Aftermath

Geekman, calling from the university at 8:30am: "Hey Styley, that storm last night? It totalled the campus."


At the entrance:

Man in fluorescent hazard gear to students trying to pass the cordon: "Guys, guys! The university is CLOSED. Library shut, cafes shut, buildings under water. Take a holiday, dammit. It's not safe!"

Student: "Can we go in and take photos?"

Man in fluorescent gear: "Why doesn't anyone listen to me? You know, the worst are the professors. They just keep walking on in despite everything I tell them. I mean, they don't have to teach today: classes are cancelled. So why can't they just kick back and relax?"




At the pharmacy:

Me, squelching across the wet, muddy carpet: "Hi, I'm impressed you are open."

Pharmacist: "Oh, yeah. Everything's fine here."

Me: "Can you fill this prescription for me?"

Pharmacist: "Uh huh. But is it okay if I just put the pills in a spare box? The packaging is all soggy."

Me: "That's fine."

Pharmacist: "And I'll have to write the label by hand. Our printer died in the storm."

Me: "Okay."

Pharmacist: "Here you are. And you have another two repeats on that prescription, but I can't give you the receipt for them, because our machine is dead. I'll post it to you, okay?"

Me: "Sure. Can I pay by EFTPOS?"

Pharmacist: "Sorry. Our telephone lines are down."






At my building:



Another man in a fluorescent suit: "You can't go in there. There's too much damage."

Me: "But.... But... My files? My computer?"

Fluorescent suit man: "Take a holiday. There are no classes."

Me: "You don't understand! I'm a PhD student! I have three more days to finish an absolutely really truly final version of chapter five! I need my files!"

[StyleyGeek sneaks round the back entrance and lets herself in.* Our second-floor department is, indeed, 10 cm deep in water.]

Fluorescent suit man, looking through main entrance: "You again! Get the fuck out of there!"

Me [bursting into tears]: "WAAAAAAAAAAAH! I want my files!"

And that is how my supervisor found me five minutes later, having a total meltdown on the steps to our building because I didn't want to take a day off (or three, or four: they say the campus is off-limits "until further notice").

I'm starting to feel like one of the characters in this PhD comic (but with colder feet).



Update: the storm has made it into the news now. Here's the Sydney Morning Herald's version. I especially like the final line: "A spokesman for the territory's water authority, ACTEW Corporation, was unable to confirm if any rain had fallen over the catchment area because the ACTEW building has been flooded."

____________

* Mysteriously switching to talking about herself in the third person as she goes.

Seriously scary storm

We just spent the last hour wondering if our house was going to collapse under the onslaught of ice and rain attacking it. The non-stop rolling thunder and lightning that gave me flashbacks to the few be-strobe-lighted discos I went to as a teenager were ten types of freaky too.


A couple of times I really thought the golf-ball-sized hailstones were going to start breaking our windows.


And they left our potted* plants none too happy.


Once it started to slow, though, it was kind of pretty.


And now the house is no longer shaking and groaning, I might be able to finally get some sleep.

____________

* Thanks, Ianqui!

Why physicists are cool (Reason #498)

They can pick up pirate radio stations on their BEC machine. Recently it's been playing Nena.

The return of the lazy space-filler post

Search terms that have recently brought people to this blog range from the weird-ass...

how to make new zealand

I think I'm going back to places


...to the just plain sad:

"grad school drop out" job hunt

i want to cry already

despairing student

feeling incompetent

internet procrastination dissertation

I think I'm having a nervous breakdown


Whoever you are, I feel for you! Hope you found something here to cheer you up.

How to spot a good person

They are the ones who stop to converse with birds.

Not necessarily people like me (I tend to blurt out a loud "Helloooooooo BIRDIES!", which promptly scares them away), but the ones who wish a quiet good morning to passing cockatoos, and people like the man I saw this morning, who nearly trod on a magpie but then graciously begged its pardon.

Rock climbing in Australia is full of surprises

Wow.

I read a story in the New Zealand news today about complaints about the billboard below (link here, but links to this news site go dead after a day or two, so I'll summarise the story).



