Coming to europe

It's really time that I write a new post. It's been almost two month since the last one I really have to get my act together. Well first news: it's all set I am coming to Europe in May. I'm going to CLEO in Long Beach CA May 21st to 26th. After that I will be working with Thibaut in Besancon for about a month and then I go to Germany to visit friends and family. I'm really looking forward to this. Hopefully I'll have some time to go to Scandinavia to visit Lina and Flavius in Sweden and Bo in Norway. I'm taking a month off after France, but I already have so many things I'd like to do that I really don't know where to take the time from. The great thing about the whole trip is that I will be avoiding most of the winter this year. I don't particularly like the NZ winters. I mean they are alright and a lot better than the winters in Muenster but still it's raining way to much, and with the houses not having any insulation it's usually way to cold inside. Apart from this news nothing much has happened lately. My work is coming along although I sometime would like to see myself making faster progress. Well I guess every PhD student wishes for that. I have been on a couple more sailing trips. The last one being to Coromandel peninsula. That was awesome. You could get oysters on one beach and Pipis (another sort of mussel) at another. And by get I mean you just had to pick them up(the pipis at least), there were tons. We also went out fishing and caught 11 !! Snapper, quite a few big ones as well. For somebody coming from Europe this abundance of natural resources is just amazing. Where in Europe do you have that!? Still to many people here take it for granted, and can't even understand why there is a catch limit (which is still very high). They just want to exploit the resources like no tomorrow. Can't they see what an attitude like this caused in Europe?! Fortunately most people really see the sense in it and obey the rules. It's interesting how aware most Kiwis are of issues concerning the enviroment. They don't always act by it but they are quite aware.

Bay of Islands and Paper accepted

Nora and I went up to the Bay of Islands two weeks ago, and went sailing with John. That is the guy I've been going sailing with. He just bought a boat and it was up there, although he brought it down now. The Bay of Islands is awesome. We head great weather and really enjoyed ourselves. It's definitely one of the places to go to here on the north island. I also got another good message, my paper was accepted for CLEO 2006. So I'll be going to California at the end of May. I'll also be going to spent a month in Besancon to work with Thibaut, one of our collaborators, so it'll be an exciting year. Especially because I can go visit everybody in Germany while im over there. Compare to the distance from here Germany is just around the corner from France :)

Sailing

Well it's about time for another post. We have been enjoying the summer lately, it's perfect weather here around 25C and sunny. Flavius a friend of mine from Romania is quite keen on sailing as well. He and I have rented a little cat from Mission Bay a couple of times now. It was quite good so far. The last time we went Nora and Casey another friend of mine came with us as well so we rented out 2 cats and did a little racing against each other. The guy who's renting out the cats also has a tornado, but so far we haven't been able to get it, because he either did not bring it when we were there, or he was just by himself, and he only rents it out if he has someone to help him at the beach. Well hopefully we're able to sail it one of these days. Flavius also knows someone from his department who ones a 10m keelboat and is always looking for crew to race on wednesday afternoons, so Flavius took me with him last week. So we did some cool keelboat racing. Fortunatly John, the guy who owns the yacht always looks for people so I think I'll be going regularly from now on. Really looking forward to it! I've also looked at some prices for dinghies on trademe, the NZ version of ebay, just for fun really, I was quite surprised that a laser or say a 29er are actually not that expensive really. You can get a boat like that for around 5000NZD. Not that I can afford 5000 $ atm, apart from a space to actually put the boat, but you gotta have something to dream about.

Champagne pools

Champagne pools
Originally uploaded by Nora und Jochen in Neuseeland.

The Champagne Pools in Waitapo Thermal Wonderland, awesome colours. I quite like this picture

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.

Car

Well it was about time I wrote another post here, it's been way too long. First off we bought a car. Unfortunatly that really is the only way to get around Auckland or out of Auckland. The public transport here is really crap, I'd say it's the worst I've seen in a city this size anywhere. There is about 2 or three train lines in Auckland, so you can hardly go anywhere by train, apart from the fact that they are awefully slow as well. When I still used to live in Avondale, it took approx the same time with the train to go to the city as it took by bus. Ok so that leaves busses. The thing about the busses here is, there is just way too much traffic on the roads, so they are not really fast either. From Avondale to uni it took me about 10-15min during peak hours and maybe 5min during normal traffic more than on my bike. Lucky me I don't live in Avondale anymore. The other thing is the busses are really crappy busses as well. The are awfully loud, I am just glad I don't live on a bus route, or worse at a traffic light or bus stop were they accelarate. Public transport was privatized I maybe 10 years ago, because well all these neoliberalist crackheads tell us everything will be better if it's privatized. Now the main bus company here is stagecoach an english company. But they don't make a profit on ticket sales, but the city wants a public transport system, because there are many benefits: less congestion on the roads, less polution, it makes the city more attractive for tourists etc.. So Auckland pays around 30-40million to the bus company, approximately the same amount the company takes home as profits. So essentially the city of Auckland and the people in Auckland are subsidising a british company. A company which does not have intersest in improving their service (the community is paying them), buys the worst busses (they don't care about the polution and noise) and pays really low wages (a busdriver makes about $NZ12-13 an hour). Why don't they just make public transport public again!! Mmh now I got in to a rant about the public transport, I wanted to write about our car. Well we bought the car mainly to go on trips, weekend trips short holidays etc.. We don't need a car to get to uni we live close enough about 14min walk. So we wanted a station wagon, so we might put a matress in the back and could sleep in it. It's just a lot more convinient when you travel in a car like that. So we got a Subaru Legacy TX-S. It's fairly new (1995) and in really good shape. I had quite a look around before we finally got it and we got a very good deal on it. We bought from a dealership as we wanted to play it save with the first car. It was advertised for 6000 but we got it for 3300. There should be some pictures up on our pic site soonish.

Sydney

I went to Sydney last week to attend a workshop on photonic crystal and optical waveguide theory. It was good fun. I stayed with Alex and Susi two friends of mine from my time when I was studying at Sydney University. They now have a small boy, Peter who is a little more than a year old. Really cute and not difficult at all. He hardly cried during the time I was there. Everytime I come to Sydney I get very melancholic, I love this city. IMO it is the best city in the world, and although Auckland is nice, it can't quite compete with Sydney. I had a talk with Martijn who is the cosupervisor for my PhD thesis and I will probably spend some time in Sydney during my PhD. The workshop was really good as well, some quite interesting talks. The best one was probably the talk by Philip Russell, a poineer a photonic crystal fibres. The whole trip was only 4 days, but that's OK. Nora could not come with me so I was happy to see her when I came back. While in Sydney I also met up with my former flatmate, also Nora. She's doing an internship with Schwarzkopf there. She just arrived a week before me and I showed her some of my favourite places in Sydney. We finally have some pictures up on the net, you can find them here. It's not many yet, as flickr has a maximum monthly upload limit and we have just been lazy.