The Blog

   Jiggity jig...

And now I'm home safe, with blog posts to catch up on. What was the last thing I had listed? Oh yeah. The prac class was interesting, I learned a bunch of stuff I didn't know before, such as, in FORTRAN, when you have a two-dimensional array x(i,j), it stores it in memory along the columns before the rows, so to search it most efficiently you'd have a loop over j, with an inner loop over i. Basically, this session was dedicated to learning how to make your code efficient when working on a normal (non-super) computer, and given that this is what I plan on doing for my project, it was really helpful.

James spent the time exploring Canberra, discovering the particle accelerator (though he didn't ask for a tour), and generally wandering around the campus and then the city centre. He appeared back for dinner at the college, and there was so much dessert. I don't know if they'd been expecting the kids back or what, but there was oodles of wasted food. (I'm not sure if I mentioned the kids or not: they were holding a national science camp thingy for high-school kids the last few weekdays I was at ANU. They were everywhere and they all dressed exactly the same. I know that we got a t-shirt for the summer school, and that every day a few people wore it, but these kids wore the same clothes every day...)

Yesterday, James and I finally went to Questacon!!! For those not in the know, it's the National Science and Technology Museum, built as a bicentenary present from the Japanese government, who know a thing or two about teaching science. It's all hands on, touch this, poke that and play with this, and even though we are supposedly big kids, James and I had an utter blast. He fell six feet without a parachute and I went on a rollercoaster (technically, so did he, but I didn't do anything special on my own). There was a giant funnelweb spider - that was evil - as a part of their "predators and why eating things smaller than you is fun" exhibition, but aside from that, we had a really good time.

Today, we went to both parliament houses. Yes, I am aware that I went there last week, but I wanted to return to old parliament house so that I could view the special exhibition on the Petrov Affair, which was fascinating, and James wanted to visit new parliament house for the contrast, and also because it was hours before our bus was due to take us to the train station. Since I already wrote those up, I'm going to gloss over them now due to me being stuffed.

Okay, so the buses in Canberra are a bit of a bother, as they only run once an hour and usually run a minute or two early. But they've done a pretty good job of selecting routes for them. The bus from the uni runs past many of the sights on the opposite side of the lake, and the bus to the station runs past parliament house, which meant we didn't have to lug my heavy bags very far (although I'm sure James hated every step - but I did keep offering to take it back). So it all worked out to the best. As a side note, but parliament houses had nice cloaking facilities for us to dump our bags at, so we didn't have to carry much around.

I think, though, that it would be really cool if there was a sort of Canberra Explorer bus, similar to the Sydney Explorer bus, which goes around to all of the touristy places, not just a few, which runs regularly and which has a nice simple ticketing system (not that the buses in canberra were bad with the tickets, they were quite cheap). I mentioned this idea to James, and he pointed out that the Canberra Xplorer is the train that takes you away from Canberra.

*pouts*

Dinner on the train tonight was fantastic. I was really surprised. We both had the vegetarian pasta option and it was really good and filling too. And it helped break up a really long train trip. My mum met me at the station, and James kissed me goodbye on the train before continuing on to the city. Then we drove home, and I collapsed into bed to blog. And now we're up to date.

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