The advert is by the New Zealand company Hell's Pizza, which is fairly controversial with its advertising campaign at the best of times (notably sending condoms in the mail to all NZ households last year). But what I think is hilarious is the response from the representative of the advertising agency that came up with the concept of the George Bush billboard:

"We believe, and given the even greater opposition to the war in Iraq and George Bush's plummeting popularity among voters in the US, that the billboard was not only socially responsible, but incredibly prescient given events that have unfolded subsequently."

Also:

"much to our chagrin, the billboard company acted unilaterally (much like George Bush in fact) and removed the billboard as soon as it received complaints".

And:

"We would point the board to the seminal work [by Barry Crump]. Bastards I Have Met was a wide-ranging almost academic study of the different types of bastard that one could encounter throughout New Zealand.

Of course George Bush had not yet come to prominence when Crump was writing, but had he been in office at the time, and if Barry had met him, I feel sure he would have qualified for his own chapter, headed 'Evil Bastard'.

As it stands, George W could certainly fit within the genus of bastard identified as a `Bad bastard' (bastardus skullduggerus), or arguably for a subgroup of this particular type of bastard – the `real bad bastard' – although that is not for us to say."

Despite what it looks like (shameless gossiping), I do actually feel sad for her too

Okay, so celebrity gossip is not exactly what this blog's all about and no doubt I'm about to horrify my regular readers. But I just got some gossip via my office mate, who has Sources, and who was therefore the first person in the entire universe to hear about for instance Steve Irwin's death.

So her sources just came through again and said that Britney Spears has just tried (and thankfully failed) to kill herself.

Just thought you'd like to know before the rest of the internets do.

(Is my credibility entirely shot now?)

10 weird things about me

I was tagged by Geeka for this meme, which is very exciting because no one has ever tagged me for anything before. So here you are. I hope these things are weird enough:

1. I can't sleep with the wardrobe door open. It feels like my clothes are staring at me and creeps me out.
2. There is no food I don't like. As a kid I hated bananas, peanut butter, and cheese, but through the gateway drugs of fried bananas with maple syrup, peanut butter chocolates (yay America!) and parmesan, I have gradually come to treasure all three.
3. I have a whole bunch of half-siblings who I've never even met (as well as others who I have).
   
4. My father is a priest (3 and 4 are not related).
5. My potplants always die within two months of me taking ownership of them. Cacti take longer, but still shrivel up and cark it in the end.
6. I have lived in 16 different houses in 13 different cities in four different countries. That's an average of a different house every year and a half throughout my life.
7. As a kid I got teased for having big lips, a big bum and long legs. When grownups said I'd be glad of these features later, I never believed them. Now I am happier with my body than I have ever known any other woman to be with hers. (Not because it's spectacularly beautiful or anything, but see #9 below).
   
8. I have never owned a TV.
9. I think my happiness level is naturally set higher than everyone else's. My default mood when nothing good or bad has happened recently is that the world is awesome, I am awesome,* and I can't wait for the rest of the day because awesomeness is just bound to happen. If something good happens, I get even higher, and I bounce back from negative events more quickly than most people I know.
10. This probably makes me very irritating to be around.

______________

* Okay, so maybe this is more like narcissism than optimism.

Pavlovian

Every morning around 8 o'clock I put out the birdseed for the rosellas. If they eat it all during the day, I put out some more when I get home. Lately, this has been the sight greeting me when I open the curtains in the morning and again when I get home at night:



(At least, I assume they don't just sit there all day as well.)

Serial conference fraud

Yesterday my co-editor and I were brainstorming titles for the proceedings volume of the workshop we organised last year. After running through all the bad puns we could think of, we turned in desperation to the original title of the workshop. Let's call it Boring but Unambiguous: Easily Searchable Workshop Title 2006. So we googled "Boring but Unambiguous" to make sure there wasn't already a book or paper out there with the same title.

And oddly enough, one of the hits to our search solved a six-month-old mystery.

One of our presenters for Boring but Unambiguous: Easily Searchable Workshop, who had submitted her abstract, had it peer-reviewed and accepted, and who had not triggered any mental alarm bells, had then simply failed to show up, both to her scheduled session, and (as far as we know) to the conference in general.

