Another quiet day

It's terribly quiet here. As this is a long weekend most people have gone off on holiday somewhere. The pulsar astronomers at the telescope are currently myself, David and Alessandro. We spent the day working, observing and watching various sporting matches on the TV.

As this is a rather boring blog, I've uploaded the conference photograph from the Montral meeting. I'm somewhere on the back row.

At Parkes

The observing went well today. Not too much to report. In the evening I went jogging!!! I'll try and write a more interesting blog tomorrow. Lots of kangaroos.

Arrive in Parkes

Feeling rather good today. I woke about 5:30am, had some breakfast, packed my bag and then met David. David drove the entire way whilst I map read. We stopped for breakfast in the Wattle cafe in Blackheath, had a quick detour to see the stunning views (see photo) and then drove straight through to Parkes. The observing didn't start off well as we had very strong winds. However, David got trained and we managed a few hours of observing by the end of the day. I'm now going to study a little Italian and then get an early night. I start observing at 5:45am tomorrow.

Down from the high

errr ... work went well today. I got heaps of congratulations from all sorts of people including:

"Fantastic news on the QEII Fellowship. Well done." from Matthew B.

After work, Jono, Matthew (a different Matthew), Albert and I played ping-pong for a few hours and then went off to the Epping "hotel" for a meal. It was all great, but I still feel very strange coming home to an empty house :(

I'm very tired and need to be awake again at about 5:30 am to drive with David to Parkes.

QEII

I got it! I got it! I got it! I've suddenly cheered up as I was successful in my application for a QEII fellowship. This means that I'll stay at the ATNF for at least another five years. It seems that a total of 31 QEII grants were given out this year. The titles of the approved grants include:

"Human time perception: A crossmodal investigation"

"Persistence and transformation in Ancestral Oceanic Socity: the archaeology of the first 1500 years in the Vanuatu archipelago"

"Understanding social cancers: Intra-sepecific parasitism by honeybee workers"

"From print to the internet: the media in Australia since 1803"

"Environmental and genetic risk factors for anxiety disorders in children"

"Dynamic spectrum access in multi-hop wireless broadband networks"

"The structure and geometry of graphs"

and, or course,

"Gravitational wave detection through millisecond pulsar timing"

There were two astronomy QEII's awarded and I was lucky enough to get the only award given to CSIRO. Thanks to everyone who read my application! Jonathan, David and I went out for a Thai meal to celebrate.

sleep ... sleep ... sleep

errr.... I need to go to sleep. ....

I've just finished watching "The Red Violin". It's marvellous.

il gatto, il fratello, lo zio, un figlo, il padre, un cugino ... gosh learning languages is soooo exciting! I've looked ahead to discover that after lesson 14, I'll be able to say "My sister buys fruit everyday". I can imagine saying that a lot in Italy! It's probably a bit more useful than the phrases in my Urdu book which teaches me "my cowardly servant wouldn't go near the dead tiger", but such sentences do make the Urdu rather more interesting.

Mio padre prepara il pasticcio!

Any suggestions for phrases that will come in handy in Italy?

Sleep ... sleep ... sleep

Not a good day ...

This is not going to be a fun week. I'm in a bit of a mood at the moment and hope that ranting at my blog will allow me to calm down a bit. First, I discovered that I didn't get the CSIRO award that would have given me some sabbatical leave. Robert was very kind telling me about it, but it didn't make the day start off well. I then found out that I will hear about my QEII application on Wednesday. Two rejections in one week is not going to be great. I know that the chance of getting the QEII is very small, but I'm still going to feel rather down if I don't get it. I'm certainly being negative there - I probably have as good a chance as anybody else, but as I was told a few weeks ago, there's always about 100 excellent applications for about 5 positions. To make things worse I also spent part of the day trying to fix problems for Han which basically have nothing to do with me, or part supervising Bill's student. Most of the rest of the day was spent staring at my "to-do" list slowing growing.

Oh well, Jonathan and David came to the rescue (as always) and we went out for a pint and steak at the Ranch.

