This is my new hair

It has faded a bit since the original tint...That was vibrant! ...and just to try it, I did the face recognition too. I think I liked the first one better.

lets kick off the year in the manner in which I intend to continue

A 70% match to Yasmin bleeth…bwah ha ha…bet it wouldn’t be if I had a whole body match done...btw I'll do this again tomorrow when I bring in the shot of me with new fancy hair...

don't worry, I haven't forgotten

I do remember I promised to put up piccies and a spiel about my PNG trip, but I've been busy, and disorganised, and sleepy...and the photos are at home. I will get to it...just sooo sleepy.

BTW my thesis is submitted.

one step closer

I have a second examiner...paperwork is grinding through

I'm back

I've been in Papua New Guinea for a week and a day. The last night we spent in Port Moresby at a swanky hotel near the airport (think rolls of razor wire around the inside of the walls, and poolside orange juice). We also caught a PMV (public motor vehicle, small bus) into town to the Baroka markets, then into the city centre. We took some locals with us so we were less likely to be hassled and went in the morning (ditto - don't go into town after 4pm). So, I've now done something very few westerners have done - caught a PMV. We were the only white people I saw outside the hotel and airport. I will write more (eg why I was in PNG) after I finish my official report...andf put up piccies

If I can't find it, how can you?

I got a comment from an old blog entry the other day...well, September some time. I had been talking about tapas at a restaurant I went to & how I had trouble figuring out the ordering/paying/seating system, but the food rocked (Rhino Bar : try it you'll like it). In spite of the entry now being archived, I got a comment from the Rhino staff explaining how to do said functions. Now, it being a whole month and a 1/2 ago, I couldn't remember what I'd actually written so I looked it up.

I assumed they'd googled it, but did not find anything. I had to do a search from inside my blog page to find the entry.

Obviously I suck at googling.

I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair

I also wish I didn't have the first line of this song going over and over in my head. Or at least that I knew more than the first line of the song to sing.

Whats your musical meme today?

for those who play guitar hero..

http://xkcd.com/c70.html

Man! not the D12

The only thing I like about D12's is they have pentagonal faces.
You are the rare, the overlooked, yet incredibly useful dodecahedron: the d12. You are a creative, romantic soul. You often act without thinking, but make up for your lack of plans with plenty of heart. You easily solve problems that stump others, but your answers tend to put you into even deeper trouble. You write long, detailed backgrounds for all your characters, and are most likely to dress up as one or get involved in cos-play. You can be silly at times and are easily distracted by your own day dreams, but are at the end of the day you're someone who can be depended on.

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

did I do a good thing?

First a disclaimer; I've never gotten round to reading Lovecraft, I've played the game, but I've never read his books.

I was showing Kathy an online t-shirt company and as one of the themes was Cthulu, I had to explain the concept (at least - of the game, as I haven't read the books) & she said they might be interesting to read. I did a quick online search of the JCU library and there's tonnes of stuff, including one with Call of Cthulu and other stories. So off she went to borrow out a couple. She's 1/2 way through the first book and enjoying it.

Why is this blog worthy you say? Little did I know when I looked up the book online, but Kathy has not read a novel without being forced to do so since primary school. So depending on your point of view, I've either introduced another person to the mind broadening subculture of readers or I've corrupted her and am dragging her away from productive work. (and I haven't even read this author).

more info

Apparently named after David William Elliman MBE (1902-1993)

I was actually looking for something else at the time...

sleepy

A week and a bit ago, as I was lying in bed at night, my whole right arm started going all pins and needles. "Hmm" I thought "Thats not good. But it could be worse. It could be my left arm." The next day my arm was still all pins and needles and I remembered what my massage therapist had said about me being at risk of RSI in my right arm. So I did a web search on pins and needles, forearm, symptoms....a whole page of carpal tunnel syndrome later I decided to call my doctor and make an appointment. Now heres a whole nuther story;

I have a doctors surgery I've been going to since I was a teenager. I've outlasted several doctors there. I'm generally very healthy so I don't go often. In the last few years, I've had a few times where I didn't want to/couldn't wait 1/2 a week or more to get in (eg I was travelling), so I've gone to the Unihealth doctor. So its not that I hadn't rung them to get in, they just couldn't get me in in the time required. Earlier this year during the possible whooping cough episode, I rang and wanted to get in and they said that since I hadn't been in over two years, I was no longer considered a "regular" and would not be able to get in for at least two weeks. So I, once again, went elsewhere. Which brings us back to the present possible carpal tunnel issue. I think, "Heres something rather chronic that isn't requiring an immediate fix. I'll ring up, get an appointment for 2-3 weeks away and get back on their regular list" So I ring, get an appointment and then they find I haven't been for over two years, and tell me "sorry our policy says if you haven't been for over two years, you must be considered a new patient and we can't get you in...at all."

"What!" says I, "Not at all!" All disbelieving that I have been dissed by my GP to whom I've been going for over 15 years. "Well then, I guess I'll be throwing away your card and looking for a new GP. Good day." I would take it further, but since the last Doctor I went to there has moved on, I'd be seeing someone new no matter where I went and this Surgery is actually out of my way.

So now I'm looking for a new GP so I can have my medical records transferred to someone who cares...or at least doesn't turf me for being too healthy for their bottom line.

Anyhoo, back to the possible carpal tunnel. The unihealth doctor I went to did some probing, asked some questions and thinks its more likely I did something to my neck. She put me on an anti-inflammatory for a week and said if that doesn't settle it down, come back and she'll get neck x-rays done. See! I can make money for the GP! I'm not getting any younger or healthier you know. But to get back to the title, I think the anti-inflammatories are making me..zzzzzz

World Peace

On Friday night I was playing with one of those little electronic 20 question gadgets. The annoying little thing got all my objects right, so I decided to stump it by having "World Peace" as my thing to guess. After about 25 questions, it guessed "Is it a fart?". We now have a new name for farts in our house. Example: "After a dinner of fried beans, there's a lot of world peace in the room"

On related note, my mother has a a pet St Andrews Cross spider. It lives outside the back door and my mum has named it Crossandra. A while back Crossandra had a man friend on a web right next door. Later, she ate him and proceeded to increase in size. We were eagerly awaiting the babies but this morning she was back to her normal size with no sign of babies or egg sack. I suggested that maybe it had just been world peace.

had a good weekend..now I must pay

I ran around all weekend getting stuff done, work, shopping (including sales!), excersize. Went out to dinner and had tapas for the first time ever....mmm tapas...lamb and tzatzicki, chips and garlic aoli, coconut crumbed king prawns, mediterranian spiced barramundi kebabs, calamari in a really interesting sauce. Yum. (apologies to those who know how to spell...or bother with the spell checker). The Rhino bar was very good value, but better signage on how they run the system would be nice (walk up and order at bar/ pay as you go or leave a drivers licence behind and run a tab). Then off to Odyssey on the strand for coffee and baklava under the stars - expensive but worth every cent.

I should set up a "Review of Townsville Restaurants" Blog. I eat at enough of them.

Of course now I have the beginnings of a sore throat. I will have to gargle and strepsil tonight. I really don't want to get sick right now. So much to do, so little time

The things I find reading other peoples blogs

Actually, when you think about it...very self referential: I find this on another blog...not anotherblog but "another" blog ( http://seeyounextwednesday.blogspot.com/ ) and then do it myself and put it on my blog and it's about blogs...and now you're reading it on my blog etc etc.

You Are 50% Addicted to Blogthings

You're a Blogthings fiend - addicted but not totally dependent. So what if you know your personality type by heart? And while you may feel like Blogthings is crack... There are people much worse off than you!

How Addicted To Blogthings Are You?

My "someone is siphoning blood from me" alarm still works

I have discovered, through trial and vomit (and multiple research projects that have dragged me into them), that I can give three vials of blood easily, start to feel nauseated on four and throw up should people be foolish enough to continue (say 6-7ml/vial=24-28ml max). This is why I don't give blood. There's no point if the blood bank people have to take the blood bag off, throw it away because its not full and then clean up my vomit. Waste of their time, waste of my time - and lunch.

