk. Clever, no? This P shaped piece of metal serves no other purpose but to warn you so you don't crash through a barrier going 100km/hr down a windy hill when the brakes finally fail.

my second chuckle of the afternoon

was a link to this comic

Fellowshipping is fun :)

Good game of LOTRO last night. We got through some stuff that took Bindy ages to do on his own...plus some things I had overlooked, so Bindy is going to trot off and have another go at them - hopefully tonight. I am reenergised to play. So I must Level Bindy up to 40+ so that he can go off adventuring in the frozen north with Aspy.

In other news, my electrical whizz brother fixed my networking problems. He brought his gear around and tested stuff. Apparently, when we got the house cabled for networking (you just plug in via the wall sockets now) they left the underhouse cabling a little loose. The network cables, if you cut the wire, can untwist a bit and the wires inside start to electrically interfere with each other and mess up the signals. Since it was loose, it untwisted a bit before they wired it to the wall. He trimmed it, twisted it, wired it back up and tested it. All is now groovy. I've been blaming my computers for being incompatible. Good thing I didn't return anything to the store :D

misc bits...while we're all waiting on confirmation

...which could be some time, since they don't commit on things round here..

I spontaneously bought a new laptop/notebook on the weekend. I had been thinking about it for a while...but as a long term thought...then there was a sale and a nifty computer.

I have a white Eee PC (1000H version) Its almost as powerful (and has more RAM) than the toshiba laptop I bought 2-3 years ago for over $2300. The new one cost me $560

Also, see below for bird pics - I've updated finally

Things change

My job just changed..probably. I will not be doing next year what I expected to do..probably.

Watch this space & I'll let you know when it becomes official....or not

mysterious enough? :D

nine, count em, nine

I now have 9 baby budgies out of their nests and flying round...well, the last one is still hanging on the wall, clutching a crossbeam for grim death, looking like it very much wants to go back inside. 5 of the babies look like clones. Yellow heads, blue green bodies, turquoise butts and iridescent blue tails. Photos will follow when they sit still long enough.


And here they are...Some of them anyway. They're just getting faster. The first shot is a bit blurry but shows the colours up well.
the blue and green here are siblings
The bird at the front is the baby (sibling to the bright greeny blue clones) and unrelated to the other one. This is preening, the open beak isn't due to the baby screaming "Agh! she's eating my brain!" but rather "ah, that feels good"

Sleepy again

Semester has just started and I'm sleepy again. This time I'm blaming the fact that I'm housesitting and getting fresh sea air. Once I get used to it I should be right. The getting up 1/2 an hour earlier to get into uni at the same time probably doesn't help. zzzzzz

no time to read my email

When people say "I've had no time to read my email and its the afternoon", I generally assume they are either exaggerating or have poor time management as I can scan through a list in 5 minutes and reply in, at most, 10minutes to any reply needed stuff....then today happened. My email got looked at at 3pm. And now, back to work again.

its only a matter of time

I had yet another almost accident on the way to uni this morning. There is a roundabout (see below & ignore lane closed bits) that has had the same set of rules since it was built. Some of the locals who live in the suburb that comes out at Yolanda drive still have problems with it however. The problem is that the left lane coming out of Yolanda can turn left, go straight or turn right. The round about is designed so that if you are coming from Nathan street and want to turn right into discovery drive, you go straight ahead and when you get to the turn, you go in the left lane. You aren't allowed to cut across the solid line and go into the right lane unless you are doing a U-turn. This is set up because if you were exiting from the right lane into discovery drive and someone was turning right from the left lane from Yolanda, they'd crash into you.

If you are on the Nathan street approach and turning right and you are on the roundabout itself, everyone from Yolanda has to give way, not just the right lane (the same as if you were going straight ahead from that lane) - see below - yellow has right of way if they are on the roundabout first
The problem is that the "red" people often think that they are fine to drive into the left lane. Hence me almost hitting the car that I was assuming was turning left from Yolanda until it kept coming forward as I was turning right - he was assuming I would turn in the right lane and is still probably swearing about the driver who doesn't know the road rules (which I looked up very carefully when the roundabout first went in - the council put maps up with arrows and notes about who gave way).
The left lane at Yolanda needs to be left turn only. It might slow up exiting traffic but it will stop the idiots who don't bother to check the road rules or take note of solid line marking.

