The meaning of Manchester

The lack of posts over the last week has mainly been due to me moving house.  I'm finally into a new place, my own place.  Its in the suburb of Lyneham, one of the more studenty districts, but the place is close to the suburb of Dickson and Dickson shops, a larger shopping area than most of the suburbs have, with an entire street of asian restaurants, multiple Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, Lao, Thai etc etc.  It even has three, yes three, different Vietnamese restautants.  Plus a host of Oriental Supermarkets.  Its much more bustling atmosphere than quiet family friendly Hackett kind of makes it the Cowley Road of Canberra, and its pretty much where I've ended up. (Not that its at all *like* Cowley Road but you get the idea).  I ended up making two huge (over $100 dollar) supermarket runs to get suitable food stocks, plus another to buy some Manchester! Manchester here is bedding, pillows, pillowcases, duvets (or dooners, or quilts), basically all bedroom linen and soft furnishings.

To go with my "Manchester" I've got a new mattress, which required the help of JB and his car just three days after leaving! It came from Kambah, a suburb thats outside of Inner North so a chance to take a look at one of Canberra's other "towns".  I didn't quite realise how spread out the eight or so towns that make up Canberra are.  Inner North, the one I'm in is spread-out, nicely spacious and low density, full of parks and wide verges, but its not overly spread-out.  Neither are the other towns, but the gaps between them make Canberra a really spread-out city and one you couldn't ever hope to traverse without a vehicle. You really can't see many buildings from the larger parkways that link these towns.  They could be, and to a certain extent are, completely separate entities.

Unfortunately the mattress stank of cigarette smoke. So far it has taken an entire bottle of fabreeze, and three days outside and the smell is beginning to fade.  Another bottle of fabreeze should do the trick, then I'll have a mattress that actually fits my new bed! I've been lucky in that JB and ES have loaned me some furniture, a bed and a desk that were sitting unused their garage, until they need it back.  If it weren't for this I'd be spending a serious amount of money at the moment.  I've still been spending loads, just not quite as much as I could have. Very few rooms in Canberra come furnished, which is frustrating, but it does mean that anything I do buy is mine for the full duration while I'm here, rather than face leaving stuff when moving house.  Makes life easier for landlords too I guess.

My shopping spree continued in Civic (the centre of both Inner North and Canberra as a whole), where I picked up all kinds of various bits and pieces you never normally think about, but are actually pretty necessary.  Things like clothes-hangers and a bin. I did get a nice fruit-bowl though! Plus I've finally got my replacement pair of jeans after ripping a brand new pair when I came off my bike last week.

Yet despite all this activity, its been a pretty boring weekend, all of my new housemates have been away at some point.  Its been a second successive three-day weekend, which would normally sound good, but when you've been doing as little work as I have in the intervening week is actually pretty pointless.  I now can't wait to get back to work tomorrow and get some stuff done.

SHRIMP

For two days last week I got some time on SHRIMP II, one of the department's more interesting random number generators/wiggle matching device. SHRIMP stands for Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe and is a pretty cool machine involving firing a beam of caesium atoms at a target material and collecting what comes off in using a mass spectrometer style magnets and flight tubes to analyse the secondary ions you want to look at.  It can be used for isotopes or concentrations but I was "merely" measuring absolute counts of sulphur in a 12kyr stalagmite.  It was a bit of a recce operation with HSG, one of my groups postdocs to explore whether this technique actually works and we can find what we were looking for, but the results are reproducible and looking very interesting with distinguishable anomalies and background rate, so hooray!!  Its actually pretty good that after just three weeks of my PhD I've been driving the SHRIMP and getting good quality reproducible data, scratch that, its amazing, a very good start to the PhD.

SHRIMP is big: and takes up an entire room, or rather three of them take up a huge room! When building the building they had to build in a crane into the structure of the building so that if the machine ever needed to be moved out you only have to knock down one wall rather than the entire building. The original, SHRIMP I, as the machine used to date the oldest rocks in the world, which is extremely cool.  Plus I quite like having three control screens in order to drive the thing and get results, its really good fun, but like all geological type machines, it takes up a lot of time, an all-day job and is quite tiring.  Thankfully it can be set-up automatically to run overnight so that you can run coarse resolution overnight automatically then go back and high res the bits that look interesting during the day.  Also, we only had two days on it because its really expensive, more than my scholarship is worth (apparently).  Allegedly I may get some more time on it in December!

I have a house, hooray!!  I'll be living in Lyneham, one of the more studenty districts of Canberra.  I move in on Wednesday, should be fun.

Its a bank holiday Monday here so a good time to relax, and sort out the next big jobs on my list now that accommodation is sorted: a new bike.  Plus my supervisor is away for the next two weeks so I'll probably have very little to do during the week as well.

Proof for AC

In the face of the jibes I've had over the last twelve months, yes this is real.

Now do you believe me?

The Great Australian Divide

Is apparently this:

The two different flavours of this popular brand of nougat filled chocolate (other brands of nougat filled chocolate are available). Both contain peanuts and coconut so actually taste pretty similar.  The Honey Log has more chocolate and equal amounts of peanuts and coconut and a honey nougat.  The Summer roll has more coconut than peanuts (but more coconut and peanuts than the honey log), less chocolate and regular nougat.  JB and ES prefer the honey log, NB, TB (the two daughters) and JB's various Twitter companions and random people in some seminar he was giving prefer the summer roll.