I haven't given more than one vial of blood at a time for a few years but today I gave four vials of blood for a Q fever research project (as I have been vaccinated against Q fever and am a conveniently close research subject). I wouldn't have volunteered if they were going into dangerous five vial territory. Fine through vials 1-3, queezy about two seconds into vial 4. Afterwards I had to go have a sit down, a drink and some fruit and nut mix. I'm told I went pale. I'm still feeling vaguely off.

Strangely enough I don't have low blood pressure (dead normal really). Yet, should anyone (secretly and without my knowledge) start siphoning me, my body tells me pretty quick smart and at the same volume each time.

I'm so immature...or alternately 'maintaining my inner child"

You've Experienced 56% of Life

You have a good deal of life experience, about as much as someone in their late 20s. You've seen and done enough to be quite wise, but you still have a lot of life to look forward to.

How Much Life Experience Do You Have?

This was a little more fun

http://www.says-it.com/seal/index.php

Half the Jenny, All the taste

http://www.thesurrealist.co.uk/slogan.cgi/slogan.cgi?word=Jenny

I wish. But then it got creepy

All you need is a Jenny and a dream...
Jenny really satisfies...

Hmm might stop now

done done and done

Yesterday I finished up a good copy of my thesis (its approximately 40mm thick - or 247 pages). I put it on my supervisors desk and have washed my hands of it for the immediate future. Kathy said "So, now you can relax and have some free time." No, no no no no.
Now I can write four papers, finish the lab work I need to do so I can make one of the papers of much higher value, start writing the lectures for CS3006 for October, finish the pile of filing and small jobs that have been accumulating on my desk for the last three months, ring a bunch of people, oh, and at some point write a storyline and get props for my online Cruise of Cthulu game.

When I handed the thesis to my supervisor he said "Do you have anything planned now or would you like some more work?" Bwah ha ha ha. I pointed out the first three things on my list and was told "that seems like enough to do and is probably the most important thing you can do right now." So I don't even know what the work he had planned for me was.

In 20 minutes I pour a gel, set up the PCR samples to put in it, wait another 1/2 hour and run a gel for 2 hours, cut out any products and prep for another PCR and gel. In all the gaps, I'm writing a paper/doing a bunch of phone calling/small jobs. And thats Tuesday accounted for

In an aside, I had the biggest feeling of deja vu yesterday. I walked into a lab and Karen said "Hey jenny, did you hear Steve Irwin is dead?" The tone of voice was just the same as when I walked into the dining area of the B&B I was staying at with my little brother on the Isle of Skye and Doug said "Hey jenny, did you hear Princess Diana is dead?" My immediate response was the same - I waited for the punchline, followed by a real sense of disbelief: Young, famous people don't die. Of course they do, but you just don't expect it.

Grammar checking

I have recieved my thesis back from grammar checking. Much, much red pen later. My checker said he enjoyed doing it...to the point of finishing and thinking maybe he could start again with a different coloured pen. His girlfriend stopped him. It took me all day to go through 50 pages yesterday. Only 200 more to go. Then I have to reformat all the pages so paragraphs and tables go across the pages properly again and redo the TOC and tables and figures lists so that they reference the new pages that everything has shifted to....then I discuss handing in and printing the photographic/colour pages. At some point I should also discuss examiners.

bad, bad drivers

Has anyone noticed that drivers are getting worse? I seem to see more acts of stupidity, aggression and lack of road rule understanding every day. Just the other day, while waiting at a stops sign to turn left, the car opposite me waiting to turn right (ie onto the same bit of road I wanted to turn on) just drove on through behind the car I was waiting on. Pretty sure I had the right of way there.

What made me write was the bizarre set of circumstances that I was a witness to yesterday - and almost involved in.

Picture this, Dad is driving my car out to work to pick up his that he's left there. I'm in the passenger seat since I will need to drive my own car home. We are waiting at the ross river lights at Balls lane, planning to cross straight over Ross River road to cross street (which is a short two lane road, both lanes of which can turn right at the next set of lights onto Bowen road and hence out to the army base. Now, if you are on Ross river road and want to turn right onto Cross street, theres only so many cars that will fit if the Cross/Bowen road light is red. Big blue car doesn't care about that and moves across traffic on green arrow without ensuring space free to get out of oncoming lane. Small white car follows into intersection but not across traffic lane. There are no more cars behind this one. Green arrow goes off, oncoming traffic wants to move. Big blue car edges back - small white car refuses to back out of intersection...more forced edging until oncoming traffic can actually get through. Lights eventually go red and there's now enough space to drive into Cross street - both cars drive through.

If you are in an intersection when the light goes red, its not only legal to continue driving through, its illegal not to. This maybe why the white car didn't want to back back too far - she wanted to get to drive through on the red.

We now drive through and end up in right hand lane behind blue car. White car is in left lane. (Remember, both of these lanes turn right, though left lane can also turn left). Lights change, we all drive off. Big blue car does not remain in own lane, curving gently out into the left lane of Bowen road, forcing white car off the road. White car brakes and swerves back into left lane behind blue car...AND GET THIS !... continues swerving (not indicating) as though she is going to go into the right lane so she can get past the blue car. Due to relative speeds and the fact my dad styed in the right lane as he was supposed to, she almost ran straight into us...Much braking and honking. She then swerved back into the left lane, sped up and then, while indicating, cut us off by swerving back into the right lane in front of us (we'd slowed to avoid being hit the first time). My dad was rather peeved and spent the rest of the trip muttering about how if he'd been driving a Mack truck like he usually does, instead of a hyundai hatchback, the honking would have been much, much louder - and more aggressive.

The more i write the more recent idiot incidents come to mind. I'm a mild driver, accepting of mistakes and people acting cautious and not quite getting it right...they might be new after all. But lately it hasn't been mistakes of lack of experience, its been rank, arrogant, ignorance.

Fume fume fume.

Did I say I needed a day?

Having left my thesis alone for some time I started reading through it again. The science is fine. The grammar and sentance structure in general is horrific. I'm going through the chapters, printing out the pages where I think fixes are needed and writing notes on them. I want to see my supervisor about them before I go further, in case the fixes are just as bad as the originals...I'm printing out every second page at the moment.

shopping

The other day, for my diet, I bought a few bananas and a large piece of very nice steak. Guess which cost more.

recovery

wonders will never cease. Except for the occasional throat clearing and nose blowing, I appear to have gotten over the lurgy. Here endeth the comments about my health.

Now to my weight....I'm going on the week long diet to kick start my healthy living again. I will tell you how much I lose when I lose it (but not my actual weight. heh)

My thesis is sitting at the 2nd last draft stage and I need to read through and comment - but i need a full day. I'm also up to my gills in sequencing experiments to combine my genome for a paper I want to write. Soo busy right now.

Last weekend I shopped. Pavilion was closing down and I bought lots of stuff including a clock in the shape of a die to add to my 6 sided dice collection. I also bought these really nice green strappy high heel sandals from a little dress shop that I only went into to get a key to use the Urban Quarter shopping centres toilet. Expensive loo trip, but cheap shoes.

This weekend I may read my thesis after doing more shopping. I'd like to check out that clothing shop more thoroughly.

i'm thinking about quoting Dr who

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but is by no means the most interesting - dr Who, from 'the time warrior"

This may end up being my quote in the front of my thesis...can I quote imaginary characters?

ill - my new normal state of health

I still have the cough. In fact, on Friday I had a relapse, spent the weekend in bed and I'm back to really bad cough. I don't however have a fever, so I had my fluvax today. The doc said that I should come back if I get any fever or productive cough. I'm suspicious my tonsils may be involved, but doctors are very hesitant about taking them out now, so even if they are, I bet I'd have to have this for 6 months before they'd consider it...must go and have a coughing fit now.

The Stargate season 9 DVD box set

will be on sale on the 17th of August. I have it in my diary. Seven has just started showing this season (late, on Thursday nights, with no advertising). By my calculations, even if seven shows an episode every week (not a good bet), they'll only be half way through before I can buy the whole season - which I will. Seven hates science fiction.

misc. et. al.

I'm still coughing. Will this disease ever end!

I didn't go to the show (no point in ensuring I stay sick for the rest of the year) and I'm sad. It was cheaper this year than it has been for some time and it looked good. I like the show.

