19 April: KL, day 4

Our last day in KL, so what else to do except go to Central Market for some bar-gaining (as pronounced on the bus tour). We went via 'little India'...

I was fully expecting the markets to be like others I'd visited in Hong Kong or South Africa, so was quite prepared to have to haggle, but it was all pretty tame - more orderly than the Queen Victoria markets in Melbourne!

After that it was off to the airport for our flight to Singapore. We were quite glad to arrive... certain aspects of KL, including the airport, can only be described as semi-organised chaos. Anyway I'm only really writing this so I can put in a picture of an amazing plant/floral display in the check-in area at Singapore!

And finally here's your random sign for the day: another stick man in trouble. (The one on the right.)

18 April: KL, day 3

Hello again!

Today the sky was actually blue when we woke up, rather than cloudy as it had been for the previous two days. This meant everything was brighter and crisper in the photos, but hotter as well. More heat = faster humidity build-up = earlier downpour than yesterday (3:30 pm as opposed to 5:00 pm). Anyway enough about the weather...

Here we are back again at the Petronas Towers. With tickets in hand, we headed up to the bridge (at floor 41) and then the top observation deck at floor 86.

At the bridge

View from the top


In the afternoon, to fill in some time get out of the rain do something educational we went to the National Museum. This is literally just across the road from KL Sentral, which is a block away from our hotel, but the nature of the road and the pedestrian-unfriendliness makes it quite hard to get to. It left me a bit confused about the overall history of Malaysia and where the different ethnic groups came from and when, but it was only NZD2.00 entry fee so I can't really complain.



Finally here's a picture of an amusingly-named product for your enjoyment:

... and a stick-lady in trouble:

17 April: KL, day 2

Today we went against our better judgement of taking notice of what people said on tripadvisor reviews, and bought tickets for the hop-on/hop-off bus tour. This takes in most of the major sights and main streets of KL. (The reviews in question said it wasn't worth it because traffic is abysmal in the afternoon... but our argument would be, you get to see stuff in air-conditioned comfort that you wouldn't see if you stayed in your hotel room.)

So we took the bus all the way around the route, which took about 2 1/2 hours, then rode it a bit further to the KL bird park. There Mum found some new friends (one peacock in particular which was following us), also we saw our first real life wild monkeys.

Earlier that day we had seen some of the not-so-wild variety, also getting a drink:

Just after we got back on the bus at the bird park the daily rain started, just in time for rush hour.

Now I must confess I don't fully understand the road rules here. Here is what I do understand:
1) Drive on the left
2) Lanes are kind of optional
3) To change from one optional lane to another, just do it. The sharper angle you do it on, the better chance you have of other people realising that's what you're doing
4) Don't give way to buses, especially if you're on a motorbike
5) At traffic lights, if it turns green, you can go. Even if there is a car in front of you coming from the cross street, in which case you may use your horn to tell them what an idiot they are for entering the intersection when there was no hope of them getting across before the lights changed again

When we were in Rome we thought the traffic there was a bit of a free-for-all, but this beats Rome any day!

And here's one of the places where we are going tomorrow. We opted to book the tickets today with the aim of going tomorrow, since it's pretty hard to get same-day tickets. A prize of a 'Terima kasih' for anyone who can name the movie featuring this structure.

16 April: KL, day 1

A pretty long day today, but we arrived in KL without any dramas.

Our hotel is pretty close to KL Sentral (Central train station), so after we found it (which was not entirely straightforward - although it's only a block away, that block comprises a construction site at present) we went for a walk around the immediate area to get a feel for the place. Oh, and to look for what turned out to be a non-existant visitor information centre at the original KL railway station. We also discovered that KL is not that pedestrian friendly - so we might have to take a bus tomorrow!

Sentral station

For dinner tonight we went to a restaurant in one of the food courts at Sentral. We weren't feeling too adventurous so chose two 'western food' options: spaghetti bolognese covered with mozzarella cheese, and baked fish also covered with mozzarella cheese. Not sure which europe they got those combos from but anyway it was edible.

