Before Christmas Tala and I were looking into buying a house. The most we could afford to borrow was $420,000. The houses in the area where we are renting now go for ~$560,000 – $650,000, so in order to buy we had to look even further out from the city. It already takes me around [...]

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I am writing a couple of grants at the moment. For those of you who are not familiar with how scientific research works, scientists need to apply for funding for their experiments and they do this by applying for grants from various funding agencies. The biggest in Australia for medical research is the National Health [...]

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It was great weather for a day at the beach last weekend (Sat 19th Nov, 2011). I heard that there was going to be a game of nude beach cricket between the Coast and Valley Naturists (CAVN) and Bare Tracks up at Samurai Beach in Port Stephens on the Saturday so thought I would make [...]

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I was doing the weekly gorcery shop last night and in the fruit and vegie section of my local coles (Stanhope Gardens in Sydney) sitting beside the ordinary orange carrots which were $1.98/kg there were these deep purple/black root vegetables that looked like carrots.  Upon closer inspection they were called “Purple Carrots” and looked identical [...]

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If you can learn one new thing every day pretty soon you will have a good broad base of knowledge on which to draw in order to help you through any problems that you might come across in life. I always tell my research students that science is all about solving problems, but more generally [...]

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On the weekend I made an extremely awsome 10 Year Plan to do list. There has been a lot of planning and designing of the 10 Year Plan such that it is now very elegant, and very achievable, but to date there has been too much planning of the 10 Year Plan and not enough [...]

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Well I am back from a trip around New Zealand, a really spectacular place.  You could hardly get a country more suited to agriculture if you sat down and designed it your self.  Perfect weather, perfect soil (deep volcanic), perfect rain fall.  Everything is so green over there.  Anyway now that I am back, and [...]

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Well as usual it has been a while since my last post. In the mean time it has also become 2011. I spent New Years this year camping on a beach on the East Coast of Tasmania near St Mary’s, though I am not sure of the name of the beach. While waiting for midnight [...]

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After two and a half hours sleep I got up at 2:30am to make my way down to the opera house through the CBD. Down the southern end of the city near central there were people out and about, early morning delivery vans starting their rounds, clubbers heading home etc. I made my way down [...]

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Hi to the rest of the world. I skate at Canterbury ice rink here in Sydney and of course the buzz there is that one of their skaters, Cheltzie Lee has made it through her short program to be placed 18th out of 30 skaters over all. This means that she will get to skate [...]

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