My decision: The Summer Roll is nicer.  I have declared my position!

More Snackfood!

So HSG (my co-supervisor or at least Post-Doc in the same group, its much harder to work out people's academic position in Australia) introduced me to this today - pictured on top of a very interesting sulphur anomaly!:

Its a Violet Crumble, basically a Crunchie, slightly longer.  But its nicer than a Crunchie, less sticky, less orange, and just more crunchy!  I approve.

The Green Machine

Last night I went to my first rugby league match with the JB family.  We were watching the "semi-final" between the local team, the Canberra Raiders (aka the Green Machine) and Wests Tigers, who are presumably from somewhere in the west. (Western Sydney apparently, so East in fact!).

Its finals season in rugby league, the actual league part is over and done and dusted, but like all good commercial sporting fixtures there's got to be some-kind of play-off system to decide who really won.  I guess its a bit like playing next goal wins at the end of a football game.  The top eight go into the playoffs in a very complicated system known as the Duckworth-Lewis method, sorry McIntyre Final Eight System. Might as well be the same thing.  Teams are ranked to aim to make it easier for those who actually did well during the real season.  And the games are played over four weeks, with two teams eliminated each week.  (Why they can't just give the top two a bye to a second round I don't know). But teams are given different priorities.  In the first week, known as the qualifying final, all eight teams play, the top two can't go out if they lose, but get a bye if they win, the bottom two definitely go out if they lose and the rest inbetween either go out or stay in depending on their result and the ones around them.  Its a crazy system that requires the games to be played in a certain order  to avoid dead rubbers.  The second week is called the semi finals and involves the two highest ranked losers and two lowest ranked winners from the first week.  The third week is known as the Preliminary final and is actually a semi-final.  And the final final on the final week is the Grand Final rather than just the Final because they've been having finals for about a month now. Confused? I was!  JB suggests you need a Masters to understand the system properly.  he's probably right.  Anyway, if you'd like to know more then check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McIntyre_Final_Eight_System

A bit like Blackpool's meteroic rise in the Championship last season, the Canberra Raiders had been having a bit of a poor season, but picked it up towards the end becoming the only team all season to win six in a row and nine in ten matches as they found their way into the finals slots.  They then beat the second-place team in the first week of the finals and consequently found themselves rewarded with a home fixture against the third place team, Wests Tigers.  So here we were, JB is a massive fan of the Raiders so managed to get tickets.  The roads were blocked, the local papers and radio had been on about nothing else all day. And it was already reasonably full when we arrived just before seven for a 7:45 kick-off.

The stadium was pretty good, it was a record sellout crowd for the club given the situation and was quite cool, built into a hill like the LA Dodgers or Olympiastadion in Munich.  In the UK, I'm used to small stadia being quite boxy, such as Selhurst Park for example, which holds about the same number of people (Just over 26,000).  However the Canberra Stadium is just like a mini version of a bigger stadium, though with just the two multi-tier covered sides.  A bit like most modern small stadia I guess, I just haven't been to many.  There were a lot of Tigers fans in the crowd.  Since Canberra has only had a rugby league franchise (I hate the term franchise when it comes to sports - it sounds so purposely commercial) since 1982, most people in the town have an outside Canberra team still either as the one they support (or "go out for") or a second favourite.  So there's often a strong away crowd at these matches.

The match itself was entertaining, if not quite as fluid as I thought it was going to be.  The Raiders were pretty poor, but found themselves going into half-time only a converted try behind at 18-12.  The second half was more even, with the Raiders and Tigers matching themselves try for try, but a penalty successfully scored by the Tigers (albeit there was some dodgy refereeing all night) and a later one missed by the Raiders left the final score at 26-24.  The Raiders out, and season over, and despite the loss I reckon all the only slightly drunk people in the ground appreciated the fact that the better team over the match and season had won. And that the Raiders had had a pretty good past few months, albeit peaking with their win over 2nd place Penrith Panthers.  It was a good evening, but freezing!

Progress

On the housing front its been nice to actually be getting somewhere.  I saw more houses over the weekend and a couple this week.  All of them have been so much better than (all but one of) the ones I saw last weekend. And at reasonable prices this time, hooray, I will be able to eat! Why was the quality so bad last week, its really strange.  But yeah, lots of places I'd be happy to live in and I couple I actually want to!  Now all I have to do is choose between the cosy one with a wood-burning stove and cushions and the like and a dog and a hot-tub or the bright airy one with homebrew, a cool garden, and a Wii.  Its a tough choice!

I thought towards the end of last week that the weather had turned for the better.  Its been a lot warmer during the days, reaching mid teens.  But the thing about Canberra is that, because its not coastal in anyway, there's a big diurnal temperature range, so its still absolutely freezing at night. Plus of course, weather never really turns instantly and we've had some more rain.  But it does feel as if Spring is on the way.  Blossom is out and I even had lunch outside (albeit with my coat on!).  Its now two layer weather!  I've got some good photos of weather related stuff over the last weak. It makes landscape shots more interesting!  All of these are on my commute in and out of ANU, which is a nice way to travel.  I hope I don't have a hideous commute wherever I end up.

And work has been going well too, though I'm remembering how I work, and just how rubbish I am in the afternoons at getting everything done!

I have a pidge! That little hole in my heart has been filled! And a student card (finally) and the like.  Certainly starting to be a bit more settled.  Now if only I could remember people's names!