Dr Horrible

I found this on the web this weekend. Its a supervillian musical done by some american actors you may recognise - Check out Captain Hammer. You need to let it download or its very jumpy.

not writing...reading

I have been looking at blogs that people have not been updating & thinking "how lazy are they?" Then I realised I am in that number. So I'm going to write. I was making the excuse of nothing to say, but once I actually start typing I remember things

1. Birthday last week - popcorn cake was brain explodingly sweet
2. I bought myself a new digital camera Lumix TZ-15. It even has a smart photo setting for taking photos of food. I got it for $150 less then RRP. It also has a setting for 6x4 shots, so i don't have to crop when I take the jpgs to the camera place to print.
3. I have almost finished a draft for a methods paper. I will submit before the end of July I hope
4. One of the three fans in my computer is getting noisy so i'm taking it into the shop...after getting online tonight.
5. I'm turning into a grumpy old woman - small children related activities are irritating me more and more - not with my nephews and the kids of friends, but with strangers kids. I see this as the first sign of becoming one of those old cat ladies who come out of the house to yell at the neighbourhood kids. Apologies to the perfectly sane and compassionate cat people out there. I think I'm getting arthritis in a finger too.
6. My cockatiels have abandoned their eggs and are looking for a new nesting box. Obviously this lot didn't work - they would have hatched by now if so.
6. I've discovered a bunch of webcomics that I will, at some point, make links to on the side bar. PS238 is pretty fine.

Dr Who

I wonder if our local fanboy has seen this bit of unedited footage, where the Dr has to be seen talking but doesn't actually have lines. Heh.

Filing Time!

I've been writing a paper all day and have got to the point where I just can't make a rational decision about it any more. I've actually caught up with all the "must get this done stuff" - at least the stuff that doesn't require other people who aren't here - hence actually working on a paper. Its too early to go home, what to do?
Aha, I have filing that I haven't got to in the last 18 months - ie since I moved to this office! Actually its probably older than that.
Anyhoo...filing time! Spit could write a song about it.

a new record for me

I got to work this morning knowing that a meeting was scheduled for 9am...last minute thing booked yesterday. I got out of it at 5:30pm. It was still going but I just wasn't functional anymore.
It was fine tuning exam questions - they were all written but needed to be polished for grammar, intent and whether the question was really asking what we wanted the students to answer. It was commented on at one point that answering the questions was easier than writing them. The students won't appreciate it. It was alos only for one exam...there are three more :(

The birds...

I've put nesting boxes in my aviary. I've been having endless fun watching the aerial combat over the best box. The male cockatiel is making keep away noises at the budgies...who are ignoring him & disturbing his lady love. The male budgies are all sitting on top of nesting boxes looking down on the girls. There was one female budgie who chased one of the males around till he agreed to mate with her. Now he's gone off with her mother....the philanderer.

Yesterday there was a loud thump and we saw a great Goshawk on the top of the cage. It (probably she because its rather large) kept coming back to try get the birds. They were dead quiet. Apparently, Goshawks are bird eaters and can grab budgies through the cage wire and eat them by nibbling through the wire. My cage is large and solid, but I could still lose a few. It's a magnificent bird though. The Bird of Prey carer here said if I want to get it back, I should put chicken meat on the top of the cage....but I don't think I'll give it any encouragement.

warm..bah

I love winter. The curling up under blankets, the lack of sweating.
Last night I went to bed, threw the blankets over myself and felt that something was wrong. I was hot. I threw the blankets off, thinking "this is a bad idea, I'll be too cold. Its winter and all that". But I wasn't. In fact, as I lay there I thought "I'm still hot". I checked the thermometer on my clock to determine whether it was the temperature or me with a fever. The former apparently. It was 25oC at 10:45pm!
I swept with the fan on last night...in winter! Last year we had the lowest top temperature in June ever on record. This year we probably won't. I'm hoping it was just because it has been so overcast that the heat hasn't escaped. It's still warm today. I miss my winter :(

This was fun...and quicker than I though it would be

I found this on someone elses blog and copied it

What we have here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you read for school, underline the ones you started but didn't finish (or are on the shelf waiting for a free week). I'm assuming they don't mean underline those ones you've always meant to go out and get a copy of...