I then got home thinking that I'll cheer up by sorting out some photographs, but ended up looking through hundreds of pictures of my engagement to Maryam. As they say in Australia, I'm "like a bandicoot on a burnt ridge".

Okay. I'm going to learn lesson 2 in my Italian course now and then get an early night.

Arrivederci ....

A great curry!

Another interesting day. I woke up really early, had a good breakfast and then spent a large amount of time cleaning up the cupboards in the kitchen. I've moved all sorts of things around and now have a lot more space. How exciting! Before lunch I decided that I couldn't stay in the house any longer - the weather was stunning - and so went walking around North Ryde. I discovered a great Malaysian Hawker food place (which was rather unexpected). I then shopped for various items for the evening curry.

Jessica, Bob and David came around for the curry. I (with David's help) cooked a large butter chicken curry and a vegetable balti with papadums, chutney etc. Jessica and I then played some Vivaldi 'cello sonatas.

As my day was fun and enjoyable, but not incredibly exciting (the most exciting thing that happened to me today was being attacked from behind by some rather vicious magpies), I thought that I'd scan in one of my favourite photographs. This was taken when I was living near Geneva and took a trip up to Mt Blanc. There is a more serious reason for trying out my scanner. I'm going to send Maryam a large number of our photographs and want to keep an electronic copy of some of the photos that I particularly like. I'm not looking forward to going through a photo albums, but I'll have to get it done sometime!

errr ....

I haven't got a clue what to write in this blog. I went to the Macquarie centre this morning and purchased some more DVDs. Marta had suggested that I buy a bunch of Italian films - one "la meglio gioventu" happens to be 6 hours long - but the Macquarie centre didn't seem to have any of her selection. Instead I bought "The Red Violin", "Il Gattopardo" and (for light relief) "Those magnificent men in their flying machines".



I then planned to do heaps of work, but fell asleep instead. I woke up in the evening to cook an enjoyable dinner of Leatherjacket and then headed off to the Epping Hotel for a drink with David. Bill has signed me up for a 50km cycle ride in a few weeks. I'll have to mend the puncture on my bike.

I rather rashly promised to cook David, Jessica and Bob a curry tomorrow night. Hopefully that goes okay. My kitchen is now nice and tidy (although only on the surface - I still need to tidy up the insides of all the cupboards).

Changing emotions

What a mixed day! Last night Maryam phoned and we had a great chat. I'm absolutely amazed about how she is coping and keep realising how that I cannot predict her reaction to anything! I really thought that she'd be upset, but incredibly she seemed really strong and quite cheerful.

Work went terribly until about 10 minutes before I finished. I spent all day trying to solve a silly problem with my gravitational wave simulation. I thought the entire day was wasted until I decided to remove a DC offset from the gravitational wave background and suddenly everything worked perfectly!! Bill and I also discovered an issue about fitting for pulsar positions that we hadn't thought about before. Therefore, my work overall went really well!

My arm is still a bit sore, but I can move it reasonably freely now. In the evening I planned to cook a stunning dinner, clean up the kitchen and then put a photo of my sparkling, clean kitchen on this blog. In fact, I ate a pie and chips whilst drinking too much wine (okay, mum and Maryam, I won't drink any more for a while) and watching "la vita e' bella". I'm now in the strange frame of mind that occurs after watching a magnificent, sad, but beautiful film (or after enjoying a good Australian wine).

Marta is sending me an Italian word of the day. Today's word is "tastiera" which, apparently, means "keyboard". Well, that will come in handy! I plan to write an entire blog in Italian within two weeks - unless I get some more interesting suggestions my blog will be entitled "my family"! I know the word for father (padre), uncle (zio) and a few other masculine nouns. I'll try and get around to some femine words sometime next week.

Ciao,

Bottle on the bottle-brush tree

Hooray, finally a bottle appeared on my bottle brush tree! I've had an emotional day. I started off by writing an email to M. which was horrendously hard to write and probably completely inadequate. I really hope that she's okay - she deserves a lot more luck in the next few years. By the way, if anybody (Maryam in particular) reads anything on my blog that they don't like then just ask me to remove it. It's very easy to remove some text as I keep discovering when I write a blog and then accidently delete it.

