Spring into Melbourne

So again, its been quite a while since I updated this blog. Quite a big has happened. Jen is here in Melbourne (has been for almost 2 months now) and we moved out of Graduate House and got our own place in the city. We spent a little while looking for a place but I'm quite happy with our final decision. We live on the 6th floor directly across from the Queen Victoria Market and about a 10 minute walk from my lab.

View from our balcony

School is going well. I just finished my last day of classes on Friday (2 this semester) and have exams in mid-November. Once those are out of the way its on to full-time research. I had some serious technical problems with my virtual bicycle trainer early on and a couple months back we decided to put the project on hold. I'm currently working on issues of environment complexity and how map complexity and alignment influences wayfinding and orientation. Things are moving a long quite smoothly now, but I'm beginning to realise that there is a steep learning curve in working with some of these 3D graphic programs.

Hallowe'en was last week and passed without notice by most Australians. My old housemates decided that since half of them were Canadian, they would throw a good ole fashion Hallowe'en party. I think halfway through planning the event, they got confused and planned a Luau, because there was a pig on a spit, live band, bobbing for apples and apparently a limbo contest. Jen & I went to Savers (Value Village) the day before and made some costumes. Jen was Miss Canada 1985 and I was... I'm still not entirely sure, but Jen did a great job with my make-up.

I'm sure a lot more has happened that I'm forgetting, but I'll just have to write it up when I remember. I'm also thinking about starting an organic low-meat cooking blog. Since we live right across from the market, I have access to some amazing fresh organic veggies. I've gone through a number of cook books & online blogs, found my favorites, synthesized the relevant information and perfected through trial and error. I'll let you know when my first post goes up... I'm sure you all can't wait! ;P

Home & Away

So... my site is finally back up-and-running. My apologies, something happened with my previous hosting company and I have been unable to access my sites until now.

It’s been quite a while since my last update. Let me think. I was back home in Vancouver from the end of June until the end of July. I had such a great time... saw friends & family, attended a wedding, enjoyed a month of the beautiful BC summer and played a pile of shows with Remember August. We (Remember August) were fortunate enough to play 3 of the dates on the Vans Warped Tour (Washington, Portland & Vancouver)... unfortunately I was unable to attend the Washington date as it landed on the same day as my friend's wedding. Being asked to play guitar at his wedding was a huge honor and one of only a few occasions I would purposefully miss a show. A huge "thank you" to everyone that made the Remember August summer concert series such a success (friends, fans, family, Andy).

Another highlight of the trip back home was hiking up to Lake Garibaldi with Jen. It had been a few years since I had been up there and being that there was still snow on the ground, we were 2 of 4 people in camping in the area. The weather was amazing, scenery was stunning and the company was excellent as always. If you get a second, please head over to Jen's site and look at the photos: Jentrance.com.

So... here I am, back in Melbourne. I've been back for almost 3 weeks now and slowly sinking back into my routine. The research is moving along quite slowly, but the courses are great and keeping me busy. The weather, besides being cold, has been surprisingly pleasant... nowhere near the amount of rain the Vancouver gets in the winter. A bunch of us are actually thinking of going surfing next weekend (with the thickest wetsuits we can find)!

That’s the short version of the last few months... as always, please keep sending me emails with your updates. I look forward to reading them.

Assignments & Footy

It has been an interesting few days. Sunday concluded the week long Melbourne Uni Easter break that began with the arrival of my mom. I have always found the concept of a break from school quite humorous. One fundamental issue on which students and professors will forever disagree is the concept of a break. When I think of a break, I envision the kit-kat commercial where the construction worker stops his construction doings, sits down, pulls the kit-kat from his back pocket and proceeds to enjoy it in a relaxed and stress-free setting. A break is a vacation, a holiday, a rest, a respite. But No! Not according the Academic staff. Apparently, somewhere in the University mandate is a regulation stipulating that University professors assign the bulk of their assignments over a break period. You see, to them, a break is defined using exactly the same terms as a student’s break with one added word: suffering… or to be more precise, knowledge of suffering. That’s not to say the professors themselves are subject to suffering. Rather, to truly be relaxed and stress-free, the professor must take comfort in the fact that his or her student’s breaks are filled with as much stress and suffering as possible. This battle has gone on for centuries and will most likely continue to do so until the end of time.

Assignments! Assignments, my dear friends… the be all and end all of University life and the highlight of this past weekend. That being said, after all the stress and late nights, my assignments are finally in and I can relax for oh… maybe 20 minutes.