Also of course, I could bold more if they let you do it for watching the movie :)


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales - maybe, i went through a classics stage and this might have been read all the way through
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon (reviewed, new,for Baltimore Sun!)
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed

sleepy, cold-ridden, sore knees and needles

I have a cold...I got it thursday. It didn't stop me climbing Castle hill on Saturday (hence the sore knees that make me clutch the stair rail for grim death while going up). Nor did it stop me shopping for cool t-shirts and sale priced dresses $40 down from $160 also on saturday. Of course with all that I'm now tired. Oh, the needle is due to the flu-vax i got today. Apparently having a cold doesn't stop you from having the needle (you need a fever to stop you...or the first stages of pregnancy, neither of which I have).
Tomorrow I will be supervising an exam from 8am and then toddling off to get some blood sucked for serology -stage two to confirm I have an atypical infection of the lungs - possibly not related to the cold. After that I go on antibiotics

Hmm, its almost like this is my old lady outlet for telling people whats wrong with me. Never ask me how I am to my face. You'll never get away.

champagne tastes

I have discovered the china I would collect if I collected china. I even looked it up online to find out how much it cost..
Since I could buy a new computer for less than the price of a single piece, maybe I won't be doing any collecting...However, if any of my long time fans out there are looking for a gifty for me, my favourite pieces from the 2008 collection are ADORNMENT and FLEUR-DE-LUCE

who has time to blog?

Not me.

day 10 -britain again

This was a relatively short day. I realised I'd been pounding pavements and cobblestones for at least 8 hours a day each day. My feet were starting to hurt. I visited the Jorvik centre (which had a sit down train like tour, Barley hall - which was a hands on museum - I put my butt on seats to read up on the rooms and went to the train museum to stroll around and eat dinner. They have an inside picnic area.
For lunch I had pork and crackling sandwich & viennese truffles from Thorntons chocolates for dessert. This is my most favourite chocolate of all time - or almost - they don't make the dark chocolate one anymore :(
There were some heavy downpours that i missed by being indoors during all of them. I did walk home in drizzle though (5:30pm)

one of the royal carriages - through a window

Jorvik centre. apparently they found fossilized human faeces while digging for viking archeology

these passageways are normal - not just a "didn't join the buildings" they are designed for foot passage

Barley hall...seats mmm

The river had risen somewhat - no sitting for me

The ruins of one of the church/monastery's that had been sacked. Probably by Henry the eighth - though I don't quite recall

I'm not the only one!

It's nice to see someone else had the same response to seeing the Mona Lisa as I did. I'd also like to complain about the 50 other tourists gathered round desperately trying to take photos in spite of the conditions & spoiling my already terrible view.

LOTRO is cheaper

I just installed a piece of equipment that cost the school over $18000. Its a spectrophotometer about half the size of a slimline computer. While browsing through the functions I found a section entitled "games" I then played tetris on this machine for 5 minutes. I resisted sudoku.

I would say that this was the most expensive computer game I've ever played, but I remember playing patience on an atomic absorbtion spectrophotometer that cost the company I worked for over $20000 at least ten years ago. At least that machine had the excuse of being attached to a windows based computer. The new one is a little unit with it's own screen and numeric keyboard.

a real academic

On Monday my business cards arrived. This morning I got a rejection letter for the first paper that I wrote myself. I am now a real academic.
It's one of those "deal with the critiques and you're welcome to resubmit" rejections. Since the critiques were mainly about things I thought were weaknesses in the paper, I'm happy to work on them - but it may take some time :P
I'm choosing to see it as a sign that my instincts about what makes an acceptable paper may actually be right. I submitted because the lab time I had to do this work was over, so I worked with what I had found. Must find more lab time (I do have some funds to do it in).

havent blogged in a while

I've been designing new curriculum (ok, sitting in the room and asking questions while other people design curriculum), writing lectures and pracs - new subject...I'm writing bird lectures and bee lectures and designing a project for a student to do. So lots of things I've never done before. I just came back from holidays and got sick enough to stay in bed for 4 days, then I came back to work, while still convalescing and so I'm quite tired. Things are only going to get busier, so i really should get back on anyway. But those are all my excuses.

I still have to finish the Britain holiday stuff on my blog and I've since been on another holiday. Even my recreation is getting on top of me.

BTW, while looking for a journal article to use as a statistics example for vet students, I came across a paper on measuring dog flatulence on different soy based diets....soooo tempted to use this one.

Shades of British travel

I was on Holidays in Kentucky and Sydney for a week and got home today. My flight from Sydney was delayed due to technical difficulties, resulting in a new plane, a missed connection in Brisbane and my luggage has not arrived with me. They may get it to me tonight some time...I hope.
Anyone want to fly with me ?

so cold

I am training for a trip to the coldest part of NSW in a couple of weeks by doing a walk in Freezer clean up. I'm spending about 2 hours a day in there. My nose goes numb, my fingers go numb, the cold seems through my shoes. And boy, is there a lot of old rubbish in there. I'll probably end up with a cold from the rapid fluctuations in temperature.