I need to get a flu vax. I must remember to ring my doctor.

This long weekend (show day was monday) I did a lot of lying around coughing. In between bouts, I leveled the dish washer, planted a coffee bean, started to design a new online game, started to type up the names of my brothers books and determined that thyme is a really good companion plant for cabbage. I planted individual cabbage plants near each other some time ago, surrounded by different herbs. They all got chewed nigh unto death except the one nestled in the thyme.

I also managed to delete the sound driver on my computer by accident. I didn't realise it was the sound driver. I thought it was some insignificant extra program I'd installed. I then found that resetting to an earlier system setting, although it should work in XP, kept failing at the last section and freezing up. This is disconcerting. I was assuming I could rest if I screwed something up.

An online search determined that lots of other people have done what I have done and finding the driver requires that you know what your motherboard is. One opened computer later...I found the original disk for that motherboard in my files and happily reinstalled (only wasted about 2 hours and a bunch of my online time).

didn't I mention that?

One of my cousins was emailing me asking how things were. I thought "why isn't she reading my blog? Didn't I tell her about it?" Apparently - No, I didn't. She'd also never heard of them.
When I mentioned this to my mother she said "You never told me you had a blog." .....oops.

I have now passed on the address to my mother and am anticipating comments of a cringeworthy motherly type. Not because my mother is actually like that, but she has a warped sense of humour. Hi mum, Luv ya.

update on 'Lurgy

There's a general feeling I might have had whooping cough after all. Its going around and previously vaccinated people are getting it. As an adult, you don't always get the same symptoms as a child, the very long symptoms (still coughing all night and not doing a full days work) etc. etc though my coush does sound a lot like the one I have a link to.

The green stuff below is taken straight out of http://textbookofbacteriology.net/pertussis.html
The first stage, colonization, is an upper respiratory disease with fever, malaise and coughing, which increases in intensity over about a 10-day period. During this stage the organism can be recovered in large numbers from pharyngeal cultures, and the severity and duration of the disease can be reduced by antimicrobial treatment.

The second or toxemic stage of pertussis follows relatively nonspecific symptoms of the colonizaton stage. It begins gradually with prolonged and paroxysmal coughing that often ends in a characteristic inspiratory gasp (whoop). To hear the characteristic sound of whooping cough click whoop.wav (whoop.wav is copyright of Dr Doug Jenkinson, Nottingham, England. www.whoopingcough.net). During the second stage, B. pertussis can rarely be recovered, and antimicrobial agents have no effect on the progress of the disease.......................................Many young children are vaccinated against whooping cough with the pertussis vaccine. However, the vaccine is only approved for children under seven years of age. Antibody-mediated immunity wanes in approximately ten years, leaving older individuals more susceptible to the disease. Adults get infected, often to a lesser degree, but they are still able to spread the disease to unimmunized children.

Sounds very familiar. This means I may have spread it to Cairns, Kuranda, Mareeba, Innisfail (where I coughed in a very, very crowded Maccas at lunch time) and a few incidental places. I was hygienic with my coughing & did lots of hand washing, and my highly susceptible cousin hasn't come down with it, so maybe I haven't given it to anyone.

I knew I should have got someone to take a nasopharyngeal swab and streaked it out to check for Bordetella pertussis before I started antibiotics. Then I could have added the isolate to the clinical isolate collection in the -80C freezer.
I think the microbiologist in me is showing. We have a general attitude of; "wait, give me a sample/photo of the symptoms/biopsy of what the doctors take out so I can add it to the collection/use it for lectures/cut it up and look down a microscope at it"

Here endeth the microbiology lesson.

still sick but working

After two days off work and sleepless nights spent coughing, I went to the Doctor. She said "You aren't linked to the uni are you? There's whooping cough going around and if you haven't had a booster....." She gave me an antibiotic script just in case, though my cough wasn't whoopy and sent me home for another two days. Turns out the antibiotics were a good thing, as by the next morning I had an obvious and possibly secondary bacterial infection.

It took till Sunday night for the antibiotics to kick in and start cutting the symptoms back. I still haven't had more than three hours sleep a night, and I've wasted a week I could have been finishing my thesis, but I'm feeling better. I know this because I'm not hanging out checking the time, waiting till I can reload all the drugs into my system. BTW Ease-a-cold flue strength rocks!. Instead I'm thinking "hmm symptoms are getting worse again, oh yes, should have taken drugs 2 hours ago."

best bit about being sick for a week: getting to do some fiction reading that I hadn't had time for
most irritating bit: having no appetite for a week, eating very little and still not losing weight


Must get back to grading exams now. If I'm diligent I'll have them finished by tomorrow and can wallow in thesis editing for the rest of the week :)

sick as a dog

My father is a sharing man. He shared his cough with me. I have a chesty cough, a sore throat and a runny nose - and i'm sleepy without being able to sleep. I thought I was feeling better so i came into uni to hide in my office and do some work (so I wouldn't sicken others, I'm not a sharing person). I'm not feeling better. In fact, I've bundled up the exam papers i'm marking and copied my latest version of my thesis onto a dvd (its 128meg in size plus peripheral files) about a gig worth and I'm going home to pretend to work. Ironically, the question I'm up to marking is "name four airborn diseases and a risk factor for them - I'm willing to accept "common cold, Jenny's dad" as one answer right now. When I'm feeling better I will tell you all about my trip to Cairns.

I declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted ...

So close I can smell the rejection letters from the examiners

Updated stats

My thesis, without an introduction, abstract and lists of tables, table of contents etc is now 223 pages long, made up of 63474 words. Just thought i'd let you know.

Bwah ha ha ha

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=145

Its funny if you're doing a PhD

my favourite way to play action adventure computer games

is to sit behind someone else playing and offer advice. This is because I have naff all fine motor control and always stuff up the moves. Yesterday I got my 8 1/2 year old nephew to get Lara Croft (version 2) from level 1 to level 2. I just couldn't get past the spiders. He used much better tactics than me and wiped the floor with them. I like to think I'm better than he is at sideways jumps though.

This is truly, truly awesome

Download it, play it, be blown away
Plasma pong

Have you tried tringo yet?

There is a tetris like game that has been developed called Tringo . It is very popular in Second Life, apparently all the avatars are playing it in the game - wheels within wheels. I have rearranged my computer so that I can play it in the five minute periods before I have to shoot off somewhere without getting asked why I'm not working (ie no-one from outside can see my computer screen anymore). Its not bad, yet another online thing I can waste time on...sort of like blogging really.

Actually, the reason I changed my computer round was that I kept hearing people walk past the door and had no idea who they were or if they were walking in. It was creepy.

Now that I have procrastinated, I'm going off to mark 82 bacterial conjugation pracs.

I blame answering no to do you wear thongs for the low wonderwoman score

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 80% Supergirl 60% Robin 57% Catwoman 50% Hulk 50% Spider-Man 45% Green Lantern 45% The Flash 35% Batman 35% Iron Man 30% Wonder Woman 25%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

some numerical data

My thesis, not including abstract, table of contents, figures or abreviations, or appendices currently is;

words: 56429
sentances: 4646
paragraphs: 2609
pages: 196

average words/sentence:12 words
longest sentence: 115 words

the things you do to avoid actual productive work :)

I should blog

Interesting things are happening. i'm having firsts for lecturing and prac teaching. Life is pretty cool, but i don't have time to blog...maybe later, if i remember it all.

My notebook

is a toshiba satelite A100 with the following specs;
Processor: Core Duo T2300, 1.86GHz
RAM: 512MB
Hard drive: 80GB
DVD: DVD DL super multidrive (+/-/RAM)
Video card: ATI Radeon X1300 64MB
Networking: 10/100 NIC, integrated 802.11 a/b/g
modem: internal 56kbps V.90
connections: 4xUSB 2.0, IEEE 1394, VGA out, S-video, PCMCIA, 5 in 1 card reader, iR, bluetooth, fingerprint reader
Speakers: Harmon Kardon
OS: Windows XP home
monitor: 15.4" TFT
software: 3mth norton antivirus, office student edition
3yr warranty


the fingerprint scanner is frivolous and fun. I still have to buy a good bag and a mouse - I may get a cordless optical one...or a blue tooth one. That way I can play with the bluetooth stuff.

lecture virgin no more

I have given my first lecture for microbiology. DNA replication in bacteria in review. It only lasted 30 minutes, but this is good as it was supposed to be the shortest lecture of the series. The students appeared to be paying attention and I got several down the front afterwards.

