This has been a crazy semester for me. I’m redeveloping both of my courses, which is a bigger challenge than I thought it would be. I’m teaching some new technologies that I haven’t used before, so there’s a lot of learning involved before I can even start preparing lecture and lab materials. I barely get time to do the other things that I’m now responsible for at work, let alone any kind of social activities. My car seriously needs a mechanic but I just haven’t had time to take it. I have a serious issue with the radiator or radiator hoses which means I need to pour about a 3L bottle of water into it every day or two. Fortunately I’m only doing short trips so it doesn’t have time to heat up much, but the noise it’s making is quite unsettling.

At the moment, I’m working between 12 and 16 hours a day. A fairly typical day has me arriving at work about 8:30am and getting get home around 10pm. Weekends I usually average about 6-8 hours a day. I haven’t been to the gym in months and I haven’t cooked a meal in months. It’s not a very healthy (or cheap) way to live.
We are currently in Week 9 of the semester and I have lectures prepared for tomorrow. Tomorrow when I’m not lecturing, I’ll prepare lectures for Wednesday and labs for Friday. On Thursday, I’ll prepare Friday’s lectures. On the weekend, I’ll make the two tests my students just sat and the assignment they handed in two weeks ago.
With a bit of luck, things will improve.
At any rate, I only have 3 and a half weeks left to survive this semester. And never again will I redesign two courses at once.

Whenever I’m feeling particularly masochistic, I read websites like answersingenesis.org, a young earth creationist fundamentalist christian apologetics site. I highly recommend their article called ‘What’s the best “proof” of creation?‘. It is aimed at christians, teaching them the best way to argue with and convert evolutionists.
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My current PC is nearly 3 years old now and is getting a bit past its use-by date.   I’m planning on buying or building myself a new PC over the next couple of months. Read More »

Well, the outcome of the election obviously wasn’t what I was hoping for, but at least I made some money from it.

On iPredict.co.nz, I made money from the following positions:

• Short sold the Maori party vote (at 4%)
• Short sold National gaining an outright majority
• Short sold Winston Peters returning to parliament
• Bought National Prime Minister

I’m a swing voter.  I’ve voted Labour in the past, but there are a few things they’ve done that leave me dissatisfied.  National has promised not to do anything really bad during it’s first term in office, so I am truly undecided about which party I’d like leading the government.

But today, I came across this quote from John Key in NBR which really annoys me:

“I’ve had nine years of being told what lightbulb I can screw into the house, what shower I can take, what food I can eat, what things I can do, what thoughts I am allowed to have.“

None of this is true.  Not one bit.

• Lightbulbs.  There is no law about what lightbulbs John Key could use for the past nine years.  There have always been consumer regulations about energy efficiency for all sorts of things – the stars on fridges for example.  All that’s happened is there is a plan to raise the standard on lightbulbs.
• Showers.  For the past nine years there have been no laws governing what showers John Key can take.  Unless you count that he probably wouldn’t be allowed to walk into a ladies shower block, but I doubt that’s what he means.  I assume he’s referring to the Greens’ plan to have low-flow showerheads installed in newly built houses.  How is this a problem?  The Consumers’ Institute has been recommending people switch to them for years as it saves a lot of money with no noticable impact on shower quality.
• Food.  If anyone has ben telling John Key what food he can eat for the past nine years, it wasn’t Helen Clark.  The government does have food safety regulations, which most people generally consider to be a good thing.  It means for instance that he can’t choose to eat milk powder with melamine or spinach with E. coli.   As far as I know, National has not been arguing that food safety regulations are a bad thing, nor do they have any policies to repeal our food safety laws.
• Things.  Yes, there are certain things that John Key can’t do.  He can’t murder people, steal, beat people up and various other things that are against the law in this country.  The only thing I can think of that he can’t do now that he perhaps could nine years ago is smack his kids.  But National voted for that law also and has no plans to repeal it.  Rather than being fewer things he can do, John Key can now do more things than he could nine years ago.  He can now sell his sexual services, and he can now enter a Civil union with a man.  Or not – it’s an option, not a requirement. 
• Thoughts.  This is just blatent ridiculous scaremongering.

Now, I don’t know whether John Key actually believes this.  If he truly thinks that the Labour government for the past nine years have been telling him what lightbulbs to use, shower pressure to have, what to eat, do and think then he doesn’t have a very firm grasp on reality.  If on the other hand he doesn’t really believe this then he is just lying in order to gain votes by stoking fear.  Playing on and inflating people’s fears is the most vile form of dishonesty.    Either way, I don’t want to vote for him.

The Large Hadron Collider might be out of action for up to two months after a cooling failure caused a quench. Scientists are still fine tuning and testing everything before the collision experiments were due to start next month. It was out of action for a week already when a transformer failed, but the damage from a magnet quench is potentially more serious and takes longer to fix.
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I’m sure most of you are less sad than me and have seen the Apollo 13 movie. And if not, then maybe you’re enough of a science geek to know the details anyway. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t really need to explain what Apollo 13 is and what happened to it, do I? I just need to explain why I’m writing about its towing bill.
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Some people make friends easily and have lots and lots of friends. They could probably spend every day with a different friend and not have to start recycling people for months. I’m not one of those people.
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Yes, I know it has been a long long time since I posted. I’m a bad bad blogger.

I was kicked out of my apartment. My landlords sold at auction, losing very close to $100,000 in the process. I’ve currently packed up all my stuff and stashed it at my brother’s place, and I’ve moved back in with my family on Waiheke to save some money.

Since I hate moving so much, I’d really like to buy a place this time. Also, I’ve had such good luck with landlords in the past that I can’t realistically expect it to continue. Even though I earn (I think) a fairly decent salary, I’m almost completely priced out of the housing market in Auckland. There are a few places I can afford but I really don’t want to live in them (Manurewa, Clendon) or that are just too far away to be feasible (Papakura, Pukekohe).

I’ve been looking at units in the Mt Wellington/Panmure/Ellerslie area (I can’t afford an actual house in this area), but most of them are not really places I’d want to live. For instance, I’d quite like to have a deck/garden where I can have a BBQ, but many of these places have just a shared lawn that doubles as extra carparking for everyone. I’m also not a big fan of having a carport miles away from the unit, or a situation where everyone coming and going from the other units has to drive or walk past mine to get to theirs.

My second choice is to look for a place out west – Massey, Royal Heights, West Harbour. At the very bottom of the market there are some actual houses that I could possibly just afford. They aren’t flash – basically kitset type houses with flimsy fibro-cement cladding, but they are sufficiently old that they are unlikely to leak. They’re usually three bedroom and most places have a garage and at least room for a deck or patio. I’ll probably end up having to rent out one or two rooms for a while to try and get the mortgage paid off.

I’m still busy saving up a deposit so I won’t really be able to buy anything until the end of the year, but I’m starting to tentatively look for places now.

I regularly get emails sent around with sexist jokes like those in Part 1 & Part 2. I’m pretty sure a few years ago we used to have a whole lot of them hung on the walls of our postgrad labs. I know I found them funny then, but I don’t anymore.

I know they’re just jokes, but I think that our tacit acceptance of the stereotypes underlying the jokes is no laughing matter.
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