danny’s space

… is truly another man’s treasure. At least at Reverse Garbage it is.

Sara, Ernie, Nuggy and I drove down to Marrickville this morning and spend a few hours walking around the dusty warehouse of the Reverse Garbage co-op. It literally is ‘garbage’ that is sold. Offcuts, potato sacks, lots of random bottles and toys and paper. Like factory left-overs or something.

Not as many things as a good 2-dollar shop in Eastwood, and the things are pretty crap. Although, you’ll find rolls and rolls of butchers paper, which is great for youth group and childrens’ ministry. That was the main point of the visit. Also got a few random bits and pieces, two hessian bags (they sell quite a few things ‘by the bag’ which means you pay by volume!), and a ‘wide load’ sign (never know when that will come in handy).

Worth a visit if you’ve got nothing else to do. But take a gas mask, or take lots of antihistamines beforehand.

A very happy Hallmark day to all!

February 14th - what card companies, chocolate manufacturers and rose growers look forward to in the shortest month of the year. Too much commercial hype around a very simple concept that shouldn’t be restricted to one day of the year.

A few selected quotes from people on the SMH News Blog about Hallmark Day:

February 14 doesn’t mean anything and is simply a commercial reason for giving gifts. How about giving someone some flowers when YOU feel like it?!

…if you need valentines day to remember to give your partner some flowers or some extra attention, then some thing’s wrong with you…

When did we actually need a special day to remember and love someone? Why not do something special on any other day of the year and not be such a cliche.

Of course this represents one extreme, but I lean towards that extreme. Why need February 14th in order to do these things? From now on, I declare the new Valentine’s Day to be June 7th. Go the rebellion. Starting 2008.

And to smother flames, I do agree with those that say Hallmark Day is just a nice opportunity to stop what you’re doing and do something different/special. But why follow all this commercial hype - it’s a shame, it’s like what Christmas and Easter have become…

2007 seems to be the year for transitions.

In the ASO Biology program, there’s a new director and deputy director. I spent the last three weeks in Canberra with a great bunch of staff teaching a keen and tight-knit bunch of high schoolers. Our new director hasn’t been through the program before so it was a bit tough for her to get accustomed to our teaching style, our culture, and our strange sense of humour. But Sarah, the new deputy, did a fantastic job of holding things together during the transition. Nevertheless it was a bit tough for everyone, especially after losing three key staff members, and losing another one after this year.

At church, Ernie our student pastor left us after two years to go work for a church in Eastwood after graduating from SMBC. Because of his high level of involvement with the youth group, his absence will definitely be felt. The new youth pastor, John Menzies, returns to Australia with his family after 5 years of mission in Uraguay. He’ll be working with the youth ministry at ND, but again, a challenging time of transition is in store. Especially since I’m apparently heading up the youth group team this year, with a diminished number of leaders after losing a fair number of experienced leaders.

And starting a PhD sometime in March. The first year of a PhD, people say, is mainly spent poking around not achieving much. I guess I’m fine with that, as long as I can do other stuff apart from just PhD work. Honours was difficult because I basically had no life apart from research - squeezing in youth group was hard enough. Hopefully this year my time will be more balanced.

Also, moved to a new server after getting sick of the slow speed of webhostingbuzz. With hostgator now, which provides faster speeds but the price increase is also noticeable. Took a while to migrate to the new server though; especially difficult doing it through the ANU connection in Canberra.

Big movements in 2007. It will be an interesting year, that’s for sure. Meanwhile, I’m still zoned out from spending the last 3 weeks in Canberra, and can’t actually think or do much. Will take a bit to recover.

Online tests used to be the craze in high school. Dodgy websites asked you questions about your kitchen utensil preference and bowel habits to determine what type of dog you were. Sometimes personality tests also have a bad wrap, putting people into distinct ‘categories’.

But there are some uses that stem from knowing your ‘personality type’. They can help you understand in a more concrete way how you relate to people, how you deal with stress, what to watch out for, and so on.