15 April: Leaving NZ

I'm currently sitting in the lounge waiting for the boarding call for our flight to Singapore. I've just been watching the live stream from Calvary Westminster, the church I was going to for a year while I lived in London. It made me smile and gave me a bit of a buzz to see the people worshipping and fellowshipping, and pastor Alwyn teaching - although I listen to a couple of his sermons a week as mp3 files, video gives you so much more than audio alone. Anyway it's on our itinerary to visit Calvary Westminster at the end our the trip, and I think it's safe to say that I'm really looking forward to it.

We had a pretty smooth touchdown on our flight up from Wellington. Probably a 9.5 out of 10, if we were giving out scores. Which we're not. Yet.

Awkward moment for the day: what do you do when you're in the lounge, and the person in the seat that backs onto yours starts snoring? Do you (a) wake them (b) laugh at them (c) ignore them (d) phone a friend? All vote now.

Soon I'm leaving, on a jet plane...

Well that's all the beamtime over, for now. I just got back on Monday night from 5 days straight, somehow ended up on night shift (I think that was out of compassion for my two colleagues who were both going to an electrochemistry workshop starting on Tuesday). We were doing some experiments looking at corrosion of different types of steel in carbon dioxide-containing solutions, and they worked really well. Meaning, we should get a number of papers out of this.

Anyway so this week has been catching up on sleep, looking forward to Easter (although I must guiltily confess this has so far been more about the time off work than remembering what Jesus did for us). And getting ready for my next trip.

Mum and I are heading off to Europe for 6 weeks. Basically it stemmed from a conversation we had several months ago. Mum was lamenting that we didn't make it to Prague on our previous Europe trip (when she and the boys came over for Christmas in London when I was living there in 2005). I'd suggested it at the time, but everyone felt too weird about actually going to Paris and Rome - after all, those places don't actually exist in reality, they only exist on TV and in history books - that we decided those would be enough. And ever since then, she said, she's seen so much about it and wished we had gone. I said, 'Well, we can always make another trip.' So here we go!

It looks like we should have fairly regular internet access while we're away, so I'll try and keep this updated as much as I can. In the meantime I will leave you with a map of our approximate route, and keep trying to brush up some Czech. Ještě se vrátím...

Measuring stuff you eat

Last week I was in Melbourne for 24 hours of beamtime. We arrived 2 days early to prepare samples, and it's just as well we did - we didn't finish until 1 am the night before we were supposed to start.

This time we were looking at small angle X-ray scattering of milk. Yes, you heard that right. Milk - the stuff that comes from a cow (or any mammal for that matter), the stuff you put on your breakfast cereal, the stuff cheese and ice cream and yoghurt are made of.

Milk is an amazing material. It enables minerals - particularly calcium - to be delivered to the body in a water-soluble (or at least, colloidal) form. Milk gets its white colour from casein micelles. These are basically clumps of protein, and inside those clumps are tiny crystals of calcium phosphate. If it wasn't for the casein proteins surrounding them, the crystals would basically precipitate out and not dissolve.

It turns out you can do lots of stuff to milk to change it. You can try some of these yourself. Take some milk, and add vinegar to it. You'll see it separate into white solid - that's the curd, made of casein proteins - and yellow-clear liquid, the whey. This is the first step in making cottage cheese. Vinegar is acidic, and it dissolves the calcium phosphate, which leads to the break-up of the casein micelles, which then join together into even bigger clumps that are visible to the naked eye.

We tried a number of things. Firstly we tried replacing some of the calcium with iron. Then, we tried adding an acidifying agent to simulate what happens when making yoghurt or cheese. Next, we did an in vitro digestion experiment. This basically entails setting up a beaker of milk, then adding gastric juices (you can buy these from a chemical supplier). Finally we ran an experiment on some milk and some cheese to see what happens as they are heated up.

This was all pretty ambitious - and even more so given the fact that our time was cut short quite significantly: we were meant to start at 8 am, but didn't get going until 3 pm because a piece of equipment we needed was broken by the previous users (although it wasn't their fault). So we had to come up with a different way of measuring those particular samples, which wasn't a problem. We were told we could have a couple of hours extra the following morning to finish things off if we needed it - which we did.

