The Blog

   Odd new / old posts?...

A quick note, for the record, to say that I'm in the process of updating the last of my trip blog entries, so if weird new posts appear that seem to be backdated, don't stress. I am backdating things, your rss reader isn't going crazy. I hope to have everything up by tomorrow.

Update: Everything is up now... Hooray.

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   LifeSucks.com...

I catch a lot of trains. That means I see a lot of poster advertising at the stations. One campaign that has been particularly annoying in recent months reads Life Sucks Now Has A Website.

Excuse me? Have you guys ever visited the internet? "Life Sucks" has been a predominant theme since the place first appeared. It's primary website was originally the free web hosting places like angelfire and geocities, but in the last many years, "Life Sucks" has well and truly belonged at livejournal (and to a lesser extent blogger, which I use as my interface here).

I know, you're trying to help people by telling them that someone has set up a website to help people with depression, kinda like the various helplines that exist. But really, couldn't you have chosen a slogan that is a little less redundant. As long as the internet has existed, people have used it to complain about how much their lives suck, and you just make me laugh when you should be invoking sympathy.

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   Fun and Games on Australia Day...

Heidi and Tony are coming over today. It will be good to see them again in a social context, not just a "we have a few minutes to talk at uni" kind of thing.

We're playing a game on the message boards at the moment, where one lists ten things about themselves, but four of them are lies. Here's my list, I'll post the answers in a week or so:

01. I have sung at the Sydney Opera House.
02. I spent my summer camp programming on a linux cluster supercomputer.
03. I have my bronze medal for ballet.
04. James was the only one of my friends to wish me "happy birthday".
05. In my room, I have a large Harry Potter wallscroll.
06. I have two cats: Whisper and Kamen.
07. I was Dux of my High School.
08. I've cosplayed as my Domus Prime character.
09. I once went overseas to Tasmania.
10. My first celebrity crush was on Leonardo DiCaprio.

Labels: this was before tags

   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.

Labels: this was before tags

   What's this? An interesting lecture?...

Good lord, I didn't think it was going to happen, but this morning's lectures absolutely rocked, which was good as James had tagged along and had a blast. This guy was really cool, talking about modelling the oceans and the atmosphere and generally having a model earth. Very sweet, and hugely complicated.

I think that geekcamp would have been more fun if there'd been more of this: good lectures about how we build real models that actually work, rather than hours of derivations of different methodologies with no real applied work other than "run this matlab script... now run this other one. It goes faster." Boring...

This afternoon is more practical work put on by the APAC guys on optimising serial programs. I'm looking forward to it, though James won't be here. *pouts* No more hand-holding in class... But this stuff looks to be useful, which is good, as there hasn't quite been enough applied study here. I've had a blast, and this last lecture has left me with warm feelings towards the whole experience, but I'm glad I'll be headed home in a few more days.

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   Pizza for those of us at Geekcamp...

Hooray, and finally I get pizza! Sure, it wasn't the cheap stuff that Edan and Adam were hoping for, but it was bloody marvellous. James came down to Canberra this afternoon, in the middle of a massive thunderstorm, and I had to buy an umbrella before heading out to meet him after class. That didn't stop me from getting drenched, and my socks were wet all night as we explored the main city mall.

We discovered an excellent cafe with free wireless internet and fantastic hot chocolates which warmed me up to no end. I can't think of the name, but they have signs out the front for "Dutch Pancakes" and the brand of coffee is Lavanza. Next door was a cute clothes shop which sold singlet tops decorated with anime girls, but they were shut (it's thursday night, what's wrong with you people?).

Then, after much more wandering around, pizza! I have a business card around here somewhere, so I'll post the address, as these guys had the best vegetarian pizzas I've ever tasted (I'm not sure if I've mentioned this, but James is vegetarian, and while I'm not, it's easier when I'm with him to just not eat meat. Plus, vegetarian food is yummy when it's done right).

It was so good to see James after so long away from him (the longest ever separation we've had so far). Getting cuddles, and just the basics of human contact, being able to reach out and touch him familiarly, felt really good. That's one of the downsides of being away from your peoples. No casual touches to remind you that they like you.

Anyway, ignoring all the mushy stuff, after the pizza, ooh and ginger beer brewed at the pizza place (I drank a pint of the stuff, it was great), we went for birthday gelato (I didn't feel like cake)! Yummy yummy yummy, but I was so full at this point... Then we came home to the college, where James is going to stay for a few days, until we both go back to Sydney.