I'm about to go off and give the second lecture; Protein synthesis. I'll be using my own laptop this time. More about the new laptop later...when I have time to drool and don't need to be over at the maths physics building.

and the race is on

After a month of stuffing round getting no thesis work done. I bit the bullet and wrote my last chapter on Monday...in one day. I could be a month more advanced than I am if I'd written it in one day a month ago-sigh. Now to formatting

avoiding work...the purpose of this blog

Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot?

Ninja!You are a sneaky Ninja.We don't even know you're there... before it's too late!
Take this quiz!








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I wanna MacBook Pro

Having read the specs and how (quite simply apparently) to run XP on it so I can actually use it at mac averse JCU...I really really like this laptop.
What I do not like is the price. ~$3200
Way beyond my price range. I was getting all whiny at the thought that what I wanted might mean I had to go over two grand. I'd really like to pay less than $1600. Perhaps I can buy 1/2 a MacBook Pro.

Specs I want;
duel core Intel M processor (2gHz)
677MHz, though I'd live with 577
min 512Mb Ram (pref 1G)
Wifi
DVD duel layer Burner
lots of USB ports

Theres more, but that'll do right now

what do you mean there's no computer in the lecture theatre!

I'm looking to buy a laptop this year.
The buy just got urgent as I have found out the lecture theatre I'm supposed to lecture in does not have a computer in it!!!!! Just the peripherals like the data projector (and overhead projector probably). So, if I want to give a lecture using powerpoint rather than old OHTs, I must provide my own computer.

So what should I be looking for?

I think I'd like it to be reasonably fast. Powerpoints can run really slow on the older desktops if you use images (I do)...so maybe I should avoid celeron processors. I'll also probably store scanned photos on it for my family history stuff. I'm unlikely to game on it though.

Any suggestions from the notebook literate?

Yup, a stick I tell you

Got another one this morning. I'm getting better at the " The report is a little enthusiastic. While future work may result in human therapy, my work was a foundation for further research & it doesn't really have a punchy tag for you to do an article about." I'm also getting better at explaining what bacteriophage are.

By the time this is over, I'll have a much better handle on what info to have available to the media prior to their talking to me.

beating them off with a stick....

...or at least two of them.
I had someone from the school newsletter interview me about my PhD (slow news day). She sent me the article - which was hugely misinterpretable and made it sound like I had just about cured cancer (or my disease) so my supervisor and I fixed the worst misscommunications and sent it back. This is the problem with trying to explain pure science in laymans terms and give them a reference point. I should have done more to squelch her enthusiasm as it then went to all the news outlets across Australia I think.

I just had to have a conversation with an associated press person (another slow news day) and explain that what I was doing was foundation science without any immediate practical application to human health. I did say that in the long term, should we get funding and students to do the work, the work I had done would be a foundation for possible human therapy. I should have made that clearer to the first interviewer, but practice makes perfect I guess.

I gave her some names of people with more interest in current human treatment etc., who also have experience with the press, so hopefully she will completely forget about me.

As a scientist, who may need public interest in my work to achieve funding, I should be more eager to talk to the Press - but I'm not. I'll happily write them something, but talking to them fills me with dread.

edited because I can't spell

Larry induced injuries

I have a 10cm cut on my arm with a blue smear around it the size of a 10 cent piece (internal bleeding) and a bad knee causing a limp. Both of these were due to injuries recieved while cleaning up the yard to avoid flying debris should the cyclone hit us. Apart from that I am well and since we were virtually unaffected by Larry, I find these injuries ironic.

On other ironic news, I officially started my short term lecturing contract yesterday and spent it at home doing odd jobs. Good start to the full time job. I'm a day behind in my schedule already.

Cyclone Larry

After spending yesterday afternoon lugging everything under the house and filling up those things that couldn't be lugged in with water and tying them up, taping windows, putting washing machines up on bricks, and generally preparing for the worst....we have light persistant rain, and mild winds (rain at about 45 degrees). I've put up the best windy picture I got - palm trees always look so effective in wind. This is one of the neighbours houses, I wasn't going to tramp out into the rain to take a photo of mine.

Dad and I both have the day off work - organised last night when they shut down the uni for 24 hours and told the contractors at the army not to come in. This cyclone was taken seriously. I guess the speed at which it approached and the rapid upgrading to huge cyclone (cat 5), was taken seriously by those in charge. I'm spending the day doing all those things I don't have time for usually.

My to do list will get shorter at least, but I don't think the people in Innisfail are appeciating that right now. I'd be very surprised if there are no fatalities. Its supposed to be the biggest to hit the east coast for 100 years. Dad says there was one that hit Mackay about 100 years ago that almost wiped out Mackay permanently. Leonta hit Townsville in 03-04 (1903 that is) I think, and it was very destructive too.

Hmm, getting more windy, rainy and grey, maybe I should get off line now.

Living dangerously

If when driving at 100km an hour down the highway, the car starts to vibrate and feels like you are going at high speed over corrugations whilst pushing a 2 stroke lawn mower, do you;

A) stop the car on the side of the road and check for obvious problems
B) slow down, annoying all the other cars and drive more slowly to limit any damage
C) assume its the engine problem you think you have getting worse and stay at 100 since its only another 50km till you get home and how much worse can it get.

Actually it was my rear right tyre separating and the vibrations were due to the egg on the top. After I got home and described the symptoms, my dad said it was exactly this and that my tyre was going to blow out...very soon, so I shouldn't drive on it at all. It was probably only prayer that was the reason it didn't blow while I was doing 100km/hr on a highway with traffic in both directions. My mother was the one who noticed the two, 10cm long wires sticking out of the tyre. I put the spare on this morning and will be spending $140 as soon as I finish here.

and in conclusion....

my exit seminar (now known as a pre-completion seminar) went well. At least it did after the ship anchor otherwise known as the lecture room laptop was replaced with Brendas working laptop. So I started about 7 minutes late.
My supervisor said I looked flushed and nervous to start with, but after the second slide I was away. My friends said they understood it up to the second slide. My mother said she understood most of it, though many of the grad students and academics said they understood very little. My mum is very smart, and has had the advantage of listening to me explain my work to her over the last...egad...seven years. My father fell asleep. This was not an uncommon occurance, several academics looked very sleepy too.
My student monitor (he who must be appeased and approve the PhD) was happy with it. He picked up that I had written MgOH, not Mg(OH)2 . I was suitably mortified after I'd said no, it shouldn't be MgOH2 (which is what I thought he was asking) and then thought the charges through and realised what he was saying. Me with a chemistry degree and all.

I had drinks afterwards and popped my Melbourne cup champagne (Killawarra brut). It was very nice and the cork suitabley hit the ceiling and ricocheted off tables whilst people ducked.

Doom doom de doom

Today is the day. Exit seminar to be given at 2pm. I'll let you know how it went.

Anxiety and a raised heartbeat - though you wouldn't know it to look at me

I practiced my exit seminar in front of my supervisor today. I remember thinking at the beginning "wow my heart is beating fast, it doesn't move like this at my peak exercise rate" and "I'm sure I'm not nervous, after all, we're both expecting him to be shred my talk because my emphasis will be wrong"

Then I sensibly focussed on something else before the "If this is how fast my heart beats when I think I'm relaxed and have one person in the audience, how bad will I be with 30" thought could be fully expressed to make me have a panic attack.

Of course, then I couldn't look at Leigh because every time he made a note, my mind went "noooooooo! I've screwed something up"

In the end the main comments were "No-one in the audience is going to understand this work, you need to hold their hand a little more and use pictures" and " show how much work those protocols you describe in one sentence actually were...with pictures mainly" :)

So, I'm off to play with pictures.

my best effort for an eeuugh!