My elbow is really bad. I couldn't sleep at all last night and felt that I was going to faint a few times. Everytime I turned over I got some excruciating pain in my left arm. Work didn't go to well, but I put that down to the lack of sleep and worrying about Maryam.

In the evening, Jonathan, Kate and I cooked up some spaggetti bolognase which tasted fine (I'm still always shocked when my cooking actually is edible)! Richard then joined us to play some string quartets. We got through a Haydn quartet, followed by the complete Smetana "From My Life" quartet that mum bought us before finishing with a Mendelssohn quartet. Marcello (I think that's her name) was planning to come around to sing some Italian songs with us, but unfortunately had to finish off her paper instead. Richard invited me to go sailing on Saturday as "his dad needed some more people for his boat". Unfortunately, I'd already planned another trip and cannot make it. I'm really annoyed about this!

In the comments from a previous post mum had asked me how many instruments I now have in the house. The answer is: a quena, toy didgeridoo, electric piano, descant recorder, alto recorder, tenor recorder, viola, acoustic guitar and, of course, the 'cello.

Ciao

Sports injury

Well I must be reasonably fit. I was in work at 7am after a rather sleepless night. Apart from some work, today I did heaps of sport. I played ping-pong after lunch for about 30 minutes, from 5pm to 7pm I played tennis really, really badly against some very good players (I won a few games and slowly improved towards the end, but I was by far the least skilled player). Oh well, I can only get better. Then Jonathan and I ate a Thai meal until 8pm. From 8:30pm to 10:30pm we played badminton which almost killed me off. We played with 3 Chinese people + a guy who, I think, was from South Africa. I lost all the games I played, but have an enormous bruise on my arm as a memento.

I think that I'll add to the Australian drought by taking a bath now and try and be in bed before midnight.

Work went well. Bill and I have finalised our technique for spectral analysis of irregularly sampled data in the presence of steep red noise. It's complicated. We undertake various stages including interpolation, smoothing, pre-whitening, Fourier transforms, post-darkening and inverting the filters. Now I just have to get it to work within tempo2 and then apply it to 400 or so pulsars!

Success

Good! Today I've managed to 1) cook a good dinner, 2) get a reasonable amount of work done on the Jodrell timing noise paper, 3) do some exercise by playing ping pong in the evening, 4) book the hotel in Vancouver and 5) increase my Hirsch ranking! I've now got 17 papers with 17 or more citations!

I thought that I'd better put a photo on this blog of my nephew Alex!

I have some exciting plans now to travel to the tip of Portugal from Australia -- by train. My current plan is to take the train from Sydney to Darwin. Take the boat or fly to Singapore. Then take the train to Kuala Lumpur and on to Bangkok. I'd then head up towards Hanoi and across to Xian. I can then pick up the trans-China train to Urumqi. Across Kazakstan into Saratov in Russia. Across to Moscow and then to Warsaw, Berlin, Paris and then down into Spain and Portugal. Any volunteers for coming with me - language skills in any Asian or Continental European language would certainly be welcome!

On a more reasonable time scale, Joris and I are planning to walk the 6 foot track across the Blue Mountains sometime near the end of next month. This should take about 3 days in total.

Canada, here we come ...

This is the first time that I've had a flight itinerary that says that my flight time will be 42 hours! However, that does include a night in Vancouver on Christmas eve! The Air Canada web site was a disaster and it took me more than one and a half hours to complete the booking (which involved three phone calls and four resets of the firefox window!). I'll be travelling with Jonathan. This should be great! I think that it's Jonathan's first time in Canada and I'm sure that he won't be disappointed.

