13th May
I've been exploring on my nice shiny new bicycle. And I've spent lots of time chatting to people via wonderful modern technology like Skype and MSN messenger. And I've also been swimming and diving at the outdoor pool with very exciting outdoor diving boards. And tomorrow I have to stop all this "settling in" and actually go and do some work. Shame really.
This is the road I have to cycle down to go to work, and (more importantly) have to cycle up to get home afterwards. Nice view though...
New bike! It's a shame the sun is right overhead so it's a bit hard to see it properly.
This is somewhere north of La Jolla. I followed the coast and it pretty much looked like this all the way.
This is the street I live on, Caminito Mallorca.
It's all in chronological order, so if it looks the same as the last time you checked, scroll down and see whether there are extra bits at the bottom.
19th May
I've not taken any more photos of my surroundings this week, but here are some that I took in the lab on Tuesday. They're 4mm diameter bubbles rising from a nozzle and I'm using them to work out a way of photographing the neck where it pinches off. The interesting bits take less than a millisecond to happen, and I haven't got a proper high-speed camera here. Both these pairs of photos are 1/1000 of a second apart and the interesting physics is going on in the gap.
Photos like this will probably be a large part of my life for the next few months....
In other news, I went sculling in Mission Bay, the large pond-type thing that they have here that is their closest substitute for a proper river. I met a few jellyfish along the way and also some penguins (wrong hemisphere, yes, but I definitely wasn't dreaming). I found some badminton and then lost it again - it's the end of the season so I got to play once before it stopped for the summer. The sun stayed away this week, even though the undergrads at UCSD had their annual festival, called the "Sun God" festival. Apparently the sun god wasn't impressed.
Since when did you plant trees in flowerpots?
The building my lab is in and my desk (after only two days).
The bay near the boathouse on an overcast morning and the boathouse itself. Note the start of the beach in the bottom lefthand corner!
27th May
This week I read. I read enough to know how much I don't know and then I decided to go back and play in the lab for a bit. So I built a circuit to detect light with a little photodiode chip and then wasted 45 minutes of my time and someone else's time trying to work out why it wasn't working. It wasn't working because the power cable from the dc supply to the chip was dodgy, which of course should have been the first thing I checked. So much for five years lab experience.
It's been a really good week though. I went climbing (indoors) and running along the beach. And I went rowing on Saturday morning. And there was a lab social event in the Scripps aquarium and it turns out that an aquarium is a fantastic place to enjoy a glass of wine. Watching fish is pretty entertaining after a few glasses...