It wasn’t all bad, I had at least one night of fun this weekend. Friday night I was privileged enough to experience what the majority of Melbournians consider the most important part of Australian life: Footy. The AFL (Australian Football League). I thought Canadian were obsessive about ice hockey… but they are nothing compared to Melbournians and their footy. Upon first meeting someone in Melbourne you ask two questions. A) What their name is and B) Who they go for in the Footy. I’m not even joking about this. Their devotion to their teams is unquestionable. Once you pick a footy team, you’ve picked them for life. Parent’s register their unborn children as members of a specific team, just so that one day when their child is around 25 years old, they’ll be able to watch their team play the final match of the playoffs. The waiting list is that long. So needless to say, I have to pick a team. It has been a long slow learning process and I’m still working at it. I’ll let you know soon enough.

Anyways, Friday’s game was an eye opener. Carlton was playing Hawthorn and the 45,000+ fans were so into it. We bought our top level tickets for $11, grabbed a couple of beers and some meat pies, and found our seats in row X or some other obnoxiously high row. The game was a blast. The fitness level of the players is astonishing. In the end, Hawthorn won to the disappointment of many Carlton fans (including ourselves – being that we live in Carlton). On our way home, we stopped at the local pub, had a few pints of Guinness and talked about the footy. It’s a staple of life here, one that I am willingly being forced to experience… All in all, a nice break from the books.

I’ll save my Australian driving experience for next week. Miss you.

Happy Easter

So here I sit, stuffing my face with yet another handful of chocolaty goodness. There have been too many handfuls to count and I'm starting to feel my eyes close as the ChocoMinions take over.

My mom arrived in Melbourne yesterday and with her... came the Easter bunny. Its amazing how small this planet is. I met my mom at the airport and seeing her for the first time in 2 months made me feel like we had never been apart. Family has a funny way of doing that. It has been so great having her here, if only for a short while. Her being here also gives me an excuse to pull my head out of a computer monitor and explore a bit more of what Victoria* has to offer.

*For those of you that don't know... Victoria is one of 6 States and 2 Territories in Australia and calls Melbourne its capitol city. On a more environmentally conscious note: Victoria has the highest Greenhouse gas emissions per capita in the world, over half of them from Melbourne motor vehicles.

Today, while surprisingly cold, turned out to be quite a lot of fun. We jumped on a train around 8 am and headed out to the Dandenong Ranges. The trusty Lonely Planet Guide to Melbourne listed it as one of the many "must do" excursions in Victoria. Once we were outside the city, we hopped on the Puffing Billy train (an old 1900s steam engine train) which took us on a beautiful tour of the Victorian country hills and fern gullies on our way to Gembrook. Our destination, Gembrook, turned out to be a quaint little tourist town on the edge of the Ferntree Gully National Park. After a short walk to the Ranger station and back, we bought a couple toasty sandwiches, boarded the Puffing Billy and enjoyed the scenery on our way back to civilization. All in all, a great day outside the urban rush and one that would probably not have been attempted out my mom.

Well, its back to reality. Another day, another article to read. Its a tough life... I say as my hand slowly sifts its way through the jelly beans, looking for the final elusive, yet incredibly satisfying mini egg.

Going Nuclear

I found this article quite interesting. Thought I would re-post it.

Going Nuclear... A Green Makes the Case

By Patrick Moore
Sunday Washington Post, April 16, 2006

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.

I say that guardedly, of course, just days after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country had enriched uranium. "The nuclear technology is only for the purpose of peace and nothing else," he said. But there is widespread speculation that, even though the process is ostensibly dedicated to producing electricity, it is in fact a cover for building nuclear weapons.

And although I don't want to underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every technology that is dangerous. That was the all-or-nothing mentality at the height of the Cold War, when anything nuclear seemed to spell doom for humanity and the environment. In 1979, Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon produced a frisson of fear with their starring roles in "The China Syndrome," a fictional evocation of nuclear disaster in which a reactor meltdown threatens a city's survival. Less than two weeks after the blockbuster film opened, a reactor core meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sent shivers of very real anguish throughout the country.

What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do -- prevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn't been a nuclear plant ordered up since then.

Today, there are 103 nuclear reactors quietly delivering just 20 percent of America's electricity. Eighty percent of the people living within 10 miles of these plants approve of them (that's not including the nuclear workers). Although I don't live near a nuclear plant, I am now squarely in their camp.

And I am not alone among seasoned environmental activists in changing my mind on this subject. British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, believes that nuclear energy is the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Stewart Brand, founder of the "Whole Earth Catalog," says the environmental movement must embrace nuclear energy to wean ourselves from fossil fuels. On occasion, such opinions have been met with excommunication from the anti-nuclear priesthood: The late British Bishop Hugh Montefiore, founder and director of Friends of the Earth, was forced to resign from the group's board after he wrote a pro-nuclear article in a church newsletter.