Is there no way you can end up with an unattractive tartan? I really tried

Och Aye the Noo

http://houseoftartan.co.uk/interactive/weaver/index.html

This would be my tartan based on the colours I liked, in the order I liked, with the number of threads I liked...now, what would happen if I picked a really bad mix....

animal picture 2

This is my favourite pic, the second of the suicidal echidnas. After I took this shot, it curled up in a ball because it didn't like the flash.

animal picture 1

here is the skink Dr Clam was commenting on

hmm, I thought I'd be sabre

At least, thats what the questions made me think

what kind of fencer are you

You are an epee fencer. Epee is a weapon of deceit and guile. You tend to take your time and counter-attack. You can touch your opponent anywhere at any time. What Kind of Fencer Are You?

Animals I saw on my holiday

lots of wallabies
two echidnas - both suicidally crossing roads, confident in their ability to take out the tyres of anyone foolish enough not to swerve
multiple birds
bumblebees
a snake crossing my path that turned and reared at me as though to strike as I moved away from it. Discussion with a Tasmanian has resulted in a probable identification as a tiger snake, aggressive and quite venomous. That could have been the end of my holiday then and there.
sheep
cows
marsupial mice
ducks
a skink
hmm there were probably more but they elude me

been on Holidays

Back. many pictures (1.6Gb worth). lots done. write soon.

I'm now updating my exit seminar (or pre-completion seminar as it is now called) and making a decision about whether I want to say I'd be willing to do full time job for first semester to teach some of 2nd year micro. I would, I've just never lectured before. I will sleep on it. If I say yes, it will then have to go higher to be approved anyway.

Goodies, goody goody yum yum

Can't write long, doing killer hours to finish PhD thesis, just had to say...The Goodies Rock!

I went to the last Goodies live on stage show in Australia last Sunday, thanks to a birthday gift voucher from Dot. It was hilarious. Graham hasn't changed at all...except for the increasing girth and lack of hair. Actually he looks quite different, but he sounds and acts the same. He alsways was my favourite Goodie. I think because he was the scientist.

They sang Wild Thing to close off and said that we could ignore the no camera bit during that and just flash away. Of course I'd left my camera at home since the ticket said no cameras to be taken into the auditorium...lawful-good alignment. An awful lot of people pulled out cameras though. Shame on them. I'm so jealous of their happy snaps :(

Twinsen!

After about two years of trying to get the old classic Twinsen to play on multiple versions of windows, I sat down and did a web search to see if anyone else had a solution. Apparently I am not alone in my love of Twinsens Adventure. There are whole chat sites devoted to it....and you can't get it to play under windows (its a DOS game). Unless of course you get the patch someone has written just so you can play it on the more advanced computers. They've even put a maximum speed limiter on it so the faster processors don't make it run too fast. Last night I played it for a whole hour (after reading some papers for my thesis).

The only issue I have is the very weird save game system that I'd forgotten about. Its very easy to screw something up and not be able to go back to an earlier version. You have to save a copy and then you play the original. If you screw up, make a copy of the copy before you play it or you could end up screwing up again and the original copy will be updated with the screw up.

Speaking of my thesis, I'm currently enjoying writing lit review and feeling frustrated if I have to go do something else....weird...must take advantage of this aberation and go write some more :)

As I write....

As I write my thesis, I find more and more papers that cover more and more stuff, and reference more and more papers I have not come across yet. How can this be? Before I was seriously writing and was only looking for general reviews and specific stuff regarding what I wanted to experiment on, I couldn't find 1/2 of what I wanted, let alone all this extra stuff.
I remember saying, this will be an easy subject to literature review, there's not much literature....ha ha ha ha.

Was it just that my searches were too finely focussed? As I recall, I was searching for "bacteriophage". Maybe I was just blind to things that didn't sound, in my ignorance, to be relevant to my subject...sigh. I have 4 inches of papers to go through at the moment (just my A priority ones) and I can't get through more than 2 per day as I keep zooming off finding more related to them, then more related to those. And now that the 45 page review I just found has finished printing. I think I'll take it home to read.

I'd put it up as an ID pic if I could figure out how in 5 minutes

This is the hat that won me a bottle of champers yesterday.

I win alcohol - ironic.

Twice in the last six months I have won alcohol...and I don't drink. Why oh why does this not transfer to winning flights to Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane that are being drawn every day in the local bulletin?

First it was a bottle of 20yr old 100pipers scotch whiskey (now in my cupboard for my brother for Christmas) and today at the Melbourne cup luncheon I won the best hat competition. I raided my herb garden this morning and covered my brown straw hat with all the flowering herbs - fennel, chives, thyme - and then added roses and grandfathers whiskers and a few other odds and sods. I now am the possessor of a bottle of Killawarra brut. It may end up my contribution to the christmas hamper.

Dim and Damp Mothership

http://www.corknut.org/toys/levelname/

Apparently A good name for a level of an alien game is as above...It seems now you don't have to be creative at any sort of RPG naming..

And another;

In the Construct of Decay

doom doom doom

mine is bigger than yours

I have a new computer at uni. It took the computer guy about 3.5 hours to get all my data and settings onto it. I can now do things at a reasonable speed and all my software works again. (This is the important part). It is also sleek and black and shiny and slender with a 19 inch, skinny, flat screen monitor (This is the fun part). Stats are as below. For some reason it seems to have three video cards - according to the computer guy. No idea why.

LCD monitor AL1912BM 19" black

Veriton 3700G computer
microsoft XP prof
CPU : p4 550 w/ HT technology (3.4GHz 1MB L2 cache 800MHz FSB)
Memory: 1024MB 3200 DDR-SDRAM
hard drive: 120GB S-ATA hard drive (7200rpm)
16x dual layer DVD burner
floppy drive
Graphics ATI Radeon X300se 128MB VGA TV out PAL graphics card
integrated 10/100/1000 LAN

milestones

Woo-hoo, chapter 7 is written...except for the results of the experiment I need to repeat once I get the equipment back from being fixed...but that won't take too long. Woo-hoo

the copying VHS saga

Having had no-one reply to my blog about my new tv tuner card with high tech geeky mumbo jumbo, I have been forced to slave along alone. This is what I have found;

After giving my frizbees to someone else to check on their DVD player, four of the eight variations I did have worked....but they won't play on mine. My DVD player won't play things other people have burned either, unless they have been burned on DVD-. So I tried that and lo and behold it worked. I have a DVD- player...I didn't think that players were that specific

I also bought a new aerial with FM/UHF/VHF/Digital TV compatable/adjustable gain. I opened the box and it was sitting loose and had no instructions. I couldn't get it to give me reception anywhere near as good as my 30yr old VHF aerial, so I took it back. I'll try another brand when I get over the trauma of that episode.

I also bought a set of swanky, gold covered video and audio cables so I'm not using the aerial cable to connect the video. This reduces the static but the noice is still cloudy, like my ears are blocked a little, though very loud. I found a site on the web talking about sound recording problems in general and how to fix them. Unfortunately most of the things they suggest, like setting the gain to 1x instead of 2-4x I can't even get access to. I don't seem to have the settings. (SoundMAX audio card)

I don't have an S-video video player, so I can't do that (apparently the audio is better on them)
I've checked the capture rates I'm using and they are better than the suggested ones.
I've tried turning down as much sound as I can find - apparently if the sound is set on max, the sound card can't cope. If the different parts are set on different sound settings, it can't cope.

So far this hasn't helped. I may try putting them just above zero, though it said signal to noise got crappy if sound was too low as well.

The last thing I still have to try is to look for ground loops - but I need to look up how to do that. The page I found had lots of stereo system stuff that I have to sort through to find sound card stuff.

Stay tuned. Heh.

what sort of humour?