Ah, I didn't mention my birthday presents. I got a camera card reader (no I don't have a digi-cam, but I have been using James'), and the book, "Battle Royale" (yes, just like the movie). I haven't started reading it yet, but I will, because it's a gorgeous edition and looks to be a lot of fun. Thank you James.

There's been no birthday greetings from my other friends.

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   It's pronounced *nu-cle-ar*...

Okay, the Access Grid was cool, but sticking my head in a particle accelerator was cooler. Hooray for the thing being down for repairs, which meant we got to look inside and get a better idea of how it works.

It was also good to visit the research school where my uncle Jimmy (James Boland) worked for so many years. I got a nice sense of family history, even though I saw no real evidence that he was ever there.

We went on a private tour of the physics school, given by an old friend of Wendy's supervisor. We caught the lift up to the top of the particle accelerator, which is huge. At the top, a large supply of negative ions are created using a voltage of about a million Volts. These ions are whisked past a huge magnet and sent into the accelerator, where a giant Van der Graaff generator creates a voltage of around 16 million Volts in a positive terminal awaits them halfway down. They hit the terminal and are converted to positive ions and then accelerated faster down to the bottom where the ions are directed into a number of different experiments, or can be have their energy doubled by passing through a superconducting linear post-accelerator.

What all this means is that you get charged atoms travelling at up to 10% of the speed of light, at which point they have enough energy to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between atomic nuclei and nuclear reactions can occur. That is, the positive bits at the center of atoms can smoosh together and go bang. This process is called fusion and it's what happens within the sun to make it glow so bright.

We also got to visit their plasma laboratory, where they study what happens in high energy ionised gases, like in the sun's corona. This stuff was almost applicable to me, as I have done a little bit of stuff with the theory of plasma before. However, what I liked most about it was the wierd helix structure the plasma moved in.

We got a lift back because a thunderstorm had hit while we were inside and it was raining way too heavily for us to walk for twenty minutes. Now we're stuck here for an afternoon lecture that had been delayed past lunch by the Access Grid event running overtime. We were meant to be doing a prac class this afternoon. Grr... Arg...

Labels: this was before tags

   Accessing the Grid...

So, this morning we got to see the internet used the way I always thought it ought to be. Or, at least, the way the advertising makes it out to me. At this moment, I'm listening to a talk on visualising scientific modelling (ie. making pretty pictures out of ugly numbers) given by Christ Johnson at the University of Utah.

A video camera is recording his movements, a microphone his works, and a VNC session is capturing his computer screen. All of these are then transmitted over the internet to us, where the visual is projected out onto the wall, one projector displaying the video, the other his powerpoint presentation. Several large speakers give us his voice in stereo goodness.

Of course, the missing piece of this puzzle is that he can see us, due to two cameras here. And there are a bunch of people in Adelaide, and a few more in Western Australia watching and participating too. Their video feeds are being projected off to the side of the wall.

And from the talk, here's a question for graphics students, which I'll pitch at Tony: "If a polygon falls on the view plane and nobody sees it, does it still exist?" I wasn't sure, but the speaker informs us that it doesn't.

Back to the description of the system known as the Access Grid. This morning, we've had three lectures, one from a guy in New York where they've been promised eight inches of snow tonight, and then another from Jack Dongarra from Tennessee, who is responsible for the Top 500 list of supercomputers. He talked about the list and how it's calculated, what is wrong with the system and the new benchmarking system that they are working on developing. Perhaps the most interesting graph he showed was linux adoption in supercomputer systems over the years, which has been going up exponentially.

There have been problems. Tennessee had no audio so he had to phone Rockhampton where they had a speakerphone. The speakerphone put the audio into the air, and microphones on the ceiling caught it and sent it to us. And yet, I didn't even notice really. We lost audio a few times during this lecture, and we only get a small number of colours during the slides here, which is a pity as this one is all about pretty pictures. And the VNC session (what we're using to see his screen) is running at one frame a second during its best moments. Which means that his videos suck instead of being cool. I'm hoping we'll be able to get a copy of his presentation so we can get the images at least. But the video of the speakers has been fantastic: we're getting around twelve frames a second, in sync with the audio, and things aren't quite smooth enough to make me comfortable but I haven't really noticed it.

