Ninth Fret

So, you thought I'd never write again... well here I am. First the News: I attended two conferences in quick succession last month. The first was in a working Abbey outside Kerkrade, only a few hundred metres from the German border. Think thousand-year-old church, courtyard, and cellar bars. As 50% of the local organizing committee I was busy from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed: handling registration, setting up talks, collecting payment, counting heads on the excursion, replacing batteries in the laser pointer. It's no wonder my favourite time was during the cave tour. [An aside: why do so many conferences feature a cave tour on the excursion? This was my third.] The caves in Valkenburg are remarkable only in that they are entirely unremarkable. Carved out for limestone mining, they are devoid of stalactites or -gmites, or any other interesting natural features. The man-made bits (sculptures carved into and paintings on the walls) are nothing special. The redeeming feature was the darkness. Often the only light source was the guide's lantern, and when he rounded a corner the darkness enveloped us like a blanket. It was a wonderful disorienting feeling — and it left me happily invisible to the conference participants.

The second meeting was a big one. Usually held in Prague, this time it was in Poznań, Poland. I recognise more and more people at these meetings as the years roll by but it's the same few I seek out. Tuque Whalemitts, formerly a microwave spectroscopist in Canada, is now doing photoelectron spectroscopy in Switzerland. She still likes beer and conversation. No Hurry hasn't changed a bit. He's still in Dresden doing his magical calculations. He brought his 19-year-old daughter along to Poland for a holiday. It was strange to realise that I have a friend who has an adult child. Czech Mate also attended. The last time I saw him was in Prague in 2006. As ever, he knows everything about everything when it comes to the literal nuts and bolts of laser spectroscopy. My experiment back in Leiden benefitted greatly from his insight.

Back in Leiden

It's been a year. Already. I have no idea where the time went. Stereovision Raider and I spend the majority of our time together; riding our bikes to and from work, shopping, cooking, walking through the Saturday markets on our way to Bagels & Beans for coffee, doing nothing at all. It gets harder and harder to be apart — as when I was at the conferences, and when SR spent her summer holiday cycling 540 km across Finland — but that's a good thing.

We spent a weekend in London to finally meet the new guy (My Nephew) who was in town for a quick visit. He is adorable and very well behaved. Good personality too. One might even say charming.

Visitors keep visiting. The Blond Beatle was in The Netherlands to attend a conference and to watch the Finnish football team lose to the Dutch. Others are coming soon. There aren't so many weeks left until Christmas, but by then we will have had a few more visitors and we will have set foot on a whole new continent. More about that later.

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My Brother and Joy Priority had a baby. He's healthy and cute and, as you can see from the photo, not underweight. Pseudonym to follow.

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Spring has arrived in Leiden. Today I rode home scarfless.

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Stereovision and I spent last week in the Alps at the holiday house of a French student we know from Helsinki. We were joined there by six others from Leiden and Finland as well as the aforementioned student, who is now living in Lille. The week away was great: the skiing — and the après skiing — surpassed all expectations. For photos, have a look at the 9f Flickr photostream. There's a nice new link to it in the menu to the left, where the random photo used to be.

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Started running the plasma discharge in my experiment today. It's pretty cool when it's going. It looks like a purple glowing sheet in the vacuum chamber. Unfortunately I managed to destroy the plasma-generating filament with too much current while trying to optimise the discharge conditions. This is how we learn science.

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I just wrote a new submission form so that I can more easily write updates. It also makes it possible to update from mobile devices, so the updates might look more like tweets. Here's one:

This morning SR and I were riding our bikes to work. It was 3 degrees, windy and raining heavily. I yelled over the gale to remind SR that moving to Australia is still an option. She claims having bad weather makes other things seem better. I disagree.

My boss was awarded a prestigious "Vici" grant today. We could have a few more post-docs and students joining the team.

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Last Monday I went to the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to oppose a Ph.D thesis. It's a formal occasion in which the candidate gives a short talk about their research and is then questioned by six opponents for 45 minutes. The opponents are meant to have read the thesis but most had only read one chapter. As this was my first time I read the whole thing and prepared a comprehensive list of questions.