I had a go at this after checking out Dave's site and rather than write up all the details, I'm using their coding....more on the video recording epic later

the Cutting Edge (61% dark, 46% spontaneous, 5% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | SPONTANEOUS | DARK Your humor's mostly innocent and off-the-cuff, but somehow there's something slightly menacing about you. Part of your humor is making people a little uncomfortable, even if the things you say aren't themselves confrontational. You probably have a very dry delivery, or are seriously over-the-top. Your type is the most likely to appreciate a good insult and/or broken bone and/or very very fat person dancing. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: David Letterman - John Belushi The 3-Variable Funny Test! - it rules - If you're interested, try my latest: The Terrorism Test

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 77% on darkness You scored higher than 50% on spontaneity You scored higher than 0% on vulgarity

Monday, September 12, 2005 I take it back I just commented on http://evildrclam.blogspot.com/ that I was still anonymous enough not to get spam....3 spams later....must get comment screener like accidental blog has. The new toy As part of my tax return, I got myself a TV tuner card for my computer (AVERTV 303 from memory). It can pick up FM radio, TV and, my prime reason for buying, copy my old VHS videos so I can put them on DVD and get rid of the 1/2 cubic meter of VHS tapes. Just what I need, another task involving hours of fiddling with computers. The FM radio works great. I have a remote and can switch FM/TV channels while lying in bed. On Saturday I bought a new aerial so that I could actually pick up channels. Then I found that the reception sucked for everything except channel ten and the cable was too short to shift the aerial round. So I swapped it with my parents 20 year old aerial with 2 meters of cable. This worked better for both of us, I got better reception, as strangely enough so did they. They also got an aerial that doesn't fall off the tv everytime the wind blows the curtain - the new one has sucker pads. Of course the reception is still not great for non ten channels. I suspect I should have spent more than $10 and got an aerial that actually advertised that it worked for UHF - I think 10 is VHF and the others aren't. This is pure guesswork on my part though. Once the TV was ok - sort of -, I tested that it would record TV channels and it seemed to record onto my computer at the same resolution I was seeing on the live feed. So I attached my video and an old copy of Star trek the next generation. The one where Data gets a girlfriend. After much hassle, I discovered that TV channel 68 picked up the video. The TV sound wasn't great but picture was ok. From the help menu, it seemed that video should have been picked up by composite or Svideo - I think the former rather than the latter as the cabel attachment diagram for Svideo was different. Neither worked though. Then came the real hassle. After recording to computer in DVD format (which seems to be a DVD compatable version of MPEG-II), I tried recording to DVD. Four frizbees and three different software programs later, I still can't get my DVD player to identify the DVD. It will work with VCD versions I burned with ROXIO videowave though. Part of the problem is that I have light versions of my burning software and they cunningly leave out DVD parts. The other part is the bits of them I can use to record TV/video seem to want to record channel 4 - which is a blue screen, and I'm having trouble changing that and getting them to pick up video anyway. Nero says it will burn to DVD but that function only picks up *.ivo, *.vob and some other non-recognisable file format. None of which are files I seem to be able to make. Power DVD seemed happy to make a DVD from mpeg, but my DVD player just didn't recognise it. I may actually have to buy some proper software and get rid of all the others. Even if I get that working, as I suspected from when I played the files on my computer, video playback sound is atrocious. I played the VCD on my DVD player and the old VHS tape. The image quality is identical but the sound went to pot. I may have to get different sound cabling. Apparently you can get a cable that has separate left and right cables (or was it sound and audio) from the video and then a single other end to plug into the card (rather than the old aerial type connection). I am so going to understand this by the time I get it working - aren't computers fun. Feel free to add comments/advice containing weird acronyms and high tech geeky mumbo jumbo. Monday, August 22, 2005 The fellowship of the extended version On my trip to Ayr to scrapbook last weekend my cousin and I decided to watch all three extended versions of LOTR...in one day. Twelve hours later, at 1am, I was thinking - even more than I did when I saw it at the cinema - hurry up and get on the ship and finish this thing! I must say I liked the extra scenes with the hobbits and Frodo still annoyed my with his constant worried eyebrow look. But now I've done it. I too have seen the the entire extended epic. The next day I was violently ill in the evening. I'm blaming too much TV - maybe I should have slowly become aclimatised to LOTR by watching the short verions one at a time again...maybe eating sugary stuff all day didn't help either. Wednesday, August 17, 2005 a new internet game I've been going to pubmed ( a medical/health data base) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi and doing searches on the words NASA And "word of interest" and seeing how many research papers turn up. 19 for bacteriophage. Its amazing what NASA is involved with. I got interested because a woman here is looking at a protein in crustaceans and she found they have been taking crabs up into space to look at muscle wastage (craaaabs in spaaaace). Then someone else piped up with the research done on gut flora to try to avoid methane built up in spacesuits...faaarts in spaaace! heh. Sunday, August 14, 2005 The big weekend This has been something of an event filled weekend for me. I went to Gem club on Friday night and sawed a couple of rocks in half for my nephew, then after a late night, I had a very full Saturday. My cousin and I went to Creative Memories Scrapbooking day and scrapbooked all day, with a break for lunch - caesar salad at the Blue Bottle cafe - yum. Afterwards we walked down Gregory street to the Strand and watched the "Living Heroes" parade for VP60 day. Lots of veterans in very nice old cars, plus some very large pieces of current military equipment and people..the machines were large, not the people. After that we went down to the beach with the old picnic blanket and ate beef in lime and coriander with noodles (using chopsticks - in the dark) and waited for the fireworks display - we had a ring side seat. A jet went by at the end and hit the afterburners so we had a very impressive show. Today I went to the memorial for the Battle of Porton (1945). My Cousin Bill (or rather my dads cousin), fought in it and was one of four survivors to unveil the plinth commemorating those who fought and those who died there. The death toll was pretty shocking and all who spoke said something about the tactical decision making to send the men in being badly flawed. The battle had been swept under the carpet until the daughter of one of the commanders wrote a book this year which brought it to the attention of those who make decisions about such things as memorials. Since Townsville was having VP60 this year, and most of the men at Porton came from Townsville regiments, they made a memorial at Anzac park. As my cousin Bill said, "about bally time". Now I'm at uni setting up the freeze drier to refresh some silica beads. Speaking of which.... Tuesday, August 09, 2005 Sick of Pink I have backslidden (is that a word even?) and am playing with my blog instead of getting to grips with rewriting a chapter, as I should be doing this morning. Having finally had my eyeballs peeled away enough by the colour of my blog so that I can't stand the pink anymore, I'm going green...but only in a colourific way. Hmm, as I glance down at myself, I realise I am also dressed completely in green - except the red socks. I wonder if there is a subconcious reason for all the green? Monday, August 08, 2005 Finally waking up I was tired all week last week. I even went home early and had a nap on Monday. Then last night I had broken sleep so I'm tired again this morning. I've been grumpy and short with people and part of my broken sleep is from waking up with adrenaline surges from dreaming about being grumpy and short with people. I'm now on my second cup of strong black Redback percolated coffee (from malanda) and I'm waking up. I may actually get some productive work done today. I resent being dependant on "drugs" to function though. I should be alert even when coffee free. I just know if I go cold turkey off the coffee it will be futile in the long run because I'm hooked on the whole coffee culture, Gloria Jeans white chocolate Mochas. I'll just end up needing it again after a week of suffering through withdrawal fatigue. Tuesday, August 02, 2005 Too many people with the same name I got an email this morning entitled "Daves Food Joke" so I clicked on it and was terribly confused. "When did Dave join Dietpower?" I wondered..."and why?" Then I realised it was a different Dave. There should only be one. Didn't they watch Highlander? Monday, August 01, 2005 So tired after a week off I spent most of last week in Cairns at Ridges on the Esplanade at a conference on aquatic animal health. I had a really good time, made contacts, met up with people, discussed my thesis and a kit I'm designing for Tropbio and ate lots and lots. Ryutaro took us to a Japanese cafteria behind the night markets the first night - big yummy servings. The second night he took Kerry and I to Shamogen (I think). It was a more formal Japanese restaurant and was absolutely delicious. I ate japanese dishes I hadn't heard of and was taught how to eat them properly. Shibu shibu is my favourite. I also