danny’s space

Today I apparently had the typical honours experience.

I got into the office at 10am, planned a few things and started making up media and reagents at 11am. I was done by 1pm (I don’t know how on earth it took me that long) and took the things to the autoclave to sterilise. Find out that the tech staff who are meant to turn the thing on at the beginning of the day didn’t, and it takes ages to warm up. Then I press a few buttons, release a bit of steam, and it’s set to go. Then it’s back to the lab to make up some more stuff and then walking around to find people to go through my seminar with me. Then 5pm comes, the autoclave has finally finished sterilising my media, and boy has it changed. Glunky bits at the botton of liquid broth, you’d think the media took a trip to the evil bacterial dimension while they were hiding in the autoclave for 4 hours. I have to make up the media again tomorrow, even though I followed the protocols just fine (I think).

So the whole day wasted. Hooray, the honours experience.

Interesting article in SMH:Radar about stereotypes at uni. Especially note the comments on the article, in particular the ones relating to Christian groups at uni.

The article writes this stereotype about Christians:

Jesus loves you and he’s stationed these pamphlet-bearing folk outside the library to prove it. But to achieve His aims, the campus Christian often resorts to serpent-like guile - inviting you to “free barbecues” or “movie nights” which quickly turn into happy-clappy, Bible-bashing sessions where everyone babbles in tongues. Profess purity but are secretly sex-mad - that’s why they’re all married by 21.

Judging by the massive amount of comments, it would seem that:

1. Christians have no sense of humoour and are easily offended
2. Lots of people are put off by the ‘tactics’ used by Christian groups like ‘free BBQs’
3. There were lots of comments about the pushiness of CBS
4. Some Christians say pretty nasty stuff and do very in-your-face things when evangelising
5. Anti-Christian sentiment bred at uni stays with people
6. In-your-faceness turns lots of people off
7. EU is an evil empire
8. Posters are effective ways to get the message across

It was good to read a post by James of EU:

As a member of the EU at Sydney Uni, I can tell you for sure that if people at uni really aren’t interested in finding out about Christianity we will leave them alone. The stereotype given here of Christians is quite funny because it’s just so wrong and misunderstood. I doubt any of the people bashing Christian groups in the talkback have ever been to one of the Christian groups’ meetings before - their only experience has been perhaps that they are asked if they want to join a group at O-Week, they have seen a poster on campus advertising a Christian group event, and perhaps they have been asked by a friend if they wanted to come along. Cornering and manipulating? insidious? psychos? I don’t think so.

The fact is that there are people on campus interested in Christianity, and we don’t know who they are, so we have to ask people, just like any other club. If you say no, we don’t go after you, we leave you alone. But we think it’s important that people be allowed to hear what Jesus says, so that’s why we advertise…

Good on you, James.

These comments, however, possibly point to a need for Christians to re-evaluate the ‘tactics’ we use for evangelism. With O-week coming up for USYD (and already happening for UNSW), the criticality of such re-evaluation is high. However, there can only be so much change - fundamentally, as James rightly puts it, Christian groups at uni still need to seek out (no, not like a homing missile) other students on campus who might be interested in the message they have to tell. It’s like knowing a good chinese restaurant and wanting to tell people about it. Plus, in my first year at O-week, I was actually missed by all the white shirt EUers and had to go find the stall - so yes, all those people walking around campus during O-week ’stalking’ first years are needed.

I’m personally not a huge fan of in-your-face evangelism - I think this isn’t a particularly helpful way to do it. But then, the danger is to veer towards the other extreme and be a lax evangelist - and that’s a no-no as well. Striking the right balance is difficult, but it obviously is a good thing to reach, since so many are put off by scary tactics and so many fall through the cracks with no tactics.

The LAN in the building I work in now for honours uses network printers - by this I mean printers physically hooked up to the network through their own RJ45 ports, meaning they have their own IP addresses.

A problem exists with Windows XP SP2 (not SP1 or before) and TCP/IP printers in that whenever you try to bring up the Print dialog box, it is slow and takes ages to load. At least 10 seconds, although I’ve read reports on Google groups that it can take up to 1-2 minutes.