They're blaming the audio problems on all the students arriving back on campus at Utah and plugging in their computers to boot up napster, so the local network is melting down.

There have been several veiled digs at the Bush Administration and how certain military actions and other diversions of funds have stilted research funding. It was pretty interesting to hear about the changes that have been wrought over the past four years.

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   Uck!...

For the record, the only grog at the party was beer, not even the cheap wine option. And since it's not really hot enough for beer, I think I'm going to go mope in sober reflection for a while.

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   Capture the B33R...

< -- transcript of a handwritten blog entry. -- >

Blogging by hand at the moment to keep myself awake. This current lecture is potentially interesting, but unfortunately the morning session was so dull that my brain is long gone, and before the last break I was falling asleep.

It's also that case that both of today's classes were meant to be hands-on, but the code doesn't run on the supercomputer, so all it really has been is six hours (so far) of advertising for the packages these guys use. Without any idea of how to implement their stuff other than the ever-increasing long code snippets they show, which mean nothing to me.

The only good thing about me playing "little noddy" (a phrase my mum always used to describe her father nodding off in front of the tv) is that I wasn't the only one. Even now, after we pumped ourselves full of coffee, five people in the room are sitting in a slumped manner, their eyes closed, breathing slowly and regularly.

Our hour, six minutes and forty-three seconds to go.

We're having a social event tonight, which means that we're all heading off to the bar for free drinks. I'm hoping that it will be whatever we want to drink, rather than the standard beer + cheap wine options. Some rum would do me good right now. So too would about eight hours of sleep, but that's a different issue.

Ooh, moving pictures, I like these...

Ack! pins and needles in my feet!!!! Ouchies! Don't you dare laugh; it's not funny...

On an unrelated topic, I've been doing a lot of beta-reading for Korinne recently. She is writing really well at the moment, so if you're a fan of Star Trek: Enterprise (which apparently has been cancelled, but I haven't seen an episode), give her stories a try.

Back to class, everyone is now looking awake (forty-two minutes, fourteen seconds to go), but some people are looking rather freakish in the way they are holding their eyes open as wife as possible in order to look awake. I'm in a class full of bugs! And I'm not talking about the software, although there has been a bit of that too.

I think tomorrow I'll bring my laptop. It'll look like I'm taking notes, when really I'm blogging, but I won't have the hassle of having to type it up afterward.

Writing like this has really brought home just how much blogging is a "stream of consciousness" exercise for me. My handwriting is horribly messy, because I'm concentrating (on something else) on getting my thoughts down as fast as I think of them. It's like I'm plugging you into my brain for a few minutes.

Hey, we're up to the conclusion section! Sure, it had its own table of contents, but the point remains that we will probably finish early.

My hand is blue from the pen smudges. Stupid left-handedness... Although, the glitter is a nice touch. *rolls eyes* This is what I get for using nice expensive pens, which sparkle.

Mmm... A mini-lecture on open source software, wiki technology and version-control. Aren't we done yet? I want my grog...

PS. The title of this post refers to me seeing a guy in a t-shirt of my favourite MegaTokyo strip today. I've always planned to buy James one.

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   Back to your regularly scheduled blogging...

So, putting this afternoon's little outburst aside, today was pretty good really. The work was all in python, which I know well-enough, and the labs mostly consisted of "finish coding this algorithm (6 lines max) and then explore the input parameters to determine what runs well". The teacher was good, the instruction set was good and all in all, Wendy and I had a lot of fun. I typed, she picked up on my typos before runtime, and we discovered that what is meant to be a nicely effective way of parallelising code actually sucked (it was a way of dynamically assigning work units to those processors that hada run out).

And the best bit was that the whole thing was just us trying different ways to calculate the Mandelbrot set of fractals. I haven't got any pretty screenshots with me, but I will put some up later. I like fractals, ever since I was a kid and had a program on my C64 that would calculate them, and it was really cool to find out how this particular one was calculated.

Today was also my cheapest lunch. Hooray for instant ramen. Pity I don't have another one for tomorrow.

No sight-seeing or other news about what's going on in Canberra, sorry about that. I could talk about the Huygens probe, but you've all already read up on it.

Labels: this was before tags

   I hate Tuesdays...

