Yay! Two weeks away from my computer, off to Aussie for some more experiments. These ones aren't too exciting; two days of measuring sample after sample. The first is helping some new users from Victoria University (Wellington) look at nanoparticles coated on plastics; the second is part of some ongoing work with our collaborators at Cambridge University (UK) looking at fuel cell catalyst materials.
These finish on Thursday, and the following Thursday and Friday there's a workshop on at Melbourne Uni that would be really useful for me to go to. It's about a new X-ray scattering technique that would help a lot of the projects I'm working on. But work was loathe to pay for accommodation for me in between, almost as loathe as they were for me to come back and fly across a second time. So I'm taking a week of annual leave to visit a friend in Perth. It'll be my first time there and also our first time actually meeting in person (we 'met' on the Chuck Missler internet message boards about 7 or 8 years ago). I'm excited and I know she is too! Now I just need to figure out what clothes to pack...
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Getting on with things
Things are still plugging along, another week gone so quickly. Last week I had a few days off with a bad cold; this week on Thursday it felt like Tuesday.
Work has been going well and I'm starting to feel like I'm on top of things despite having ten things all going at once. We received word of the success of our funding bid, unfortunately the $$ amount is about half what we applied for, so we're having to cut back on some of the proposed activities. In other news, there are a couple of other things that I'm applying for: the Prime Minister's emerging scientist prize and a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship. The former consists of three rounds; I was successful in the first round which means I now have to submit a poster and either a 90-second video or a 500-word essay about my research, aimed at a secondary school audience. We filmed the various bits and pieces for the video this week, so that was something a bit different!
Today our badminton rep team has another tie, at Wellington North. Although there are a number of people who have hardly been at Sunday night training at all over the last few months, they are all available for the tie... needless to say, the trip to Feilding made for a really long and frustrating day, so I'm not going today. Besides, I need to make something for church pot-luck lunch tomorrow. And the rugby's on tonight. Those are my excuses and I'm sticking to them.
In other news, Al and Vicky tied the knot a couple of weeks ago, so big congratulations to them. The weather was good (if a little cold; but it is July, after all) and it was neat just having an intimate family affair.
Work has been going well and I'm starting to feel like I'm on top of things despite having ten things all going at once. We received word of the success of our funding bid, unfortunately the $$ amount is about half what we applied for, so we're having to cut back on some of the proposed activities. In other news, there are a couple of other things that I'm applying for: the Prime Minister's emerging scientist prize and a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship. The former consists of three rounds; I was successful in the first round which means I now have to submit a poster and either a 90-second video or a 500-word essay about my research, aimed at a secondary school audience. We filmed the various bits and pieces for the video this week, so that was something a bit different!
Today our badminton rep team has another tie, at Wellington North. Although there are a number of people who have hardly been at Sunday night training at all over the last few months, they are all available for the tie... needless to say, the trip to Feilding made for a really long and frustrating day, so I'm not going today. Besides, I need to make something for church pot-luck lunch tomorrow. And the rugby's on tonight. Those are my excuses and I'm sticking to them.
In other news, Al and Vicky tied the knot a couple of weeks ago, so big congratulations to them. The weather was good (if a little cold; but it is July, after all) and it was neat just having an intimate family affair.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
De-facebooking, and other stuff
So it's been about three weeks since I last posted anything here, mainly because not a lot has happened - no overseas trips, no disasters or emergencies; things have just been muddling along. And for some reason this has given me a real case of the blues. Things are a bit better this week, but last week was just awful - not because anything bad happened, but for whatever reason the joy just went out of my life for a while. I asked for prayer at church last Sunday and things have been much better since. Perhaps it's because the wintery weather has been really miserable this year; perhaps because I haven't had as much time as I need to spend in Bible study (badminton three nights a week doesn't help there); perhaps because of spiritual attack. It's not out of the question...
Anyway as part of getting out of the rut and back into the groove (haha, get it?) I was convicted by the Holy Spirit to stop spending time on Facebook. There had been a few incidents lately that left me less than impressed with some of my 'friends', and writing something on someone's status and then have somebody who I don't know write on it and say what I'd said was 'a load of cr*p', was pretty much the final straw.
As some of you will know, I was a bit reluctant to sign up for facebook in the first place. About a year ago I noted on this blog how it was concerning me how much time I was spending there. So things kind of came to a head last week, and I figured, I can do without it, my real friends know how to contact me outside of facebook, and after all it's more healthy to have real relationships rather than online ones.
What a relief it has been, although deleting a facebook account is really not easy - I did my best though; deleting as many of my posts as I could be bothered to, deleting all my photos, deleting all my 'interests' and other biographical info, then finally disconnecting all the people I was connected to and clicking that 'Deactivate account'. Woo!
(This isn't the button, by the way; I just made it up - but imagine if it was...)
Anyway as part of getting out of the rut and back into the groove (haha, get it?) I was convicted by the Holy Spirit to stop spending time on Facebook. There had been a few incidents lately that left me less than impressed with some of my 'friends', and writing something on someone's status and then have somebody who I don't know write on it and say what I'd said was 'a load of cr*p', was pretty much the final straw.
As some of you will know, I was a bit reluctant to sign up for facebook in the first place. About a year ago I noted on this blog how it was concerning me how much time I was spending there. So things kind of came to a head last week, and I figured, I can do without it, my real friends know how to contact me outside of facebook, and after all it's more healthy to have real relationships rather than online ones.
What a relief it has been, although deleting a facebook account is really not easy - I did my best though; deleting as many of my posts as I could be bothered to, deleting all my photos, deleting all my 'interests' and other biographical info, then finally disconnecting all the people I was connected to and clicking that 'Deactivate account'. Woo!
(This isn't the button, by the way; I just made it up - but imagine if it was...)
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