found a custard I actually like instead of despise. Its a savoury egg custard and tastes nothing like custard :) We topped off the night, after two hours of eating, with green tea icecream and bean paste. I still haven't quite recovered. I'm very tired at the moment so I think I'll go home early. I've finished evaporating paraformaldehyde to sterilise the PC3 lab, so I don't have to be here till 9am tomorrow - nap time I think. Its not like I'm getting anything else of value done. I thought of going to chat to a bank and a medical insurance company about changing to them, but it just seems too difficult. Not to mention its cool and rainy here and great weather to be in bed. Monday, July 11, 2005 after the weekend... I have to start eating sensibly now...I tried to write sensibly 3 times before I got it right, is my subconcious fighting me? On Friday night I went to Sizzlers and had pork spare ribs. There were a lot more ribs than I thought there would be. Juicy, tender, not fatty, lots of meat. mmmm. On Saturday I went out to "The Point" on the Strand to eat. Also very Yummy. Sunday I was quite restrained. Mum is going back to Target today to return the toaster I bought on Saturday and get another one. The one we bought browns well on one side and not at all on the other. I'm told this is a reasonably common toaster problem. Surely it would be easy to get toast to cook on both sides? Friday, July 08, 2005 busy, busy, busy I have been meaning to write my blog for about a week and a half..I've just been so busy..lets see if I can remember what I was going to write. The reason I've been busy. I went on a "Finishing your thesis - defeating self sabotage" course at the beginning of last week. It was enlightening and was run by a couple of clinical psychologists from Flinders Uni. They run it down there regularly and have seen all personality types and self defeating behaviours and thought patterns. Your mind can be very sneaky. It was possibly the best course I've been on with respect to getting personalised training. They didn't lecture on general types, they asked specific questions and gave specific advice. Anyway, thats why I've been busy. Having realised how I was mentally shooting myself in the foot, I am now writing from 9am to 12pm Monday through Wednesday, and doing anything else after that (Thursday and Friday I'm employed to do something else). It has to be real writing too, not fantasy writing. The definition of fantasy writing here is tidying tables and formatting things, changing fonts etc. Real writing puts down actual sentences that move you forward. I wrote 8 pages on Monday. Now of course I've caught up to my lab work so my real writing time is spent analysing all the sequence data I have produced, and writing down the results :) Doing all this work in the am means that I then have lots of small, but not mentally taking, tasks to do in the afternoon - hence no time to blog. The show/s Its show time again and there were two this year. For those who haven't kept up on the Townsville gossip, there was a disagreement between the show organisers and the sideshow people as to the rental cost of space at the show this year, so the sideshow people had their own show elsewhere. I won't go into the various gossip and slander about what went on behind the scenes/who's at fault, as thats all it is and I really don't know for sure, but I went to the real show, being more interested in displays and competitions than in rides. It only cost $5 this year and felt much more like a country show that the Townsville one. Not crowded, fewer rides etc. I liked it but even the displays were fewer in number. There had been a lot of furor before the show and I think a lot of people were'nt sure what would be happening so they didn't enter this year. I think next year I might enter the cooking section. I did the usual look at the winning entries and think "I'm sure I could do better than that"...so next year I'll put my cake were the judges mouth is and know for sure. Birfday...or Brithday as I usually type On Sunday I will be exactly half way through my alloted years. Mum and Dad and I are going out tonight to Sizzlers to celebrate. Tomorrow My cousin and her mum and I will go somewhere else to celebrate. Sunday I'll be all eaten out and will give it a miss :) Speaking of food My diet finishes tonight. I should actually do another week for the few times I broke it for special occasions, but I also broke it almost everyday this week - and especially after the show.:S I think overall I lost 3kg. I had gotten down to 4kg off, but I was naughty too often. Now my plan is to eat reasonably sensibly for a month or so but increase my excersize (from almost none to the advised amount). If that doesn't lose a bit more, I'm going on the 7 day diet again. If I can get down to 70kg and stay there I'll be quite happy, and healthy enough to avoid diet induced diabetes. I have, over the last 3 weeks, ridden my bike to uni once a week - twice last week. This may not sound like much but is a huge improvement on not at all. I also mowed on Saturday - which I consider the equivalent of walking up castle hill, only with a benefit to other people as well. I also dipped my toe in the water with respect to castle hill climbing. Last week I parked at the top of Gregory street and walked up to the first castle hill park, where I used to leave the road and go up the goat track. Then I turned round and walked back down. I broke a sweat and felt my leg muscles working, just by doing the bit I used to do as a warm up/down. ZSigh, some way to go in the fitness stakes. Vouchers Tomorrow I will take my mother out to the Willows and buy her a new toaster with some of my shopping vouchers. The pop up part of hers has broken and the toast will keep cooking unless you manually remove it. There's almost a tradition in my family of giving my mother white goods as presents. She seems to appreciate them a lot more than flowers, though not as much as chocolates. Monday, June 27, 2005 I was having a good weekend... Then my budgie made a mad dash for freedom. I was cleaning out the cage and while my back was turned Marc Antony slipped under the gap and vanished. When I turned back he was gone. My father thaought he'd seen something out the front and sure enough I saw the budgie fly onto a palm tree across the road. When I went over he wouldn't come down to me. We tried bringing the other budgie cage over and me eating a piece of bread (which usually results in budgie feet all over my toast in the moring if I'm not careful). Nothing worked. Then the wind blew, the palm frond fluttered, he slipped off and flew off into the sunset. He hasn't come back. I'm told they don't if they get out, but he was so tame I was hoping when he got hungry he'd come home to eat. I left out cages with the door open and food inside, nothing so far. It's pretty cold and wet out today though. If he hasn't been eaten by a hawk and he isn't completely lost by now (a distinct possibility) he might come home. It's not like he'll find a mate, there aren't budgies around Townsville at the moment. Mum says I should ring up 4TO and put in a lost pet advert. I'm also looking after a baby chicken right now - I'm calling him/her Solo, as she/he was the only one to hatch out of a batch in the incubator at uni. When it's big enough it will join the flock out here - or be lunch, depending on whether its a boy or a girl. the big prize spending I've spent more of my prize money. I ate $20 worth of salmon steaks over the weekend mmmmm yum. I had about 4 meals out of it. I also got myself a new pair of knee high leather boots. My old vinyl boots are dead and these are very nice corelli boots which were on a 50% off sale too :) So some of my weekend was great and some was just a fizzer. I'm so conflicted. Wednesday, June 15, 2005 My shopping list Given that I probably won't be able to get a car CD player from Target, I have developed something of a list of options, in no particular order they are; Deluxe facial from Elle Bache MP3 player with voice record function cappuccino maker - one of the girls at uni got a sunbeam one for ~$160 from target that got a big thumbs up from her barista friend salmon fillets swanky dress from one of the expensive shops I usually just look in from the outside leather knee high boots (I'm partial to boots and my last pair self destructed this year) the biggest box of chocolates from Darryl Lea :).... How much did I get again? Thats at least $500 worth to pick from and I got $300. Feel free to add to my list if you think of something cool that the Willows will sell. Tuesday, June 14, 2005 It was a good weekend while it lasted In spite of having to come out to uni on Monday to set up some experiments, I had a good long weekend. It started with a hens night on Friday involving much gourmand pizza making. I have discovered that artichoke hearts on pizza is yummy and calabrese salami really is the best pizza salami. I also made dessert pizza (or desert pizza as I mentioned to Amanda). You get a base, pour chocolate sauce over it then jelly lollies and marshmallows, then cook till marshmallows are brown and spread over pizza. There were many complements. The weekend continued with me winning $300 worth of shopping vouchers at the Willows cent sale. I will go out today and pick them up. I still haven't decided what to buy, I do need a new CD player in the car, but I don't know if they have such things at the Willows. What I will be buying are some salmon fillets to celebrate..yum yum. Then my parents came home form their overseas trip and I have been feeding them while they are jet lagged. Last night I cooked a whole barramundi that I had in the freezer. Delicious, melt in your mouth mmmm. I think theres enough for two more meals :). They also brought me home thorntons chocolates, my favourite brand. Hmm, I think my whole weekend was food related. No wonder it was great :D Tuesday, May 31, 2005 Chapter 5 The latest chapter I handed my supervisor has been handed back with a "please sit down, think about what it is you want to acheive with this and try to rewrite, possibly with flow charts" comment. Apparently I managed to