In true "Garfield"-fan form, when I was younger I used to hate Mondays and love lasagne. Now I still love lasagne, but it's Tuesdays that I don't get along with. I'm not really sure why. Something about the combination of it being near-enough to the middle of the working week and my own propensity to mope when I'm left alone too long (which is kinda what happens at uni: me alone in the big office, without a friend in the place...).

It seems to have carried on, even though I'm not at uni. I'm actually feeling bad because I couldn't afford to go out with my friends here tonight and still have enough money to sight-see, so the good mood I'd worked up by finishing off today's work an hour and a half early evaporated when I realised that I had no one to share the buzz with.

Wendy and I were thinking of going out on a sort of double-date with our boys on the weekend, although she's married to hers so I don't know if it counts as a date. I'm not sure what's happening there, but if we could get together at least once that would be cool.

Yeah, me being depressed. Not going out with my people here reminded me of some pretty hurtful-but-necessary stuff James once told me about how I shouldn't always push people away, and that brought me back to the fact that when I go home, I'm not going to have a group of friends that I can just call up to go out to the pub with.

I wonder sometimes about what I did to Heidi and the others, and whether or not it was the right thing to do. When I was so upset and miserable and hurt, it seemed like telling the truth and telling them all that they had upset me, that I was miserable and hurt, was the good and proper thing. I thought that if I confessed to all the bad feelings, they'd help me make them go away. But, of course, that's not what happened. Many (most?) saw my confession as an attack on them and their actions, and even though I hadn't meant that, I guess it kinda was.

In many ways, I was asking for help, and even though I said that I wanted time away from them, I didn't want them to make me feel like I wasn't welcome. I wanted support, and all I really got was a 'good riddance, you freak'. And now, the only friend from that group I have left is Tony, and I get the feeling that he would only miss having someone to go to lunch with when Ruth's not around. And yup, I'm aware that I've probably hurt his feelings by thinking that, but the blog's about being honest, and that's what I think when I'm depressed.

I don't know what's true, and what's my own loneliness, after all, I'm wearing a gorgeous purple nail-polish that Heidi and Tony gave me for Christmas, and I'm going out for drinks with the people here tomorrow night. But I can't help but wonder: "will any of my old friends even remember that it's my birthday, or would it have just been James and I celebrating alone anyway?"

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   I hurt all over...

My muscles are sore, and I'd love a massage, but my personal masseur is still in Sydney (four more days!!!).

Anyway, there was more sightseeing today, lots of photo-taking, and in case I forget to ask, James could you please bring your 'get things off the memory card doodad'. I've only got 30 or so shots left, and we might want more than that next weekend.

This morning I discovered that the chapel was locked and empty when I thought mass was going to be on, and so I went to the australian national botanical gardens an hour earlier than I was expecting to. I took lots of photos of pretty flowers, experimenting with the camera. And I got rained on, which was a lot nicer than yesterday's heat, especially since I was in the greenhouse when it happened. I waited until it settled down into mild showers, which was incredibly pleasant on my sunburnt skin.

I then went to the National Museum of Australia. It wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped for, the permanent exhibitions were somewhat schizophrenic, in that each display was a big jump from the others without much of an explanation of what lead from one to another. From the first fleet to the first lot of boat people, it just didn't quite work. Also, they were trying to be a cool science museum with gadgets and touchscreens, while being a history museum. They had a cool building, but no three or four paths through each exhibition, so I felt turned around most of the time. I had fun, but felt vaguely out of place the whole time.

By the way, I should mention that all of the places that I visited, with the exception of old Parliament House, were free to enter, and even then that one was only a small donation. So, yes, there is stuff to do in Canberra. I'm told (by Wendy) that there are even places where people go to dance at night (on weekends).

Labels: this was before tags

   Heatwave...

Sorry for the lack of postage, but I've been so stuffed from all this hot weather. Not to mention that yesterday was just too much effort. I ended up crying myself to sleep.

So today, on my first day off since forever, I went sightseeing. Since I can't display my photos here, I'm going to have to provide links.

I started out at Parliament House, where I took the guided tour given by a very helpful woman who managed to answer all of my questions before I had a chance to ask them. Excellent training, peoples.