But the search for "boring but unambiguous" returned, among other hits, her CV. And that woman has no shortage of conferences listed there. Under a section called "Conference papers" she lists hundreds of titles, each with "accepted" next them in brackets. She doesn't specifically say that she attended and gave the paper, but she has the date and place, so what else is the reader/potential employer meant to assume? I can only conclude that she is a serial conference-submitter-and-not-turn-upper who then profits from this to pad her CV.

Maybe I'm naive, but I found this more than a little bit shocking. Do any of you know, does it happen a lot?

Tech support in the middle ages: how to use a book

This video is hilarious. An excerpt:

"Have you tried opening it?"
"Opening it? Well if it had been that straightforward, I wouldn't have called the Helpdesk."
"Well if we go like this... There. We're in."
"Yes, I got that far myself. But then I stopped, fearing I would lose some text."

Thanks to Jana for sending me the link.

The light was so soft and pretty yesterday that I kept taking photos all morning. This one was from my "commute" to university.


One thing I love about this city is that even though the university is in the centre city, and even though we live only one suburb north of it, I can get from here to there entirely through parks like the one above. This is not so great at night, since there's no street lighting, but cycling into trees is no doubt good practice for, well, cycling into walls or something. And some cynics would argue that if you want a functioning major city, you need to build, you know, houses and businesses in the centre, rather than just roads and parks, but what do they know? Burley Griffin was a visionary! A visionary, I tell you!

I'm going to stop now, and go stare at some pretty trees.

Urban commando parrot

World's worst witness

(That would be me.)

I saw a hit-and-run on the way to university just now. A car did an illegal u-turn, knocked a motorcyclist off his bike, and sped off. The motorcyclist spun through the air a few times and landed heavily.

The motorcyclist was sitting, stunned, in the middle of the road, and I ran over and asked him if he was okay. He snarled, "No," and then keeled over. A woman got out of her car and called an ambulance, but fortunately a fire engine was passing just then and pulled over and started doing whatever medical thing firemen do at an accident.

One of the other firemen started taking statements and I had to admit that I had absolutely no idea about what exactly had happened. I couldn't even recall the colour of the car, let alone the number-plate. (Nor could any of the other witnesses, so I doubt they'll ever catch the person.) All I remember is the loud crash and then a sense of speed and movement. Maybe I was watching the motorcyclist instead of the car.

After I left the scene, I realised I had had my camera switched on in my hand the whole time, since I'd been taking photos of parrots right when the accident happened. If only I'd thought to point it at the scene and click a few times, I might have got the car on film.

I think I'm probably the world's most clueless witness.

But if you'll excuse me, I think I need to go sit in a corner and turn pale and shaky for a bit.

It's raining, it's pouring!

And that is big excitement all by itself, as you can probably imagine if you look at the colour of the "grass" in the last few photos I've posted.

But more importantly, for the first time ever since we moved in here two and a half years ago, our apartment is behaving like something waterproof. Hooray!

This is fantastic news, since it not only means we won't have to deal with people like these anymore, but we can also stop worrying about whether we should move. Much as I have totally fallen in love with this house and want want want it, it was never going to happen, so we might as well just stay put.

Parrot Junior High

Technology firsts

It would be cool if this turned into a meme: I'd love to know about how the rest of you experienced these firsts. Of course, if you are younger than me or a member of a more advanced civilisation, some of these things might have been around since before you remember, so feel free to substitute your own ideas for anything that doesn't apply.

First experience with a video player: 1986
When my father brought home our first video player, I remember being fascinated with the exciting new possibilities this opened up. I insisted on recording my favourite shows and watching them at fast speed and again on rewind. Family lore has it that even my six-year-old self saw the main advantage of video players almost instantly and announced that now we could watch a five day cricket match in just a few hours.