There was a lot of tradition: we were led into the hall by the sceptre-bearing Yeoman Bedell who, along with the professors on the panel, was in academic dress. The audience stood for our arrival. Before each opponent's first question, s/he had to recite:
"With respect to the Rector Magnificus and according to my right..."
Each of our questions began with
"Dear Candidate..."
and each of his answers began with
"Learned opponent..."
or if it was a professor asking the question,
"Most learned opponent..."

As time was short, I only got to ask one question. The candidate tried to waffle around the topic but I interrupted and pressed him to give a sensible answer. I felt justified in this because the opponents who had asked before me were much rougher on the guy. In the end we had a brief deliberation - just a formality - and decided to award the degree. Wine and cheese followed.

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So you thought it was gone, well Ninth Fret survives. As you may have heard, I no longer live in Helsinki, Finland. After four and a half years it was time to go. Through some cosmic alignment, I got a job in Leiden, The Netherlands - the same place that Stereovision Raider started her Ph.D in January. So we're back living together again. Skype's great and all but nothing beats living under the same roof. Speaking of our roof, we live on the top (3rd) floor of an old house in the old centre of town. This means that we live in a tent-shaped apartment with sloping walls and heavy wooden beams everywhere. It's charming.

The whole town is charming. Ever since my first visit to Leiden back in 2000 I have wanted to live here. Things here are groovy: my new job is a lot of fun (I think I'm an astrochemist now, whatever that is); the people are talkative; SR had already organized everything from the apartment to a social group before I arrived.

There is, however, a reason you've never heard the phrase "Dutch cuisine". On the other hand, I did live in Finland for four and a half years.

I don't know if this is already a well-known phenomenon - perhaps some of the Ninth Fret audience who are trained psychologists can shed some light - but I noticed a strange thing: I ride my bike to work and while doing that I listen to podcasts. For a few weeks I tried using regular earbuds because they let in quite a bit of outside sound and I can hear the traffic quite well. The problem was that although I could hear both, I couldn't comprehend either. Weird. So I tried using my in-ear 'phones, which block almost all external noise. This is obviously somewhat dangerous because we share the road with cars so I only use one side. The effect is really strange: as before, I can hear both the traffic and the podcasts, but I can "follow" both quite easily. It's like the signals are being processed before being mixed if that makes any sense. Any thoughts? (Write to seventysix@ninth-fret.com.)

I think I'll leave the rest of my news until later. I have the bad habit of over-promising and under-delivering on this site. That said, watch this space.

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Slovakia, Australia, Turku, Tampere, SR in Iceland, her foot in geyser, SR in hospital, skin graft, good as new, now she's in Hawaii. 76 miraculously granted unasked-for job in The Netherlands, wrapping up in Helsinki, weeklong conference in Savonlinna - great!

Details to come.

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Howdy. The lovely people who host this website - our hosts, if you will - are going to upgrade their server software on the 13th of May. It should take half an hour but who knows if this site will survive the process. In the meantime, I challenge you:
http://nega-realm.mybrute.com
Clicking there will take you to my My Brute page. I have another Brute:
http://seventysix9f.mybrute.com
but he's kinda weak for a guy with such a cool name. If you get the error message on that site "A brutal error has been encountered!", just reload the page. It happens all the time.

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Ok, it was a while ago but I'm still calling it news.

Verkverkverk

We got a new post-doc at work, Rad Fisch Milton*. Now that there are two of us in the lab, things go four times as fast and are infinitely more enjoyable. He's Austrian, which means that the Blond Beatle gets the two of us confused.

...the Euro, as of January 2009

I think it was the end of February. I spent the week at a ski holiday research network winter school in the Tatra mountains of Slovakia. Getting there was the simple matter of flying from Helsinki to Vienna airport, taking a bus to Vienna Sudbanhof, catching a train to Bratislava, taking a second, heavily overcrowded train to Liptovský Mikuláš, and taking a bus to the tiny resort town of Jasná. After that it was only a 10-minute walk through the forest up the mountain in deep snow to the resort. It took a while but it was worth it.

