Nora's coming

Awesome news, Nora passed all her exams and also received a letter from Auckland Uni that she's been excepted. So everything worked out great. She is coming on tuesday next week at 5 in the morning. I'll certainly pick her up from the airport. I'm really excited, 3 months are such a long time and I really can't stand being without her anymore. I'll take the rest of the week of and we will do some things. Can't wait! Work at the lab is doing good as well now that I have figured out the reason why my results weren't reproducible I managed to limit the influence of the laser. It seems that waiting for about 5min usually makes the laser settle into approximatly the same state, so I only have to wait after changing the wavelength or the output power. Because I have to take measurements at a lot of different powers and wavelengths, I automated the whole process, so I only have to turn on the laser in the morning and start the measurement, and then I can go do some other things. So at the moment I'm trying to catch up with my reading, as I ususally have the tendency to slack off when I'm doing experiments. I also have to start on building a literature database, which allows me to quickly search my papers and create bibtex files easily. At the moment I'm looking at using pybliographer which seems to fulfill my needs. I'll keep you updated how I like it.

autumn is here

It seems like autumn has finally arrived here in Auckland. Kinda late, and hopfully it won't stay long. It has been raining strongly the last 3 days and I'm starting to get sick of it already. This is what I wanted to get away from when I left Munester. At least it is still fairly warm, about 17 degrees Celcius. The last few days haven't been really exciting, I'm still experimenting in the lab, and unfortunatly didn't get that much further. I think I figured out why my results weren't reproducible, the spectrum of our pump laser seems to change, when its output power or the wavelength has changed. Knowing that doesn't really help however, because I can't really change it. The only thing I can do is try to always wait for a period of time and hope that the laser settles into the same stable condition. My social life is not very exciting either, I guess I'm getting old. I just can't wait for Nora to arrive, it's only two more weeks. I am more up for doing chill stuff with her than go party a lot. However today is Casey's birthday so we will go to a restaurant tonight. It's called Caluzzi (or similar) and they usually have a big transvestile show one, so that will be fun.

weekend

This weekend has been fairly quite. Well sunday at least. I went riding on saturday morning. I actually felt suprisingly good considering how lazy I've been with training. In the evening my the guy I'm mainly working with, Stephane, was celebrating his birthday. It was a really good party, great food, interesting people. I left pretty early however, as I was still tired from getting up at 7 in the morining to go riding and also because I wanted to go riding sunday morning as well. That part didn't work out too well. I accidentally had turned of my alarmclock, so I woke up at 10 to 8, with the bunch ride being at 8 so I was a bid late. It turned out to be a good thing however, as the whole day it was raining on and off. So riding wouldn't have been much fun at all. I decided that I will start making a list about things that I notice here which are very different from germany and which I either like or dislike. Today I'm going to bitch about all the people here driving around in pimped cars. Lowered, spoilers en masse, very loud exhaust(that is actually the most annoying thing). I don't know where all these people come from and why they don't have anything better to do with their money than buy expensive equipment to make their ugly cars look even uglier. Actually let me take that back, use their parents money, as 90% of all the people driving these cars seem to by asian boys maybe 19-21 years old. I can hardly believe that they earn that money themselves. I would care less if it wasn't for the exhausts, which you hear from miles away, and the habit of accelerating at every trafficlight like they are on a racetrack, to make sure that everybody at the other end of Auckland has herd them.
OK now I feel better, that just had to be said!

Work in the lab

The last three days I have spend in the lab. First I had to get the setup working, and than I was actually running the experiments. I was even getting good results, but unfortunatly the results were not reproducible. We are still trying to figure out exactly why this happens, we have a couple of ideas, but nothing provided useful so far. Well that gives me something to do over the next couple of days. Otherwise I have been taking things pretty easy, before Bo left we have been doing lots of stuff, so it is quite nice to actually just chill. I think I'm going to go riding tomorrow morning. It's been a while since I went on the last bunch ride, I have been really slack with my training lately, but I just couldn't get myself to properly train after not being able to ride for about 6 weeks when I came here, due to my pneumonia and wrecking my bike. I feel like doing some sport again though. I'm getting fat as well ;-).

Bo left

We brought Bo to the airport yesterday, he is going back to Norway. He didn't like his studies and is going to work and maybe start some other education when he's back. Lina, Flavius, Casey and I waved him off at the airport. It was a sad thing to see him leave. He has become a very good friend in the short time we have known each other. It is amazing how quickly friendships develop sometimes. Well I hope we manage to stay in contact, considering how bad I am with writing emails. I definitely will miss the coffees we had in the mornings at pod our local coffeeshop on campus and the conversations we had. I will miss him.
Today was the first time I have been to the lab, finally! I was getting really fed up with judt hanging in front of the PC running simulations, now I can do some hands-on work again. I did a characterization of a WDM today, has I have to know its characteristics for the rest of my experiment. Tomorrow I'll hopefully set up the rest of the experiment and then it's measuring time. This experiment is just a small intermediate one though, the main one will be a little more complicated to set up, and I still have to order some parts for it

the beach

we went to karakare beach yesterday. We that is Bo, Flavius and Lina. It was really good, quite an awesome beach. We stayed the whole afternoon. Bo and I even went for a short swim. The worst bid was the going in part, freezing, after that it was really refreshing though. We stayed until sunset, I took a whole lot of pictures, can't post them though, it's not a digital camera. I really have to get one. Sorry. I reall have to get a digital camera, so I can post them here or sent them to people.