write a chapter that even the supervisor, who knows what I'm doing, couldn't follow. He said he tried his best but it was beyond him. Oh well, more work to do I guess. On an up note, I just counted my sequencing and I have a total of 38 000 bases of DNA sequenced for my next chapter...almost done there :) Tuesday, May 24, 2005 A week later.... It took me a whole week to get over the bleary, tired phase of no coffee. If it weren't for the fact I enjoy my cappuccinos so much, I'd seriously consider not starting drinking again when the diet is off. Strangely I have had no actual coffee cravings, or any other cravings for that matter. I went off the idea of chocolate in a matter of days, in spite of the lindt chocolates sitting on the bench. This is the only diet I've been on where I've had a whole week without feeling deprived in some way, I hope that doesn't mean I'm not going to lose any weight. "No pain no loss" sort of thing. On related news, I set the kitchen on fire on Sunday....or at least a pan, but with great presence of mind, and thinking about how badly I could splash burning oil round the kitchen if I was foolish enough to pick up the pan, I picked up the lid and dropped it over the top, thus putting it out. Then I spent ten minutes with windows and doors open, fanning the fire alarm to stop it beeping. Nice to know it works. I'm now at stage two of my "while my parents are away I'm going to clean up the house" plan. I've tidied up the kitchen and done the household tasks that needed doing before my parents left. Now under the house. I'm going to haul out everything beside where the car is parked and repack it in some form of order with shelving involved. It doesn't help that most of this is bits of wood and metal my dad thinks will come in handy someday. I expect it will take all weekend. Next weekend I have to have the kitchen cleared out as the renovators (read my uncle and aunt who have a house repair/renovation company) will be coming to gut the kitchen to build our new one. After all my efforts to clean, the house will be in disaster phase at just about the time my parents get back....of course. Monday, May 16, 2005 Very Sleepy I'm very sleepy. This is not a good way to start what will be a very busy week. I think part of it is that we are having a cold snap here and I just want to curl up in my nice warm bed. The other part is that my parents went to Scotland on Saturday, so I have the house to myself which is a little out of my normal habits. Not to mention I took them to the airport on Saturday morning and had to get up at 4:20am to do it. They will be tireder than me though. I calculated they were travelling for 38 hours to get to Edinborough. I also started a diet on Saturday so there may be toxins releasing from my liver as I type. Thursday, May 12, 2005 A chapter!!! I have finally handed in chapter 5 of my thesis to my supervisor. Now I'm working on materials and methods - for a quickie hand in to make it look like I've done more work :) I'd be writing it now, but I'm getting bleary and I'm filling in time till the tangential flow cell is finished and I can go home. Monday, May 09, 2005 Juicer I have a new juicer and went to the markets yesterday to buy some fruit and veg. So far I've tried apple and carrot and apple carrot and rockmelon - yum, also easy to clean. I was going to try beetroot in there too and ginger, but I forgot to buy ginger and I've missplaced the beetroot. The juicer can also make sorbet, mince meat, make pasta and shave ice (though I think you need another attachment for that). I'm going to freeze some apple and make apple sorbet this week. I also saw a pizza maker which makes pizza in 5 minutes. I tried it - crispy on the bottom, golden on the top, gourmet style - amazing...If I had a couple of hundred dollars free I might be eating a lot of pizza. Pink nails I am currently typing this with nails almost 2cm long - plastic, pink nails. I thought I'd try the technology and see if it had improved since the last time I tried. It has. The nails look very realistic, are glued on with an instant set very strong glue (don't glue your fingers together - or worse, your eyelids) and seem able to weather the pounding I'm giving them. Most people think they are acrylic, professionally attached nails, so I must have done a good job. Downside; typing is hard, doing up buttons is really hard and there are some other things that you have to pay a lot of attention to so you don't injure yourself while doing them. Upside; I have long pink nails :) ..... Usually my nails are short, bitten and broken. And the fingernail polish is chipped within 5 minutes of application. Wednesday, May 04, 2005 as promised, I'm writing more I said I'd write more and so I am. That chapter I was talking about last month is three paper references away from handing to my supervisor. I found that I'd made an erroneous assumption in my discussion and had to edit, but on the up side, I found a paper discussing something I'd given up on finding an example of. I spent last long weekend house sitting - air conditioning, 1m wide flat screen tv, extensive cable channels, evening strolls round the hills of Yarrawonga, looking at houses I'll never be able to afford...I didn't get very much work done. Maybe next long weekend I'll clean out under the house :) In two weeks my parents are going on holidays for a month to Scotland. I'm taking this opportunity to go on the liver cleansing diet, as I've gained a lot of weight and this is a good way to clean out all the garbage in my system prior to seriously not eating junk food. I've done it before and know that there's no way I'll do it if there are other people in the house wanting to use the kitchen. You actually have to do proper meal preparation for it and it's too complicated doing that if my mother is cooking for other people at the same time. My mum is buying a juicer - just in time - fresh vegetable juice is on the diet list. (I just skipped that part last time). And before you wrinkle your nose up, the next door neighbours have let us sample some of their vegetable juices and they are really lovely. The trick is to put a bit of fruit in to sweeten it. Tuesday, April 26, 2005 Anzac day long weekend Apart from shopping for a pair of shorts on Saturday and coming in to uni on Sunday and Monday to work - a PhD is never done - the only stuff I did was some scanning of my mothers old documents on the weekend. Appropriately I found a picture of my great uncle Arthur in WW2 uniform - he survived. Of more interest was the photocopy of an original letter sent by my great uncle Victor to his mother (my great grandmother) at the end of WW2 from Singapore. He had been a POW and talked about building a railway line in thailand and Burma and being in Changi. Also about who had died there that his mother would have known and about what Singapore was like after being freed. I'll have to figure out how to attach it to this site. Lastly I found postcards from my great-great uncle William who went to Canada, enlisted for the great war from there and died in France. I think he's buried at the Somme - but I'd have to look that up. Tuesday, April 19, 2005 my head, my aching head I've had splitting eyestrain induced headaches and shoulder and back aches on and off for almost a week, held at bay only by wearing my glasses constantly and sleeping...and one night even that didn't help - with an early morning wakeup followed by vomitting. On Friday I had a massage and was told I was completely locked up. I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel this week with conciencious glasses wearing and I decided to ride to work today...and left them at home in my purse. This wouldn't be too disastrous if I had lab work to do today, but all I have to do till 12:45pm is writing on the computer and reading - sigh - and I'm not riding home to get them. I might set my timer to ten minutes and do infinite distance staring every 10 minutes to change focus. How I suffer for my PhD. Monday, April 18, 2005 googling et al Thanks to Marco's gratuitous addition of links to this page on all the blogs he's commented on, googling "Jenny's Procrasrination page" now pops up Otherblog as the first hit...with the ability to then find my page. Strangely enough, lexifab didn't come up (on the first page of hits anyway). Anyhoo, I now feel obliged to write my blog more often than once every two or three weeks. I'm writing now while I wait for the bacticinerator to heat up. Guess what that does :) On the weekend I went with my mother to a cooking demonstration on preparing low GI meals - which is useful for diabetics as my mother is - and I came to the conclusion that if I don't lose 10kg I gained over the last year and keep it off, I'll probably end up diabetic myself. So I had fish and chips for lunch today. I think my subconcious goes "quick, she's about to cut back on the junk, lets get one last feed in". Must go, bacticinerator awaits. Wednesday, April 06, 2005 sigh I had a depressing talk with my supervisor yesterday. We were trying to see how much more I needed to do on my PhD by seeing how many papers I could write from it as an estimate of whether an examiner would pass it. The problem is, all of the "lets find something new" aspects of my work have given me lots of information - but nothing new. So I have lots to write up, but nothing to really write a good paper on. My paid research work however has a world first paper I have to write up - shame it doesn't count toward the PhD. I'm going to try two more things now, once again, if nothing else they'll give me more to write up - hopefully they'll work well enough though to be the breakthrough. On an up note I've filed away the just over a foot of papers I had piled up for chapter 5 - so my office is cleaner looking. I've finished the referencing. Now I have to rewrite so someone other than myself can follow the logic of it all. :) . This chapter will be shorter than the last (at about 7000 words instead of 10000) and I may send a copy to Chris to look at. If I'm really good I'll burn him a copy of both of the research chapters I've written. 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