Then I wandered down the hill (and got attacked by a million bugs) to explore some of the embassies, particularly the chinese, new zealand, british, and papua new guinea embassies. I love the way everyone uses old-school native archetecture (well, not ancient native, but native anyway).

Then I found the Surveyor's Hut which was where they kept all the original maps of Canberra as they were trying to figure out what they were going to do with the place. Eventually they ended up flooding an awful lot of it, but that's another story.

The Canberra-Nara Park is an odd mix of Japanese and Australian gardening styles, with several traditional japanese pagodas next to fair-dinkum aussie barbeques. It's right on the edge of the lake though, which makes for good views.

Around lunchtime (which I completely forgot about) I found myself at the National Library which is suitably massive, with pretty stained glass windows, and a really nice photography exhibition (only available until april, I think).

What else? I discovered the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia, both of which had some good exhibitions going on. Then to the Old Parliament House, which I plan on visiting again next week when I have more time.

I'm sorry I rushed through the last few, but I'm really hot here, and keeping my hands on a warm computer is melting my own circuits. It's apparantly going to be cooler tomorrow.

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   College students have all the fun. ...

Being a student, living in a college, is a lot different from being a student, living at home. For one thing, your friends are always on hand. For another, they become your pseudo-family, as your real family is too far away to be of any use. Or maybe they're all just too wrapped up in their own lives to call. But it doesn't matter, because if I want someone to talk to, I just go knock on the next door over, or go to the common room which is full of people at all hours of the day (or night).

The place is fully-catered, which means that I'm social at least twice a day (I didn't sign up for lunch at college, which is good considering it's ten minutes walk from the computing labs which are right near the union). The food isn't bad, and it's refreshing to decide that I'm ready to eat and have the food there waiting, no cooking, no cleaning up afterwards. It's all convenient.

Which is not to say the food is any good, but it is convenient.

Actually, the food is better than average for mass-produced buffet-style meals. There's always an abundance of salads, and drinks (though the fizzy stuff has been dead for the last two days), and more often than not there's dessert left even if you're the last person to eat. The only thing I'd change would be the "we only serve food for one hour" rule, which is a complete pain -- especially considering that they usually start serving thirty minutes before that hour is scheduled to start. How many people really eat at 5.30pm?

The toilets here are usually really gross come bedtime, as they are only cleaned once a day, and shared between boys and girls. I know it's sexist of me to blame the boys for the mess, but it's actually tricky for girls to leave urine on the toilet seats and floor while believing that you're hitting the toilet proper. Unless you're drunk, but the bar here isn't open in the summer and no one that drunk could make it up the two flights of stairs. But I'm used to that from home and it is why I brought my slippers. I usually shower just after they clean them in the mornings, which is fantastic. Nothing says "hygiene" like the stink of bleach.

The uni bar is not that 'spensive either. I had a drink with Wendy after class today, which was exceedingly pleasant after all the heat today. It's been topping 36, with a humidity as low as it goes, and no breeze. There's no pool on campus, but the creek and Lake Burley-Griffith are looking more appealing by the minute. Wendy's mum is flying up from Adelaide for the weekend, I might consider crashing their party at the Novotel to use the pool there.

I wish I had some air-conditioning.

Labels: this was before tags

   Computers are your friends. They also make you friends...

Yesterday was spent in the labs again, only for 8 hours instead of three. We were learning MPI, which I mentioned previously. MPI is the "Message Passing Interface", which allows multiple copies of programs running on multiple CPUs to communicate with each other. That way, the different CPUs can all be performing different parts of a huge calculation, then one instance gathers up the results and spits them at the user.

Needless to say, it's pretty heavy stuff.

What this translates to is "I wrote a number of programs that could each run over four (or more, they were all scalable, though we learned that more isn't necessarily better) computers at once, so the computation only takes a quarter of the time it used to (give or take a bit)."

If it sounds interesting, it's because it is. For more info, see the course notes, which are the notes for yesterday's work. I'm always happy to expand on such stories via email, but I'm going to move on now.

I realised the other day that I haven't really spoken about my new computer. It's not an AlphaServer SC, but it is pretty nifty.

My computer is a sexy sexy iBook. It does all kinds of neat tricks. Like playing movies on the common room tv when there's nothing on foxtel, or surfing the internet from the refectory. Which is to say, I've loved having a laptop with me, because it's a computer, but it fits in my backpack (well, not my nice tiny backpack, but still, that's a small bag). I can blog from my classes if I want to (though not post the blog entries, as the wireless internet doesn't stretch to the computing building (go figure)).