I searched and searched for answers to this problem - lots of people using TCP/IP network printers and SP2 seem to have this problem, but few solutions. Some suggest using a server share name, like //server/printer, but unfortunately that doesn’t work for TCP/IP-configured printers. Some suggest updating the network hardware or something to do with a thing called Samba, but I have no idea about that plus I’m not a network admin. Other suggestions have been made too - a search of Google groups will bring them up.

The only suggestion that works for me is disabling NetBIOS in TCP/IP WINS settings. The Print dialog pops up straight away (well, at normal speed) now. Unfortunately, you win some you lose some. Disabling NetBIOS over TCP/IP means that I can’t access the network drives at home through the DHCP router. Argh! But if I enable NetBIOS at home but still have the lab printer set up, the Print dialog still takes ages to show up. Which means that whenever I need to share files at home, I need to remove the printer, enable NetBIOS, and go. And when I’m in the office/lab, I need to add the printer, disable NetBIOS, and go. Pain in the ass.

Stupid Windows XP SP2. If this problem is so widespread, why doesn’t ol’ Billy Gates fix it up? Especially since it apparently affects so many users on corporate networks with TCP/IP printers?

I post this so that perhaps someone (who might Google the problem) will benefit from what I write here.

I think that adequately describes the first week and a half of honours for me.

Honours is the research component of an undergraduate science degree where you spend most of a year doing real lab research on a topic of interest. It’s quite a change from the typical undergraduate experience though, which unfortunately I’ve gotten used to for the past 3 years.

Normally uni is go to lectures, get spoon-fed, go to pracs, get told what to do, fudge results, sit exams, go on holidays. Now with honours it’s sleep in, come in any time you want, sit in office/lab reading papers (no, not the SMH), get confused, drink lots of water because there’s nothing better to do and it cools the overheated brain down, get confused some more, go to the toilet because of all the liquid intake, go home. And repeat the next day.

I must say that I like the flexibility of it all. It’s a bit hard getting used to - ‘unlimited’ lunch breaks (well, as long as you get your work done), no set time to come/leave, not much direction provided by superiors. This last thing is a mixed blessing - it means I have control over the direction of my research but it also means that because I don’t know much at all, it’s largely directionless for the time being.

Meanwhile I see other honours students in the building already donning labcoats and walking around doing experiments. What’s going on?!

The lab I’m working in is nice, the 3 supervisors I have are great - they’re thinkers and know their stuff well. Unfortunately the lab is a bit empty, and there’s no-one else in the lab doing similar things to me which makes it hard to get help when I need it. Empty lab though means that there’s lots of office space available and I get my own office, which is cool. It’s got a cork board and a laptop security cable.

Anyway, feeling slightly stressed amongst all this confusion. Okay, more than slightly. Sara reminded me last night of something I often forget in times of high stress and confusion and brain overheatedness - God is still in control. That’s quite a comfort.

Last Saturday was Baz’s 21st. A bunch of his uni friends and Nerd Con went on a road trip down to Picton Kart Track for a hot and sweaty afternoon of adrenalin-pumping go-kart action.

In typical NC style, we (minus Baz of course) met up beforehand at Chap’s place to put some ‘finishing touches’ on the NC speech and presentation. That was fun, and needless to say we didn’t get much work done at all. Moo then drove Alex, Chap and I down to Picton after we skipped lunch (since we were working so hard). Chap peeved off the GPS lady (the GPS with a female voice, since Vince a week back on the way back from Canberra wanted to hear what it was like) and took his own route which eventually got us there anyway. We were counting on passing at least Maccas or something on the freeway down to Picton, but were met with nothing but empty stomachs upon arrival at the go-kart track.

So we looked around desperately for food. The food counter at the track had a total of 3 mature-looking meat pies sitting in one of those small bar ovens, so we asked the counter lady where the nearest fast food joint was. 10 minutes down the road she said, and gave us directions. So we drove and drove and probably took a few wrong turns, but ended up in Picton town with no KFC in sight. We asked a couple but apparently they were just visiting too, so then we asked a guy in a car shop about KFC. Apparently it was in the next town, Tahmoor, so we drove down there, got drive-through KFC, got ripped off 2 regular chips, drove back through the drive-through, complained, got our 2 regular chips, and then arrived back at the track 10 minutes late.

