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...

The rugby world cup, and a new bike

Ok, so these are two things that you wouldn't think would go together, but for me they kind of do.

Even Kirk's (Kirkaldie and Stains, the Harrods of Wellington) has decorated their shop for the Rugby World Cup. Not a bad effort, either!

So here's my new bike. It's a 2011 Giant Talon 2 - hydraulic front suspension, hydraulic disc brakes, Shimano gears, all very nice (and on special too!). I took it out on my 'regular' firebreak route - up the Kingsley St track from Stokes Valley, then south along the ridgeline to Summit Road. I normally allowed 3 1/2 hrs on my old bike (which I bought from my brother Stuart, which he bought in 1999), but either I'm getting fitter or the new bike means I can go faster, because it now takes just over 3 hrs and that's with a couple of breaks to take pictures and munch on a muesli bar. Certainly I'm noticing a big difference in the bottom gear: second-to-bottom on this bike feels like the bottom gear on the old one, which means getting up the steep bits is now mostly achievable because there's just that little bit extra range.

I rode it to work yesterday, and being such a nice afternoon (and a Friday) I decided to go home early, the long way - up the Wainui hill road (well, up the walking track next to the Wainui hill road), the along the ridge to Summit Road and home from there, which took just under 1 1/2 hours. It's normally 20 minutes if I go the most direct way, on the road.

The photo above was taken last Saturday - a perfect day for biking, nice and warm, hardly any wind.

Then on the Sunday the weather packed up, so I went and joined a whole bunch of people all wearing jeans and black shirts...

... to watch the All Blacks play Canada in their final pool match of the Rugby World Cup. I was offered a free ticket by someone at work; IRL had been given 4 tickets by a local law firm, and the powers-that-be decided to give them to people who had been involved with IRL's 'education outreach' programmes (school visits, tutoring etc.). I've been helping out occasionally with the tutoring group on Thursday afternoons for the last couple of years. So that was a very pleasant surprise!

This is only the second rugby game I'd ever really been to (the other being a Super-12 game of the Hurricanes vs the Waratahs, which we lost; I also tagged along with Dad one time in Palmie when he was doing the computer scoring, for Manawatu vs. Tonga, but I didn't really watch the game).

So the game was all right (although I did feel sorry for Canada), the crowds were pretty well-behaved (given it was a Sunday afternoon, it meant people were still pretty civilised on the train going home), and apart from struggling to make small talk with the lawyers it was a pretty good day!

Melbourne

I just got back on Thursday night from my most recent trip, again to Melbourne. We had two sets of experiments scheduled back-to-back, and I think I'm now suffering from beamtime-lag. Both were using the powder diffraction line; the first was using a new technique (new for me, anyway) called pair distribution function analysis or PDF (not to be confused with Post-Doctoral Fellowship or Portable Document Format or any of the other 66 acronyms). This involved having to change samples about every hour, and take what feels like pointless measurements of the same empty glass capillary and the air (i.e. nothing in the beam). The analysis is even more tricky and I suspect it's going to take quite a long time - although we do have an under-utilised computer geek at work whose services I have been encouraged to avail myself of.

The second set of experiments involved using the beamline in a completely different way than anyone has used it before, to look at diffraction from thin films. This involved bringing our own rotation stage across several months ago, and then hooking it up to the beamline with an area detector (and this was the first time this had been used by anyone other than the beamline staff). It took the best part of a day to get everything up and running, and then when we started looking at the samples (high-temperature superconductors on a highly oriented commercial substrate) it got quite frustrating. My brain had had enough, and with so many diffraction peaks from the various oriented layers, we struggled to figure out a suitable protocol for measuring things. This led to repeating some of the samples a couple of times, but after those initial hiccups, everything went pretty smoothly. The only trouble was, this experiment needed something doing every 5 minutes. Fortunately we had planned for this and had a team of three, so we could work around the clock and try to have at least 2 people on at all times. We got through all the most important samples and think we managed to see what we set out to see (that can't be seen on the lab instrument). So just from those three days I have about 8 GB of data to work through. So that will keep me busy!

 My colleague Martin hard at work

After that (my last shift started at midnight on Tuesday and finished at 8 am) I got a couple of hours' sleep and then drove down to visit my friends Paul and Marge who live in Mornington. I stayed with them for a couple of days; we took a trip out to Phillip Island, which I hadn't been to before. Kind of reminded me a bit of Waiheke Island with the different kinds (and classes) of holiday homes, the beaches, the townships with only a couple of shops, the laid-back-ness (is that even a word?). But I'm sure the weather is quite different in a southerly

With Paul and Marge at Phillip Island 

The Nobbies, Phillip Island. We saw two penguins hiding in burrows
but couldn't tell which part of the penguin we were looking at... 

The beach at Mornington

More snow

First there was snow on the hills. Then on Sunday, we had this slushy stuff falling out of the sky, right here in Lower Hutt. Monday we had real flurries, that settled in the hills (like at Al's place) but on the valley floor it was more like hail. I took a detour to work via the hill suburb of Kelson...

Then about 3:30 pm today we had some real snow that actually settled. About 3-4 cm at my place, I reckon. Sure it's a far cry from the 50 cm being reported in Christchurch, but this is the first time it's happened here in living memory. Enjoy the pictures... (click on them to see larger images)

I think it's time to leave work!

 

Back yard

 

Front yard

 

Looking south along the Hutt River trail (stopbank) from Percy Cameron St

 

My street, and my house

 

My street - letterboxes all covered with snow

 

My favourite arty shot of the day!