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The last of the free flowing traffic for quite a while. |
We actually went up to Gympie on Friday, but that was after my Day 3 post. We got stuck in traffic on the Bruce Highway going up - turns out a ute turned over...that made me think of Lisette (who I did my PostDoc with for those of you not in the know there) who was in a bad accident on the freeway in LA recently. Hope she is recovering as quickly as possible and her one functioning hand is still tapping out emails :P
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This is basically the whole room.
BTW: I don't think either of them is hiding on purpose. |
Anyhoo, turns out the conference centre place wasn't an absolute dive - although, the double room was bloody small. Barely room for a "double bed", couple that with a child who needs a tent-crib and it makes for tight quarters. But not bad - it was warm and dry and I'd already written my talk so things were reasonably pleasant. Little Dan stayed up til 9.30.
So now to Day 4. Yet again, since I had written my talk, I was free to wander about. So when Dan woke at 5ish, we went out into the fog and walked around for an hour or so. It was great - very quiet, cool and no-one around - it's good to be alone sometimes. We saw some bunnies hopping about in the fog and then a horse over the other side of a small pond, which for some reason (probably the fog coupled with its reflection in the pond) looked like a sloth.
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Early morning walk - doing our "this is scary" faces. |
Now for some research talk. After breakfast, Charisse and Dan went off to Hervey Bay to visit her mum and cousins. I took my macbook down to the pool area and sat in the sun for a while. Having no internet connection, I had to rely on the papers etc that already reside on my machine. I decide to open up a PhD thesis from UWollongong that I had sitting in my "read this eventually" folder. It's interesting because it's a PhD done in a maths/stats department that was unashamedly Maths education focussed - I need to keep this in mind and work figuring out how QUT would take these sort of shenanigans.
After a while I made my way up to the conference room and said hi to some folks waiting outside. There were about 20 people there I think.
The talks got started eventually and there were some really good ones I thought. Particularly Amy Chan, an hons student from UQ who talked about topology optimisation...something that has always puzzled me. Scott's army of PhD students also went well and the invited speaker (
Mike Plank - University of Canterbury) was interesting too - he talked about modelling populations of fish essentially.
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This is how we roll people. Macs, pens and paper and sticks to open our beers. |
After lunch, Graeme and his (our) PhD student Jackie kicked back to do some research looking out over the field (and highway). Scott, Angela (partner of), Gabrielle (son of) and I joined them after heading into town to acquire some beverages.
That was basically it for me for the day. We had HJs for dinner and skipped the conf dinner to try to give Little Dan a good night sleep.
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