I've had an interesting day overall. I got rather depressed (not clinically depressed, I hasten to add) every now and then, but Bill, David or Jonathan would always turn up with some interesting new work. In fact, I don't think that I got anything done today, but we did make some progress thinking through some of the statistical problems. I really couldn't face cooking tonight so I went out for a meal. I now cannot face tidying up the house, so I've been playing the guitar and now writing this blog. I've really got to get this house in order!

I'm going to be spending an enormous amount of time at Parkes from the end of this month. I have to go for a week, come back for about 3 days and then go again for about 5 days. I'm trying to arrange the schedule so that I don't have to miss my first Italian lesson, but I may not have succeeded :(

... and who says the Poms spend all their time complaining! ...

A success!

Went hiking in the Lane Cove National Park with David this morning. Saw heaps of parrots, wonderful plants and lizards. I got through a little more work this afternoon (managed to simulate some gravitational waves and clock errors!).

My success was that I've managed to clear up one room in my house -- the spare room! This is a huge step-forward. See photo! However, all the other rooms are still a mess. I hope to clear up my bedroom tomorrow and then start work downstairs.


On the left is the clean spare room, underneath is my "living room"!







If you want to watch an interesting set of pictures then take a look at this site which displays all of the pictures being uploaded to the google blogs!


Ciao!

Vino blanco

Ciao,

Ho bevuto troppo vino bianco

Il cuore altrove was a great film. Especially whilst drinking a lot of wine. Unfortunately, Maryam phoned in the middle. I don't think that I was too coherent. Okay, I've got to stop drinking wine and watching depressing Italian films ...

Back to Lyne & Graham-Smith "Pulsar astronomy", not much emotion in that book!

Sydney is wonderful

Sydney was at its best today. The weather was superb, not a cloud in the sky, absolutely perfect temperature ... I went into the city to look around the botanical gardens. Wonderful - the spring flowers make the place stunning! I shared a fish and chips lunch with an ibis and ambled around photographing the flying foxes. The only disappointment was that the botanical gardens doesn't have any waratahs (and here is a link to a page about waratahs just to prove to my mum that I know how to make links). Anyway, the lady at the information desk told me that I need to head off to the Mt. Tomah botanic gardens to see some waratahs (I plan to do this next weekend). In fact, my plan is to go somewhere different in Sydney each weekend!

Everybody in Sydney looked ridiculously happy. In the botanical gardens a young Chinese couple were trying to photograph themselves (with their camera's timer) leaping in the air, holding hands, in front of the harbour. They got quite a crowd of people around them who were all making "helpful" suggestions - mainly about how to levitate for 10 seconds. I bought an ice cream from a very cheerful Asian guy. I then bought a book and was given another book for free "because it was such a nice day"!

My free book is a lonely planet guide to Sydney which describes the "feeding of the lettuce to the giant dragon" that takes place in Sydney once a year. Well, I certainly have missed that in the last 5 years, but won't be missing it again!

In the afternoon I headed back to work and played a few games of ping-pong with Dick, actually did some work and then chatted away with Bill and his wife for a while. At home, I've been boxing up Maryam's stuff and rearranging the house. In the gardens I bought a piece of botanical artwork of a banksia which I now have up on the wall!

I'm now going to eat my dinner of rump steak and jacket potato (and whatever veg. I can find that's not all soggy) and watch "Il cuore altrove" which I bought on DVD a week ago, but haven't got around to watching yet.

Wow, another comment

Just to say that I can now play a few notes on my quena!!!!! However, as a website says "but the tone you achieve by force alone is likely to drive away all your sheep." There are now no sheep left in my house. Damn.

A mixed day

Work went extremely well today. Bill and I made huge progress on the gravitational wave simulations and correlations project that we're working on. I've also been invited to write up my talk from the Amaldi gravitational wave meeting - only 30 talks out of a few hundred have been selected for the conference proceedings! The house is still a mess. I got a tad upset this evening packing up some of Maryam's stuff. I've got heaps more to do over the weekend - although I'm planning to go the Botanical gardens tomorrow and a bit of hiking with David on Sunday.