Thankfully Baz predicted the tardiness of his friends and nominated a starting time that had lots of leeway. After signing a waiver which basically eliminated any possibility of a law suit, we watched a dodgy home-made safety video, a la the safety information message on planes. No life jackets though. Instead, those who didn’t have long sleeves (sleeves, not pants - weird!) had to wear the kart’s less-than-fashionable overalls in the sweltering heat. A heavy helmet topped off the racing costume, and we were good to go. The track was a decent size, all outdoors though. There was an evil hairpin turn with 2 feet of gravel to get stuck in if you didn’t do it right. Unfortunately there was a huge hill straight after the turn, so after coming to a near-standstill to make the turn without getting bogged down in gravel, the push up the hill was taxing for the kart to say the least. Okay maybe my mass had something to do with that too.

We had 10 minutes of practice/qualifying and then 20 minutes of race. Smok and I were the only NC to be slow enough to find ourselves in the second race. Kao and Khaled won the races, and Xing got the Most Cautious Driver trophy (again). Too bad the birthday boy didn’t win - the other two just wanted it more.

After karting it was back to Sydney for Chinese new year dinner with family. Kao and I went back to our respective families to have dinner, albeit 1.5 hours late because of the late gokart start.

After dinner and a bit of TV, it was back to Baz’s place for the rest of the night. Again in typical NC fashion, we spent another hour working on the presentation (while his uni friends sat downstairs and played a very loud Ming Mang Mong), and we finally started the speeches at around 10:30. It went pretty well though, and Baz seemed pretty pleased with it all. Quite a few Baz quirks and forgotten memories were mentioned, and his sister even came to listen. Then it was food (and lots of it! but stay away from Mozart chocolates) and video games (Time Crisis 3 on PS2 with a gun and basically unlimited credits is mad) and even driveway cricket until the wee hours of the morning.

Happy belated 21st Mr Baz! Hope you had lots of fun. Thanks for the memories! (And for being our elephant memory man).

Okay so maybe blogs are harder to maintain than I originally thought. Or, after a period of no posting, it’s hard to get back into it. I guess the same applies with everything else.

I should have posted on this when it was actually happening in January but never got around to it - or never could be bothered. The ASO biology olympiad program was on again in Canberra at ANU. This year we had 20 kids and 10 staff, more than enough to go around. The kids were a nice bunch to teach, nowhere near as crazy as the bunch the previous year - which can be a good and bad thing.

Being the fourth year I’ve been back as a tutor, you kind of get used to the general running of things. Not to say that this year was without its surprises though but they’re too sensitive to post to the world. Even though the scholars this year were more quiet than previous years (which was great!) and apparently more studious, extraneous events still took their toll on everyone and by the end of it we were pretty drained. I guess this draining happens every year anyway - it’s what you get for spending 3 intense weeks living and doing stuff together, running on a formal 9am-9pm schedule with a few hours tacked to each end. But it’s good fun.

Notable events include:

• Tetrinet (the absolute best game for building staff rapport)
• Starcraft (which Maria and I played quite a bit of once she bought it from EB at Civic)
• Turkish pizza (gotta love that oil)
• Concrete (Ruby’s ice cream, weird but yum flavours!)
• Paddle boating (and forming a 4-kayak, 3-paddleboat armarda on Lake Burley Griffith)
• Weird staff videos (especially Guang’s ones - he promised to upload them to Google video)
• Balloon animals in liquid nitrogen (Josh makes physics fun)
• Mafia (a competition of who can talk the loudest and finger-point the most effectively)
• Staff pool (with Guang and Vince playing for massages, eww)
• The last staff night (which we will never speak of again)
• Taking pictures of all these things (videos too, but they’re just disturbing)

Of course we did a bit of teaching amongst all the other stuff too.

In all it was a great but tiring 3 weeks which I’m sure all the staff (and maybe even the returning scholars) look forward to every year. Being able to learn and teach biology in such a friendly and fun environment is fantastic. Thanks to the scholars for being a pleasure to teach and the staff, as always, for so much fun.