Jasná in winter was like every clichéd Christmas card: Tall fir trees with branches curved under the mass of snow, faint outlines of looming mountains, friendly Slovakians everywhere.*

The winter school was the final event for the research network to which I used to belong. It was a post-doctoral position in that network that allowed me to come to Finland in the first place and, although I haven't been a member since 2007, I still feel an affinity for the ragtag bunch of spectroscopists. Looking at the conference program and location, one would assume that this meeting had been organised as a parting gift to the network members. One would be right. The location was a ski resort and the timetable had huge gaps: either the morning or the afternoon free every day, and in one case, both. The skiing was great; talks were alright. Mine had the distinction of being the last ever for our research network.

I felt no sense of loss at the end of the meeting. I'll see the key people again, especially No Hurry, who seems like an old friend even though we've only met a few times. There will be other networks. There will be other conferences.

* What, your Christmas cards don't have Slovakians on them?

Since then?

Hmm, what have I done since then? I suppose there was that 3-week trip to Australia. That might have to wait until my next update. Later.

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It's all about content. And mashups. And geotagging. What am I talking about? There's now a Ninth Fret photostream. Sure, you might already have seen all of these photos, but they're in a stream now. You can subscribe to the stream feed here.

www.flickr.com Go to SeventySix9f's photostream

Also, here's a stop-motion movie I made by taking one photo every minute at the Australia Day party last week. I think the video is larger when you watch it here.

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It's been a while. There have been christmas parties, short trips, no visitors and much work. I've been thinking about the philosophy behind Ninth Fret and have decided that it's time for a change. The purpose of this site is no longer for me to learn xhtml/PHP/MySQL/CSS; I will now concentrate on putting articles and photos up. To make that easier, my photos wil now appear on flickr - or possibly picasa, I haven't decided yet. There will of course be some rss for you all to subscribe to.

So what's new? Much. Most of it concerns Stereovision Raider in one way or another. She finished her Master's degree and gave an excellent final talk. On my urging, SR applied for a Ph.D position in Leiden, The Netherlands. They liked her enough to fly her over there for a couple of days for the interview. Stereovision gave a lecture on her thesis work and was offered the position on the spot. She accepted. Umm, what next? Oh yeah, then I proposed - and Stereovision said yes! My fiancée started in Leiden on January 5. I'm still in Helsinki, but I'll move to The Netherlands later in the year. I did, however, accompany SR when she moved to Leiden, so we had one last weekend together before our months apart. Though we were aware that there will be frequent visits, our farewell at Schiphol was a tearful one.

You can follow the adventures of Stereovision Raider on her very own blog at Stereovision Raider Goes Dutch (or subscribe to her RSS feed). It might make more sense if you speak Finnish, but if you don't, she has already put quite a few photos there too.

This update was written - on paper - during a couple of not-particularly-interesting lectures at a conference on a ferry to and from Stockholm. I gave a talk that was well received. The few hours I had in Stockholm were pleasant. Blah blah blah, boring. Did I mention we got engaged?!

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I added a few backslashes and semicolons to the 9f codebase and it looks like we're back in action. Let me know what still doesn't work.

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There's a problem with the photo galleries. I'm working on it. There's also a problem with the Old News link on the left. I'm starting to think I should have spent some time learning about PHP before I started writing it.

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Just a quick note to tell you that I put up a photo of some of the berries we collected. Click the image below for the high resolution version.

Here are some of those berries we collected.

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Stereovision and I spent the weekend at her parents' place in Ylivieska. It wasn't Christmas as far as I could tell so there was little in the way of purpose other than just to get together. We had a good time.

On Saturday, SR and I went for a run, and only five minutes after setting off from the house, we had run out of town - in both senses. Thereafter it was just fields with horses, tractors and countryside stuff. Dinner was a Finnish classic: Reindeer on a bed of mashed potatoes topped with lingonberries that SR's mother had picked from the forest next to the house.