First experience with a microwave: 1988
My mother got a microwave for Christmas 1988. We read the instruction book and the recipe collection that came with it, marvelling at all the amazing things you could do. And this is where Mum began her path of enthusiastic technology screw-ups: she announced that the 5 minutes cooking time for the chocolate cake in the recipe must be a typo. Nothing could cook a cake that fast. She put the cake batter on high for 25 minutes and we had to leave the windows and doors open for the next few days.

First experience of more than two TV channels: 1989
New Zealand was always late to the party when it came to TV. Television only reached New Zealand at all in 1960, and it wasn't until 1989 that it expanded beyond the two state-owned channels. There was much discussion in my family about why on earth we needed another channel. What would they show? After all, every programme we had ever heard of was already playing on channels one and two. My parents concluded that they would probably just show ads and reruns. (We weren't far wrong.)

First experience with a CD player: 1991
I saved and saved and saved for a CD player. My pocket money, at a rate of 50c a week, was just not cutting it. So a friend and I, both 10 years old, presented ourselves to a local bank at the start of our holidays and begged for summer jobs in their office. We claimed to be 14, and weirdly—illegally—they gave us work. At $10 an hour (incidentally higher than any pay-rate I was ever to have again throughout the rest of my school and university years in New Zealand) I had my CD player by the end of the summer. I still have it, in fact, and it works just fine.

First experience with a computer: 1992
A friend at intermediate school had a Commodore 64. We'd go back to his house after school, turn it on, put in a disk, and go have a snack in the kitchen. By the time we'd finished eating, the disk had sometimes booted up and we could play Jumpman and some scary little game where you had to build a raft and get off an island before a flood came and drowned you. I didn't get to play with a real computer for another three years, and then I was mostly terrified of doing anything in case I broke it. How things have changed...

First experience with MTV: 1996
Like I said, NZ was late to the television party. I didn't discover MTV until I went to Germany on a high-school exchange. And then I was equal-parts baffled and intrigued by it. Music. All the time. Music videos. It was like RTR countdown (which I wasn't allowed to watch because Madonna was The Whore of Babylon), but it showed all day long! When I got back to New Zealand I was almost bursting with the anticipation of telling my friends about this weird awesomeness that was the all-day music channel, but the Powers That Be had burst my bubble by bringing MTV to New Zealand while I was gone. It only lasted about a year, though, and then vanished from our airwaves, never to be seen again.

First experience of email: 1997
In our final year of high school our school decided to invest in a computer room. There were eight computers, and classes were shepherded up to the room to have "computer lessons", which mostly consisted of practice at sending email to the person next to you. Unexpectedly, this turned out to fantastic preparation for university, where most of my computer-using hours were spent sending messages to friends at nearby computers.

First cellphone: 2001
First and last. It was a Motorola Clunky-Ass Can't-Sell-It. It didn't work indoors and sending SMS was a bit of a lottery. It cost me 2 Euro from a dodgy-looking shop in the Turkish district and I used it about five times before swearing off cellphones for life.

Pssst!

The 7th Carnival of Gradual Progress is up at The History Enthusiast. Tell all your friends!

Your academic work condensed into haiku

This is the awesomest idea ever. Obviously you might need to be extra anonymous if you plan to use the title of a published or otherwise googlable work for your haiku. But if you're leaving them in Jim's comments, I guess you can always not sign your pseudonym.

Here's mine:

The grammaticalisation of discourse markers in relative clauses

Words like "so, you know"
glue onto pronouns; grammar
from faded meaning.

Towards a diachronic typology of relative clauses

The more I research
this, the more certain I feel
that Lehmann was right.

alternatively:

The relative clause:
parasite, steals its form from
other constructions.

(Yes, these titles do make me googlable. If you care, and find out my identity, please don't post it here.)

Update: Ooh! Ooh! I have another one (also for the dissertation):

Towards a diachronic typology of relative clauses

From the bruised syntax
of mangled constructions, rise
these zombie clauses.

(Yes, I have just spent most of the afternoon writing haikus, not only about my own thesis but also on most of the journal articles I've read lately and a whole heap of the fundamental works in my field. It's a fun game! And not at all a sign of impending insanity.)

PS: I'm going to do one for each chapter next. (Carried away? Who, me?)