There are signs of a new willingness to listen, though, even among the staunchest anti-nuclear campaigners. When I attended the Kyoto climate meeting in Montreal last December, I spoke to a packed house on the question of a sustainable energy future. I argued that the only way to reduce fossil fuel emissions from electrical production is through an aggressive program of renewable energy sources (hydroelectric, geothermal heat pumps, wind, etc.) plus nuclear. The Greenpeace spokesperson was first at the mike for the question period, and I expected a tongue-lashing. Instead, he began by saying he agreed with much of what I said -- not the nuclear bit, of course, but there was a clear feeling that all options must be explored.

Here's why: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by elimination, the only viable substitute for coal. It's that simple.

That's not to say that there aren't real problems -- as well as various myths -- associated with nuclear energy. Each concern deserves careful consideration:

Nuclear energy is expensive. It is in fact one of the least expensive energy sources. In 2004, the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. Advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future.

Nuclear plants are not safe. Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program. (And although hundreds of uranium mine workers did die from radiation exposure underground in the early years of that industry, that problem was long ago corrected.)

Nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.

Nuclear reactors are vulnerable to terrorist attack. The six-feet-thick reinforced concrete containment vessel protects the contents from the outside as well as the inside. And even if a jumbo jet did crash into a reactor and breach the containment, the reactor would not explode. There are many types of facilities that are far more vulnerable, including liquid natural gas plants, chemical plants and numerous political targets.

Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons. This is the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy and the most difficult to address, as the example of Iran shows. But just because nuclear technology can be put to evil purposes is not an argument to ban its use.

Over the past 20 years, one of the simplest tools -- the machete -- has been used to kill more than a million people in Africa, far more than were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings combined. What are car bombs made of? Diesel oil, fertilizer and cars. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire.

The only practical approach to the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation is to put it higher on the international agenda and to use diplomacy and, where necessary, force to prevent countries or terrorists from using nuclear materials for destructive ends. And new technologies such as the reprocessing system recently introduced in Japan (in which the plutonium is never separated from the uranium) can make it much more difficult for terrorists or rogue states to use civilian materials to manufacture weapons.

The 600-plus coal-fired plants emit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles. In addition, the Clean Air Council reports that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. These pollutants are eroding the health of our environment, producing acid rain, smog, respiratory illness and mercury contamination.

Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2emissions annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from more than 100 million automobiles. Imagine if the ratio of coal to nuclear were reversed so that only 20 percent of our electricity was generated from coal and 60 percent from nuclear. This would go a long way toward cleaning the air and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every responsible environmentalist should support a move in that direction.

pmoore@greenspirit.com

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, is chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. He and Christine Todd Whitman are co-chairs of a new industry-funded initiative, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which supports increased use of nuclear energy.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html

One month down...

So it is... I've been here in Melbourne for just over one month. Beautiful city and brilliant people. Last week was probably the hottest I've ever been in my life, temperatures reached a high of 39 degrees Celsius... It was hot. It's started to cool down in the last few days though... I guess we're finally getting to the end of summer.

Not much new has happened since I last updated this blog... I've settled into my place, finally done some laundry and actually managed to buy a reasonably cheap guitar from the Cash Converters down the street. We're getting into the Commonwealth Games so the trams are starting to get a little busier and streets are being closed off. I've done some more exploring of the city, but still have piles more to see. I'm hoping to head over to Bells Beach (original Billabong & Ripcurl surf shops) to get some real Australian surfing in as well as learn to kite-board.

The research is going well. I'm in the midst of reading up on current publications in my field and attempting to track down a bicycle capable of interfacing with our system. My desk in the department is great, amazing view (check out the webcam) and great location (across the street from my apartment - you can actually see my apartment in the webcam photo). I also joined a couple more Uni groups: MUGS (Melbourne University Geomatics Society) as well as GPS (Geomatics Postgraduate Society).

Other than that, not much else to say... I'll throw up some more photos soon.

Photos

I uploaded some new photos to the Photo Gallery -->

Beers & Windsurfing

I seem to be updating this thing every 5 days or so... I think I'm going to have to calm down a little bit with the ol' updates.

As usual, things have been going really well. Thursday & Friday were clubs/societies days where the main concourse of the Union House is lined with tables, each trying to convince you to join their club. By Friday I had joined 3 clubs; The Surf Club (great discount surf trips up the coast), the Squash Club (free squash court bookings) and the Windsport Club (I'm dying to learn how to Kiteboard).

Thursday night was great. The Uni runs a weekly event called "Cinema under the Sails." Basically, they set up an huge outdoor screen and a large majority of the campus shows up with blankets, pack themselves on to the lawn outside the Union House and watch a movie. This week was "The Chronicles of Narnia." A classic. Needless to say, we had a couple beers and enjoyed the show.

Yesterday I ended up heading down to the beach with the windsport club to do some windsurfing. 30 seconds in, the cold front hit... along with the piercing rain, lightning and thunder. As you can probably imagine, standing in the middle of the bay, holding on to a giant metal pole in the middle of a lightning storm is not the reason I came to Australia. So we hit the pub.

I should have some photos up soon.