On Sunday morning we went to collect our own berries. This is a big thing in Finland. Finns get that dreamy look in their eyes when they talk about Summers and Autumns past, picking berries and mushrooms. I could never understand the appeal. So off we went into the forest, after some semi-serious warnings (I don't know, I'm a city guy) about bears from SR's father. There I was given a metal device like a dustpan with fork-like prongs at the entry port. The idea is to scoop up berries and to let the prongs separate them from the branches. It works remarkably well. Our quarry was the lingonberry and it was not hard to track. In fact, once we were in a good spot, it was like collecting sand at the beach. I quickly got into the spirit of the endeavour and developed my own indiscriminate berry-collecting technique. I simply ran the scooper over everything, trusting it to sort things out. This worked so well that I was dubbed "Berrinator" by my berry-picking companions, although my basket did have rather high levels of twig, blueberry, branch and small animal. I grudgingly admitted that it was a morning well spent before boarding the train back to Helsinki for some long evenings of berry sorting and berry eating.

Other than that, not much is new. All of my travelling will have to be within Finland for the time being: I'm in residence permit limbo and cannot leave (if I ever want to come back). It's a shame, because I have been invited to an event in a foreign country and my residence permit speed-up request has not yet lived up to its name. It's a race between two fierce competitors: bureaucracy and rising flight prices. Who will win?

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This is a little update to let you know that things have changed around here. Look! The menu is all the way over there on the left. And click on "Photos" in the menu. Pretty cool, huh? Click it again. Try scrolling the page. Also, down the bottom is the new Recent News section with expandable (and maybe expendable) articles. The Old News page has also changed. The photo galleries are basically the same. I might get around to them some other day.

I know every man woman and beagle has a blog these days, and if I can't differentiate myself with content I'll do it with my own personal PHP / MySQL / javascript / XHTML / CSS. Anyone can add an entry to a Wordpress site but how many out there use the idiosyncratic 9f submission system? Back in the olden days I used to have to really get my hands dirty and edit the HTML for each new update. Now it's all automatic, but I made it automatic. That means I have the freedom to modify this page into anything, even oblivion. The downside is that Ninth Fret might not be as polished as the sites of those who use properly written software. This is especially true when it comes to testing on multiple browsers / operating systems, especially mobile devices. That's where you come in. Play around with the new site and let me know if you find anything that bugs you. Also, tell me the details of your setup. Just don't expect me to support FishWrangler 0.7 beta running on the outdated CoasterOS XP.

You can also write to me just to say hi.

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Surprise! I can still write. No apologies this time; this is the new schedule. I was just reading some Old News and noticed that there has been a gradual shift in the tone of writing on Ninth Fret. Interesting. So, what have I been doing? I really don't know. I've just had a look around my new (!) office for some reminders. Here are the results:

Our brewery, FK Panimo, has continued to produce high quality homebrew with an emphasis on drinkability and hygiene. The last batch was made in honour of Vino Karma (a fellow postdoc) who left for Canada a few weeks ago. Now no one around here knows anything about lasers. The beer is quite hoppy.

I spent the third week of July in New Hampshire at a conference. It was my first medically-oriented meeting and I wasn't prepared for how gruesome some of the photos and videos would be. I often manage to acquire a degree of unwanted celebrity at conferences. It started this time with a "clever" t-shirt.

"Hey," they would say to their friends, "you gotta see this guy's shirt."

And then there's the nametag thing:

"Oh, you're from Finland? You don't look Finnish."

I was so sick of this that I modified my nametag (as I did in Spain) and became known for this not-really-anti-authority gesture. After the kayak trip (straight river, wide as a highway, swift current, no paddling necessary) a student heard my accent and said "Are you the Australian guy who wrote something on his nametag? I heard about you!" Still, it's better than the Texan who asked "Helinski [sic]? Is that still in Sweden?"

I got even more famous when I was on my way to the computer room below the lecture theatre, having arrived early at one of the sessions and wanting to check my email. Beside the wooden door was a floor-to-ceiling glass window that allowed visitors to quickly check if all the computers were taken. While not paying a lot of attention to where I was headed I walked straight into the door. I suppose my head was tilted downwards because I hit the window with the top part of my forehead and didn't feel a thing. I did, however, hear a loud bang. The window was completely smashed. No one was injured. It was pretty embarrassing though. After reporting the broken window to the conference office I came back to the lecture theatre to hear some hilarious remarks from the Dutch contingent. Things like "Stay away from my car windows. hahaha". But my self-mockery got more laughs. At the end of the conference I was awarded the "True Breakthrough Prize".