My ibook runs all my favourite linux programs (including "frozen bubble"), it compiles and runs all the (non-supercomputer) code I've written myself, it manages to be compatible with most people's windows files, while still being very pretty to look at.

It makes me friends wherever I go, as all the geek boys at the conference want a mac (the less geeky geek girls don't get it), and the cool college party kids want one because it matches their iPods.

I'm Little Miss Popularity... Well, maybe not.

Labels: this was before tags

   I (heart) robots...

So, anyway, talking about the robot in the mass data storage device. Okay, picture a normal little room within a big room, only this room is a dodecahedron (try spelling that three times fast). There's a window to the room, and it's all dark, with only a few lights illuminating the labels on the thousands of tape drives on the pillar within. Then, a huge collection of red LEDs swing past the window, as the robot arm picks up one of the tape drives, swings back around the pillar and puts it in the reader. How sweet is that?

Okay, maybe I'm getting a little too excited. We also met a little supercomputer consisting of a cluster of 152 linux boxen (well, Dell boxen running linux to be more precise), each running as a node in a pretty sweet system. They were only connected to the controller nodes by standard network interfacing, rather than anything fancy (see also: expensive and uberfast), but they are used for a lot of really interesting stuff. Or so I'm told, I haven't got an account on the machine to test it for myself.

So, then we met "SC". It's a pretty cute system, really. All hidden away in racks that say "compaq" on them in huge letters. With big chunky cabling that runs for metres under the false floor and arranged into "hot" and "cool" aisles so that the ventilation system (also primarily operating under the floor) can keep everything at the perfect temperature (and humidity, which is something I wouldn't have thought of. Air-conditioned air is usually very dry, but dry air causes computers to spark, so the air around an expensive supercomputer has to be kept at something around 45% humidity, to keep everything working at it's optimal specs). The worst bit was that I was wearing a dress, and all the vents in the floor kept blowing it up Marilyn Munroe style. How embarrassment.

Before I get offtopic, for more information about the facilities we're using, you can visit this website. Yesterday we got to write simple programs that run on the outer nodes of the SC.

But speaking of dresses, there are four girls here with me. Wendy is a friend of mine, and Jackie I met at the Harley Wood Winter School last year. I haven't met the others yet, but I'm sure I will. There are 38 people in the course, out of 80 applications, and neither Wendy or I are particularly sure why we were picked for such a selective group. I suspect that for me it was a combination of my supervisor and the Astrophysics Effect (where saying that you do astrophysics gets you more credit than you really deserve), and Wendy thinks it's because she's doing something similarly odd (Medical Physics).

Anyway, time to go to class. Today we're playing with the supercomputer again, using something called "MPI".

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   When "SC" doesn't stand for "Sailor Coruscant"...

This morning started off with a rude awakening as the sun came up and I remembered that I hate summer mornings. 'Course, I hadn't realised that my room faced East before, and now I know. I met new people at breakfast, and even more people in the morning class.

I'm having an okay time. The lectures melted my brain, I got a cool tee-shirt, and I've met a bunch of people whose names I've promised to remember. There's Wendy who does medical physics in Adelaide, who's really nice and very pretty, but has never used Unix before and has since been thrown in off the deep end with regards to high-performance computing. There's Edan, who reminds me of James, in a hugely gothy, cigarette-smoking, little bit tubby and not that cute kind of way. But he knows his way around a computer like James, and in our little circle of peoples, he and I seem to know our way around the machines best.

So anyway, the lecture was horrible. I followed it, mostly, but it was kinda heavy maths and required mental muscles that I've been relaxing for the last few weeks. Still, I have a good background in this stuff and they gave us a folder full of course notes to follow, so I don't have to take many notes.

Then, after two hours of hell, we got to go and visit the source of all the fuss. And I decided that while supercomputers are cool (though actually hot), mass data storage systems are fucking awesome. This thing rocked my world so much that I completely forgot how cool the visualisation lab that came before it was. Let me back up.

