Geoverse

Typical isn’t it. Dutch bloke comes to Oz and what happens? La Nina establises itself over the Pacific and it starts raining with rainfall above average. At least it’s good for the plants and farmers I guess, but it does dampen my excitement for endless days of sunshine. There is nothing more I dislike than getting wet on my bike whilst cycling from home to the uni and back. Anyways some storms are interesting with heaps of lightning and hail although here no hail has fallen yet. Probably too soon in the summer. If you feel like reading about Australian weather predictions go here.

G’day.

My blog is been dormant for quite a while now. So maybe a new approach is in order: short and quick posts. From comments in the last post I got an idea for a new banner for the blog. It’s pretty decent now I reckon, as far as my GIMP skills go.

I’ve done a few things in the mean time:

-Black Crusade Concert in Melbourne (Arch Enemy, Trivium, Machinehead)
-Seen the Melbourne Aquarium and Royal Botanic Gardens
-Geocaching daytrip to Namagi National Park
-Camping trip to Deua National Park
-Housewarming party for my new housemates (30-11-07)

Work is going well but getting busier:

-Annual report + essay due 15 Dec
-Draft version of first research paper due before Christmas
-Wagga Wagga conference 31 January
-1st seismic wave attenuation experiment started which requires going to the uni at odd nightly times.

Facebook really seemed to have kicked off now. If you don’t have an account yet and you’re my friend, look me up. You will pick up updates, photos and events from me quicker plus it’s a good medium to break the silence. I simply don’t have enough time to email every one of you although I do try to keep you as updated as much as possible.* Also it’s a nice toy. If you feel the internet is taking over your life, forget it. It’s already too late heh heh 😀

* Just a little clarification here. I’m not saying I won’t email you. If you email me, the chances are good that you’ll have a response. What I am saying is that I cannot email everyone out of the blue with my life story. Sorry! 🙂

I’ve been for 4 days on a student field trip to Kioloa and Bermagui on the New South Wales coast directly from Canberra. The trip was really really good. We had to do presentations of our research on Saturday 22 Sept. I think everyone did a pretty good job. Seann and Richard were voted as the ones giving the most entertaining presentations and were awarded a surfboard with their names on it. On Sunday, Monday and Tuesday we drove down the coast in the two minivans to Bermagui, stopping along the way to check out pretty sweet geological outcrops. I won’t bore you with the details but we saw a lot of igneous outcrops progressively more metamorphosed and deformed. The geological setting can get pretty complicated with like 7 deformation phases although in most places deformation was pretty localized. The rock outcrops date back to the Silurian. We had some good times at the bar every night too. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much beer on subsequent days ha ha. Check out some photos here.

Research is still going well although I hope to speed up my experiments in the coming month. Too many distractions can slow you down pretty easily. 🙂

I’ve ditched Windows Vista for good. It was getting on my nerves after it became non-genuine again. This time it turned out to be caused by a worldwide outage of the WGA (windows genuine advantage) servers. That bit of nastyness wired into windows that phones home every time you log onto the internet to check if you have a legal version of windows. As I later found out, it is said in the EULA that even when you purchase a copy of windows, it still technically belongs to Microsolt. You are just hiring it! I’ve downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn and im a happy linux camper now. 🙂 Everything runs the way I want to. I do not miss any windows applications and I am even able to continue playing Quake 3 arena, the only game I’m addicted to at the moment. Two future games, both Unreal Tournament 3 and Quake Wars: Enemy Territory will run natively on GNU/Linux. So…no worries right? 🙂

PS. Compiz fusion, GNU/Linux’s version of the 3D accelerated desktop via OpenGL is awesome! However, it is still in early development so after trying it out for a bit I did find it a bit too buggy still. So I intend to wait for the next stable release (I only tried the latest development build of course).