This setback meant we were running the in vitro digestion experiments from 3-9 am or thereabouts - not a good time to be working with syringes and needles and tiny glass capillaries, but we made it. We finished at about 10:30, by which time I was starting to get quite grumpy (the 'second wind' of sleep deprivation was wearing off in a big hurry), back to our accommodation and into bed, a total of 28 hrs of being awake non-stop. I think the most I've ever done in a continuous stretch is 32 hrs, but still, it's not easy. The day after basically didn't exist; we slept, then cleaned up in the lab, went for dinner, and slept again. The following day we drove out of town a bit to look for some kangaroos (which we saw - sorry I don't have pics, but you all know what a kangaroo looks like) then headed off to the airport.

Anyway the whole trip was really productive - now we just have to analyse the results and make sense of it. Some of the experiments we were able to see big changes, which is great, but it's going to be a team effort to understand what it all means.
And I've found that since I got back, I've really developed a new respect for milk.

Bucket chemistry!

Measuring milk on the beamline - with a bit of kiwi ingenuity: motorised tipper to be able to add a reagent to the mixture remotely.

Perth

Hello readers!

First of all a most profound apology for not updating this since last year. Very slack of me and I'll try and do better in the future.
Part of this is because I became a little paranoid recently about announcing my upcoming trips, so I haven't been writing about the planning etc. just in case, and so I decided only to write after the event. But as you can see, that hasn't really worked either, because it always takes a while to sort through photos etc. So maybe I'll just stop being paranoid and update more often - and if I'm not going away anywhere for a while, I'll just bore you with some mundane stuff about badminton or bike riding. How does that sound?

Anyway, as some of you know, I was at a conference in Perth earlier this month. I've finally got around to picking the best of the best photos, so out of 250 you get a short list of 15. I presented a talk at the conference on the first day, and went to a few good talks that day, but after that the pickings were pretty slim. In fact, I wasn't going to go to this one - because the previous conference in this series, in Sydney, was pretty rubbish. But the opportunity to visit a good friend of mine again was too good to pass up. So I went to the conference and took an extra couple of days over the weekend.

That's enough writing, time for some photos. Enjoy!

I arrived on the Saturday prior to the conference; on Sunday I met up with my colleague Mike and we hiked 20 km of the Bibbulmun track from Kalamunda. It was relatively cool - only 30 degrees Celsius... We saw two kangaroos in the wild and walked past a camel park in the middle of nowhere.

On Wednesday there wasn't much on offer at the conference, but Sri Lanka were playing India at the WACA. It could have been Sachin Tendulkar's 100th 100... but it wasn't. Anyway it was fun, watching the Indian supporters going crazy - and they weren't even drunk.

On Thursday I went for a walk through Kings Park. Temperature probably about 35 C.

Friday was a day trip on the train to Mandurah. I figured it would be a bit cooler than the city... which was forecast to be 37 C that day.

(Mandurah)

Friday afternoon I relocated from the hotel in the city to a motel further north. I went for a walk early on Saturday morning. There were people at the beach - at 7:30 am.

We went to AqWA on Saturday.

On Sunday I went to Rottnest Island and hired a bike for the day. The weather wasn't fantastic to start with, but eventually the sun came out... another (relatively) cool day at about 30 C.

My first quokka

My second, third, and fourth quokkas

The western-most point of Rottnest Island, Cape Vlamingh. Good place for a lunch stop!

Lunch stop visitor... a 'keeng skeenk' (or as Aussies would say we say in NZ, a 'kung skunk')

Lady Edeline beach: I couldn't resist having a paddle there.

As I said, the sun came out later on... a perfect day at the beach!

Sunset over the Indian Ocean, back on the mainland.

The most wonderful time of the year

Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose
Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose
Wee fish ewe a mare egrets moose
Panda hippo gnu deer

The synchrotron roller-coaster

I've been meaning to write an update for a while now; lately I've become a little paranoid about announcing that I'm going to be away for a week or so, so I've been saving it until I get back. The only thing is that my last trip away was now over three weeks ago, and I haven't written anything about it.

