still alive...

have not blogged in ages - was caught up in the facebook craze for a little while but that was just too exhausting (I don't have as much empty time on my hands as needed to service the facebook demon effectively) so just thought I would post again toa blog whenever the mood struck...

why are we not surprised...

ok, so after 20 odd years of flying, they use a camera to look at the bottom of the space shuttle for the first time..._gasp_ they find something 'wrong' and hearts go-a-flutter... of course they saw something unusual... anything would look unusual if you have never looked before... catapult something at a gajillion km/h into space and dont expect it to make it there unscathed...

I hate to say it as I am as ardent a space-fan as anyone, but the shuttle programme looks a dead duck; a glorified (perhaps rightly so) bus servicing an uninspiring pit-stop-come manufacturing plant called a space station.

Where is the visionary work and the enthusiam that took mankind to the moon? The Hubble scope is the most exciting thing up there right now, and it is being scrapped...

A Star is Born...

..ok, so maybe not quite a star... how about a radio personality???
was interviewed by ABC National Radio this morning to comment on issues surrounding marine biosecurity; word of our poster on marine hitchhikers on cruise ships got out and I was pulled out of the conference just after my other biosecurity presentation was complete...interviewer kept asking me about local biosecurity issues, which was a bit of a dag- an aussie asking a canuck posing as a kiwi about biosecurity troubles in Darwin (which city I had never seen prior to 2 days ago)... nothing like being an 'expert' I guess...

Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia

A conference in Darwin is just the chance for me to re-charge the academic batteries and take stock of where my role in the company I am a part of is going (there is also the added advantage of getting a bit of sun and restoring the vitamin D levels in the body-its 10am and already 28C outside without a breath of wind- whew!).

I flew into Darwin last night (all flights to/from eastern australia go through around midnight, so as to coordinate with landing curfews out east (it’s a 4ish hour flight)… anyway, I am sitting on a crowded bus transferring between intl and domestic terminals at Kingsford Smith airport in Sydney, when someone down the back calls out the rugby score between the All Blacks and the Lions… woman beside me smiles, and we start to chat… she asks if I am a canook- which is odd as most people suggest ‘yank’ first… anyway, she is ‘from’ Napier (on NZ east coast) but is also a canuck… we chat a bit more then find out that she is from Shediac… I spent 7 years in Sackville (not far away), and we start talking about things like we were long lost buddies….
…small world; a friend has a blog about this he calls the 'coincidentalists blog'...

Went for a stroll to nearby botanic gardens, where there is a memorial to the USN ship USS Peary which was sunk in Darwin Hbr during WWII. Call it a moment of clarity, but here is the reason (part anyway) why Aussies and Americans are so close. While US forces were stationed in NZ, none were killed there as a result of an enemy attack… in Australia, they were killed in the direct defence, and it seems to me the difference is epitomised by the memorial to that day, February 19 1942, when 188 Japanese aircraft attacked Australian territory.

hmmmm

so an organisation gets millions of dollars to study a variety of projects for a decade or so.... but then feels bitter about a different organisation getting millions for some different research (that they wanted to do but were apparently not good enough for)... so who said life (or science) was fair and equitable?

more on this topic later....

greedy dogs and russians

I have to start out by stating I have two dogs- Welsh Springer Spaniels. As with most dogs, they are fairly food-focused... I received a call from Katrina yesterday morning.. she walked down to the kitchen to see an open pantry door, the (newly bought) 10kg bag of dogfood split open, and two dogs with swollen bellies laying on their backs on the floor... they had eaten so much they could barely move; one of them was whimpering in pain... aside from being annoyed about needing to buy more food, it was a bit funny... even that evening they were both still a bit lethargic!

...so NASA fires this hunk of expensive metal into a comet...cool, but what I think is neat is the Russian astrologer that is suing the yanks for
undoubtedly altering the icy chunks trajectory, therefore altering the ephemeris and her horoscopic projections… and she is only asking for $US300 mill…. Excellent, that’ll teach those pesky scientists to mind their own business…

....spot the difference???

so what am i?

..apart from not using uppercase letters as i should, am just a normal canook working away at staying alive and enjoying it in the antipodes, or 'noozilun' as it is referred to by locals. i am one of those people you probaly used to call an 'almost nerd' in high school; not really nerdy enough to qualify, but definitely not in the 'in' crowd... which probably accounts for the vast majority of teenagers, when you think of it...
...anyway, today i am back in the office after a stint of field work; yesterday i was bobbing around in the Firth of Thames (not the british but the kiwi one) on a mussel harvesting barge, trying (badly) to move in a straight line while we surveyed the seafloor beneath... keeping such a beast travelling a straight line is a lot like walking a direct path through a gusty wind-tricky at best.... one of the best bits was seeing the interpersonal dynamic between the frustrated germanic survey technician and the equally frustrated kiwi skipper... most amusing...