A good one to use is the DiSC test. This is useful in group situations, figuring out how each person in the group handles tasks and relates to each other. We did this at our church’s leaders’ retreat earlier this year and it was quite helpful. It categorises people into the categories of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness (there are other descriptions that are largely similar). Free online versions of this test are available at this link and also on this current website (I didn’t realise this was like the DiSC test until I did both!). A description of the DiSC personality types may be found here, or within the temperament survey. Note that the DiSC test should be performed in terms of a ‘role’ - that is, you should take the test in terms of your mindset in a particular role or position, like youth group leader, team member, etc. It makes a difference.

One test that’s been around for ages is the Jung-Myers-Briggs test. This is the more well-known test that assesses your personality in terms of four factors: Introversion/Extroversion, Thinking/Feeling, Intuition/Sensing, and Judging/Percieving. The most useful indicator I find is the introversion/extroversion factor, which tells you where you need to gain ‘energy’ from (very useful to understand!). A nice description of this test can be found here. Free online versions of this test can be found here, here, and here.

So go forth and find out your personality types. It might help you understand how you relate to people or how to recharge your batteries. For DiSC, I’m a high D and high C. For the Jung-Myers-Briggs, I’m an ISTJ.

The good ol’ US of A style with turkey! Apparently these start in the early afternoon; and there I was thinking it was actually like a traditional Asian ‘dinner’ which started around 7. But it was great of Michelle (from Penny’s lab) and her husband, both relatively fresh from the US, to host an early thanksgiving dinner for the associated labs today. Nice to get everyone together in an out-of-lab setting for food and chat. Only problem was that it was in Quakers Hill, which is about as far west as Prospect Reservoir. A few observations about westie roads:

• Everyone drives at the speed limit.
• Roads are very wide. A two-lane ’surburban’ road easily trumps the Pacific Highway in width.
• Pedestrian users of westie roads are scary. They come right up to your car while walking past (ever heard of the footpath???) and stare at you.
• There is an unbelievable amount of road-side parking.

So anyway, back at uni tomorrow to do some follow-up work on my project. Hopefully won’t be too long. Sara finishes tomorrow which is good. Many movies to catch up on, like Da Vinci Code, X-Men III, Bridget Jones’ Diary II (I didn’t just type that…), High School Musical… Fun!

Also, another thing about being on ‘holidays’ is that you actually don’t get much holidays because people (who are still going with exams and whatnot) pile things onto you. I’m not complaining, it’s great to be able to help; it’s just an observation. Today after church was a bit crazy - Nuggy and I were running around trying to recruit people for ministry teams next year while trying to organise the signing of Ernie’s farewell book and also trying to entice people to go to Ernie’s farewell BBQ. Not a big list so far which is disappointing.

Stuff doesn’t just stop after hand-in. Neither does stuffing of the face. During writing, I was sitting at home eating Kettle chips all day, 8am to 2am and typing. Now that it’s all done, the celebratory meals are in full swing.

Last Monday and Tuesday the honours bunch had late lunches at the Taiwanese place, Sunflower, on George St. Highly recommended! Quaint, cosy atmosphere, great Taiwanese food. Wednesday had lunch at Wok Station on Glebe Pt Rd with Poker. Bit pricey but tasty nonetheless. (I don’t have a very developed food vocabulary. It consists of ‘yum’ and ‘yuck’ basically). Thursday was lunch with Litty and Shereen, who handed in Friday before last, at Thai La Ong on King St in Newtown. Great to catch up with people I haven’t seen in ages. A quite time at home on Friday, then a filling dinner with Sara on Saturday when we attempted to cook pasta. Then dinner with Nerd Con last night at Cafe de Macau in Eastwood, which was surprisingly, erm, yum. And today, lunch with people from the various labs at Forestor’s Lodge in Glebe. And sometime this week, lunch with the honours bunch (who have now all finished!) somewhere in the city.

My scales aren’t going to be happy!

I don’t think this picture needs any more explanation. It all started in January… Thanks to Anii for her great Photoshop skills.

Thought it could never happen?

They’ve made a documentary series on the Science Olympiads, in particular the Biology program! It was filmed during 2005 and features the students and staff of the Australian Science Olympiads. The series airs on ABC starting June 15. Interesting info and student bios (as in biographies, not biology…) can be found on their official website.

Ooh, only 5 more weeks to go!

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.