About time for a post

Hi everybody. Well it has been quite a while since I wrote my last post, I really should be better about this. Well quite a lot has happened in the last couple of months. I have been working quite a bid. Especially early december was quite a stressfull time. We had an academic visitor from France over here and he and I were working on the passive mode-locked laser setup. Well the main thing was actually to build an optical autocorrelator to be able to observe the pulses we wanted to create with the passive mode-locked laser. Well I wont go into the details, we managed to get everything working and got some good results. During december was also the ACOLS converence in Rotorua, were I was giving a talk. Because I was working in the lab all the time I didn't really have much time to prepare my talk, luckily I had already given a similar talk at the optics group meeting here so I just needed to slightly alter that talk. Rotorua was really good. Nora came with us and there was quite a good social program so we had lots of things to do. We went whitewater rafting one day, including a 7 meter waterfall. Quite an experience. I was really good fun, although there was a bid to much stopping and talking before every rough section. I also went whitewater kayaking with some friends of us. Now that was quite scary, but also lots of fun. I had tried to roll on a lake a couple of times before, but I only managed to do it once, and that was on a calm lake. So I knew I wouldn't be able to roll when being on a rough river. The only thing you can do if you flip, is wait for someone to come next to your boat with their kayak so that you are able to push yourself up. If that takes to long you have to get out of your boat by pulling away the cover which attaches you to the boat. What I soon found out is, that you really don't wanna do that if possible. The kayak runs full of water and you have to get the water out if you wanna go on. That is a bitch! So next time I flipped I just held my breath longer to wait for someone to rescue me. My talk at Rotorua went well so the whole trip was really good. When we got back I had to write an abstract to submit our results to the Cleo conference next may. So if everything works out II'll be going to Long Beach CA this year. After that I fortunatly did not have much more work to do. Nora and I spent Christmas eve in front of the TV watching Dragonheart (what a bad movie) and eating takeaway pizza, great!! On Christmas day Nora's dad Hajo arrived from Germany, to spend 12 days with us. We took the opportunity to really get outta Auckland because Nora and I didn't really have much time to do that before. We went to Tongarriro National Park and did the Crossing, one of the best one day walks in NZ. I put up some pictures on our gallery (see link). After that we went to Taupo for a day and then spend a couple of days in Rotorua again. It's just a must to go there with anyone from europe, because most people have never seen this kind of thermal activity etc.. Hajo was quite impressed as well I think. At last we spend a couple of days back in Auckland again, before Hajo went back home on the 6th. We went to Tiritiri Island a bird sanctuary were Nora does part of her masters research and had dinner up the sky tower which was really good as well. Well, Nora is back on Tiri for a couple of days and for me it's back to work as well.