No prizes for guessing where I went. Two colleagues and I travelled to Melbourne for some soft X-ray spectroscopy experiments, looking at aluminium in zinc oxide (for solar cell applications; at least that's what we write in our research grants). Now I've only used the soft X-ray beamline once before, and it is quite challenging. I should point out here that there are different kinds of X-rays, soft and hard: soft, falling in the range between the ultraviolet and hard X-ray region. Hard X-rays being of high enough energy that they aren't absorbed by the air. Soft X-rays are absorbed by the air, which means that the experiments all have to be done under ultra-high vacuum (UHV) conditions. Which means you can't just pick them up and put them in the beam, like I do with all my other experiments, but there's a complicated loading procedure as the sample gets transferred from one chamber to another, all the while getting pumped down to a vacuum level approaching that of outer space. So it takes a while (about 2-3 hours), and on top of that is the added pressure that the soft X-ray beamline is ultimately opened up to the same vacuum that the electrons that make the synchrotron work, are whizzing around in. So if you open the wrong valve at the wrong time, and lots of air gets in, you might as well pack your bags because you won't be allowed back.

We had four days of beamtime, and every day there was some period of frustration followed by another period of elation. It was a real roller-coaster ride. On day 1 we went through figuring out what scans we were going to use to measure all of the samples. Peak #1: we were able to get beautiful data from the aluminium in our standard compound. Then we swapped to one of our samples, which had a much smaller amount of aluminium in it. Problem #1 - we couldn't see anything. This was a pretty major issue, because we had samples with between 0.5 and 4% aluminium, and this was a 4%. So we swapped to a 0.5% that was on the same sample holder (bearing in mind it takes 2-3 hours to load a new sample), and Peak #2 - we could see a decent signal from the 0.5%. We measured a few more and figured that something was screwy with the 4% samples. So that helped us make up our minds in terms of priorities. Then we tried a 2% and a 1%, and there was something wrong with the 1%. So we decided to focus on the 2% samples. Everything went pretty well from that point, until the last night. When transferring one of the samples, I managed to get it lodged in a place that I could only push it forward and couldn't pull it out. Ultimately it ended up sitting in a window port, completely inaccessible with the transfer arm inside the vacuum system... in full view, as if it was saying, 'Na nah na nah, can't get me!'

The stuck sample! (It's meant to sit in the rack just behind it, but somehow I managed to push it all the way through)

The whiteboard system used for keeping track of what samples are where. My colleagues added a new location - 'magazine window'. Yeah well it was funny at the time!


The next day the synchrotron beam was turned off for maintenance, so we helped the beamline scientist open up the vacuum system, retrieve the sample (there were another couple that had fallen off previously too, which he also retrieved), close it all up and start pumping down again. After we'd apologised profusely and helped as much as we could to fix things, and since our flight wasn't leaving until the following morning, we decided to head into the city and spend the afternoon there. It was probably the best day we'd had weather-wise, and it was good to relax a little bit. Although we did end up relaxing perhaps a bit too much on the City Circular tram... we were all starting to fall asleep. So at that point - we were pretty close to where we had parked the car - we decided that we probably wouldn't be able to stay awake until the evening to have dinner in town as planned, so we headed back out to where we were staying in Clayton.

That night I remember was pretty rough. Usually I'm able to get a flight home in the evening of the day I finish beamtime, so I'm home when the post-beamtime blues set in. But not this time. It's weird, the way that I put myself through it time and time again. Sleep deprivation (caused by long hours and weird shifts), combined with brain having to be completely focused on the task at hand, means that when you're high you're high, and inevitably there's a big crash waiting for you as things return to 'normal'. That, and you do develop a very unique relationship with your colleagues. After four or five days you get to know things about them - and share things with them about yourself - that you wouldn't normally. But I can't say any more than that, because as the saying goes, 'what happens on beamtime stays on beamtime'.

I have two more synchrotron experiments in Melbourne before the end of the year, but thankfully they're both short - one for two days and one for one day (i.e. 24 hrs). Add to that there's two annual meetings (one for the MacDiarmid Institute and one for our combined nanoparticle research groups' meeting, this year in Martinborough), and the Australian Synchrotron user meeting. And here was me hoping to do something special for my Christmas lights this year. You never know, it might still happen... but only if I do it now!

Oh and in other news we had a church retreat last weekend. It was great fun - although hard to go back to work afterwards.
And yet other news, Mum and I have booked our tickets for a holiday to Europe next year for six weeks...