Nyaak Nyaak

After the conference I spent a few days in New York. I'm trying really hard not to just write about how much I love that city, and to think of something negative. It was too hot. Summer is the worst time of year to be in New York. It would have been fine if I could have changed into clean clothes but Delta (They are terrible. I don't know about the competition; I've heard good things about Virgin. Avoid Delta. Like the plague.) left my bag in Boston. It was a small bag, I could have carried it on, but it was a really really small plane, so no dice. It took them 30 hours to deliver it to Kilty and Corporate's apartment. Thirty hours of me calling them to be told that "It should be there before midday", "It will be there soon." I got the call from the actual delivery driver at 2am so I went to the front of the building to wait for it. Kilty and Corporate live in the West Village, a gay district. It's full of cool cafes and bars and there's always something to look at. However, there is a pretty seedy nightlife scene and a guy standing by himself in a doorway can easily be mistaken for a prostitute (apparently). A couple of comments were directed my way ("Hey Chico!" and "Whatchoo got there boy?") before my bag turned up. Only in New York.

I spent a lot of my time in New York with Lucky L. We had some excellent, and gigantic, bagels at Ess-a-bagel. We wandered around. We went to a backyard barbecue in Williamsburg. It was good.

Example

SR and I had a hell of a dinner at Demo last weekend. It's really my kind of place: brilliant food in a casual setting served by friendly waiters. There was not one milligram of snootiness. Also, the prices were reasonable.

Why not?

Miksi Ei defended his thesis yesterday. It was the most entertaining defence I've been to in Finland. The opponent was a Russian scientist with a great accent. At one point, he wrote a formula on the board and asked Miksi about it. Miksi, not fully understanding what was written, asked "What's X?" to which the opponent replied "I don't know."

Last night was the karonkka - the traditional after-defence party. Miksi likes to do things a little differently so instead of a boozy dinner in a restaurant the 45ish guests went to an old warehouse that is now occupied by a circus. Before dinner some acrobats impressed us all with their flipping, climbing and tumbling skills. The rest of the evening went as expected. Until 3am.

In other good news for Miksi - and Emily - they had another baby! The new guy, District Attorney*, is adorable and so small, having been born only 3 weeks ago.

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Hi again everybody. I just got a complaint today about my lax approach to updating this site. So here's a brief update. Stereovision and I went to Berlin to meet up with MissPrint and Domino. We also spent a fair bit of time with Foter, who is preparing for his upcoming trip to Australia to see Simmer. Do you guys even remember who these pseudonyms belong to? I should mention that I'm writing this update in much the same vein as I did an ancient post from France, i.e. suffering from a brutal head-cold and hopped up on chemicals, so please excuse my rambling style.

Volley (the only Finnish person I knew in Australia) has finished her degree at the University of Sydney. She took a long holiday through South East Asia before jetting over to Finland to look for work. She spent her first week in Helsinki staying at the most popular youth hostel in Finland: my place (well, my and SR's place really). It was weird to watch someone so comfortable with the language, but so out of sorts with the culture, find her feet over here. Actually, now that I mention it, finding her feet was extra difficult because of the gruesome scar on one of her legs. Apparently it's a bad idea to touch the unprotected exhaust-pipe of a Vietnamese motorbike - yeesh.

Be vewy vewy quiet...

It was midsummer two weeks ago. Most Helsinkiläiset leave town and the remaining few all came over for drinks, great food (brought by the guests) and Wii Sports. It was classic Finnish summer weather: 13 degrees, drizzle, and strong winds. The following night was much more pleasant so SR and I went for a walk. We saw first hand the rabbit blight that has struck this city. In a one-hour walk, we counted 73 rabbits. The authorities have put a control plan (read: bunny slaughter) into effect. And so they should, I know the horrors rabbits can visit on a country, I'm Australian. Since then the weather has improved dramatically. This weekend was beautiful, but I cleverly chose to get sick and spent the entire time inside, watching episodes of Seinfeld and Buffy (Season 3), and playing Metal Gear Solid 3 (the one where you spend 75% of your time changing camouflage).

If all that reading was a bit boring, here's a video to keep you entertained. I made it more than two years ago and it probably infringes some copyright. Watch it while you can.

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