I've almost bought my flight ticket to Canada. The Air Canada web site is a disaster and it still won't let me finish the booking, but I have managed to put it "on hold".

Again I don't have a new photograph for today, but have found a nice picture of Faith and Mel's cat! "il gatto" in Italian!

Quick update

Quick update for today. I finally got a bit more work done on the Jodrell timing noise paper. Had a long chat with Andrew about extra research required for the paper. Bill and I worked through a few more issues about our data sets. Went to the Macquarie centre for dinner and to buy a few more household items. The house is an absolute mess at the moment. I'm going to need the entire weekend to clean up. I finally signed up for my Italian lessons!

Procrastination

How on Earth do people get things done? Yesterday David told me that one astronomer decided not to shave until he'd submitted his paper. A year or so later he had a huge, scraggly beard! I need to do something similar. Perhaps no burgers until my Jodrell Bank timing noise paper (which I've now been writing for 7 years) is finished. Okay, Jonathan you read it here - don't let me eat any burgers.

Today I again don't seem to have accomplished much. I've rewritten about half of my Jodrell Bank paper and hope to give a copy to Andrew tomorrow morning (I'm going to have to stay up late again). I also attended heaps of meetings as always. I've got to 1) finish the Jodrell paper, 2) finish the third tempo2 paper, 3) complete the gravitational wave paper with Andrea, Joris and Bill, 4) finish reading in FITS files into our software, 5) develop some new software that carries out fast folding algorithms, 6) complete research into pulsar timescales (the advantage here is that I could present this work in Rio in 2009), 7) develop frequency dependent standard templates, 8) update all our data from Parkes, 9) finish documenting the DFB and 10) fix up all the issues in tempo2. There's probably heaps more, but that's certainly enough to be going on with!

Played tennis this evening. Jonathan and I beat the experts!!!! Ate a rather undercooked bangers and mash for dinner. I need to spend a little more time on my cooking from now on. Suggestions welcome!

I attach a completely gratuitous photo to this blog of the map on my last flight from England to Australia. I really enjoy flying. I've just had a phone call from Maryam (from a phone box) who seems okay although she'd recently had a seizure and suffered some depression. Hopefully she's getting through this okay. Interestingly we're both looking forward to trips to Italy! I'm still enjoying my "freedom" a little (I can stay late at work without having to worry about Maryam), but things still pop up (like the screen saver on my computer that says "Hello Maryam") that make me rather upset for a while. Oh well, back to work (and learning Italian).

5 years in Australia

I've now been in Australia for exactly five years. Gosh, what a lot has happened including losing my wife. I'm still trying to get the house in order to box up her belongings. Work today was rather fun. I still cannot seem to get down and concentrate on a paper for more than a few minutes before something comes up. Anyway, I managed to produce a few more data sets for Bill, wrote Chenni's reference, finalised the summer students and sat in a couple of meetings with Dick.
This evening was wonderful. Jonathan, Kate, Jessica, Nicole and Maureen came around to my house. We performed the Beethoven piano quintet, one of the Mendelssohn piano trios, a Schumann piano trio and the Brahms quintet.

I'm now planning to phone Sarah in the Parkes control room for a chat, clean up the house, do about 30 minutes of work and then try and be asleep before midnight!

Talking on second life

Pulsar1 raymaker giving a talk on the Parkes timing array project on the ABC island in second life!





Well I'm still trying to stay in the modern world. I've updated my facebook account AND gave a lecture on Second Life (see http://www.csiro.au/events/SecondLifeHobbs.html) which I think went okay. I'm keeping this blog basically as an update on what I've done at work - today I fixed up the byte swapping issues with the sigproc software and spent most of the rest of the day preparing for the second life talk. My plan tomorrow is to get stuck in to the tempo2 paper.




Okay, enough for now.

Starting off

Well here we go. I've now used a wiki, have a skype and facebook account and now a blog! I've no idea what the purpose is of this, but I'll write down stuff as it happens. Stunning music tonight at Maureen's house with Beethoven and Mozart piano quartets!

Okay, that will do as a start.