The visualisation lab was full of macintoshes. That was my first impression, though really it was just the 30" monitors that caught my eye. Those things are excessive, aren't they? And, if I had a desk big enough for God to work at it, I'd want one too. Actually, one would look really good here on this big empty desk (I'm just using an edge of it as I was watching Buffy from bed). But anyway, we got to wear those 3D goggles where they work by synchronising the polarisation with a red LED that blinks a gazillion times a second, the ones that don't look like 3D goggles until you put them on and suddenly that odd fuzzy blob becomes a CAT scan of a little garden lizard and you're thinking "that's the coolest thing ever". The video was being played by the token windows machine (I guess when you're designing these things to run in other people's powerpoint presentations you have to make them run on windows), but that room was just so cool and the people who worked there were very cool (in an amazingly geeky kind of way).

*yawns* Okay, too tired to gush anymore. I'm going to sleep and write up the rest before breakfast.

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Musings on going away...

Some things seem easy. Getting on a train, meeting new people, going away from home. But they're not.

Getting on the train today was one of the hardest things I've done in a long time. Saying good-bye to my mum nearly made me cry. But then I saw her, on the platform, walking up and down the length of the carriage, unable to see me through the mostly-reflective glass, and I had to laugh as she couldn't see me waving until the train moved off several minutes later. That's how it works. I laughed, I felt better. Being on the train didn't seem so bad.

It was pretty awful though. The kid behind me was hyperactive, and the woman next to me was a compulsive SMS sender who didn't know or didn't want to know how to turn off the key tones on her phone. When she wasn't sending or receiving messages (how is that possible when my phone had no reception most of the trip?) she was watching home movies on her camera. With sound. Fortunately, I had my laptop (have I talked about this here?) and a hard-disk full of backed-up Buffy episodes. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems.

Ooh, and I discovered something useful: While a cup of hot water and a tea bag will set you back $2 on the train, if you have your own tea-bag it's only 60c for the cup of water. You also apparently can't reuse styrofoam cups, as they melt (I was told this by an employee of countrylink who had it happen to him last week). But it was good, and both I and my luggage made it safe and sound to Canberra.

So here I am, in our nation's capital, and the train station is no bigger than in many small towns. That kind of freaked me out, but it says a lot about this place. Ten minutes by bus later, I was in the city centre, which is essentially one block. I got off the bus a stop earlier than I was meant to (see above about the size of the city: of course I thought the first stop by a three story building was the city centre), but by deductive reasoning I decided that if I walked two thirds of the way around the pentagon that is the main square I'd be close to where the proper bus interchange was. I wandered through the mostly-empty mall (it was 5pm and the shops were shut) and found the bus stop where I thought it would be. Hooray for logic and a good sense of direction!

The next bus to the uni was an hour away, and I couldn't be bothered waiting, so I picked up my bag and headed west. Now, keep in mind that my bag was 20+kg, and I had a backpack too. Also, I didn't have a map, but I knew the uni was west from the city centre, not too far away.

Then the handle on my bag broke. Aiya! I fashioned a new one out of the old handle and a strip of material that I've been using to mark my bag for about ten years now and carried on. And less than an hour later I was checking into my room to dump my bags before heading down to dinner.

My room reminds me of how I'd always imagined a minimum-security prison would be like. A bed with a peach blanket, a desk with lamp, a chair next to a shelf and meshes and grill over the windows. Oh, and a small sink. One side wall and the outside wall are white brick, the other two white plaster. There's not enough lighting. The cupboards and shelf are plain brown wood, and the person in the room next to me runs windows xp (with default noises still playing). There's a pin-board too, which wasn't expected from my prison scenario.

Things are looking slightly more healthy now. I've put a blanket on the bed, nice and colourful, and my books on the shelf. My computer is here on the desk, and my toiletries and tea supplies are next to the sink. I don't have to walk very fair to get hot water, and the toilets (although shared) don't smell as badly as they could. And I don't have to share my room. Maybe if I get time tomorrow I'll draw something to put up on my very blank walls. And maybe I'll get my net connection set up.

At dinner, I met a nice mathematician named James who was here for the companion conference to the one I'm at. I hope I see him at breakfast tomorrow, it would be good to have a familiar face to sit with. The food was acceptable for standard buffet roast, and it wasn't too lonely coming back to my room afterwards. Maybe tomorrow night I'll visit the common room and bar. Oh, and I need to find out what the deal is about friends visiting me. But for now, it's time for good little Catherines to go to bed. And the bad ones too.

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