Na-na na-na na-na na-na na! BatAlex!

Another bout of silence but not as long as before. The virtual world is not holding much appeal for me at the moment, it has to be said. I’m spending most of my time working and being with family as per usual.

Work has seriously improved. My old assistant has taken a secondment to another section and I have a new assistant whom I have been working with for the last two months and it’s a HUGE improvement. She is much more relaxed and more efficient. We are actually AHEAD of our current schedule of classes and have some time to tackle the jobs that normally get left to the semester breaks. It’s awesome. She doesn’t take offence to things like my old assistant did and I don’t have to tiptoe around her like I used to. End result: I’m more relaxed and happy at work. I’d nearly forgotten what that was like.

At home, I am enjoying my son being three. His personality has come leaping out now that he’s discovered his voice and it’s a doozy. His first passion is Cars. Not just any old cars (though he does love Matchbox and Hot Wheels) but Cars from Pixar. He has just about every Cars thing that has ever been made but he’s also recently developed a liking for Batman. Most three-year olds I’ve met love Spider-man but not my boy. Batman all the way and that’s fine by me. I love Batman. He has a little Batman shirt that comes complete with a cape and he loves few things more than running around trying to make the cape fly out behind him and it’s so much fun to watch.

He loves the shirt so much that he wears it everywhere he can. This lead to the following incident, as described to me by my wife. The other day he was at the shops with his Mum and wearing his Batman shirt and cape. It came time to leave and so the following exchange took place:

“Alex, it’s time to go.”

“I’m not Alex. I’m Batman and Batman goes where he wants!”

“Well, I’m Batman’s MUM and Batman’s MUM says it’s time to go!”

“Oh.”

Heh. I would have LOVED to have seen that. My little Batman!

On the gaming front, not much has happened. I had planned on getting lots ready for CanCon 2013 Apocalypse but to tell the truth, nothing much has changed. I’ve developed a new list that has cut down the number of models I need to paint from 117 to 82 but I still have a LOT to paint (only 1 model of that 82 is painted). Easter is on its way, though, and I hope to get a little time to do some more prep on the army and get it ready.

When Life Gives You Lemons...

...bend life over and stick those lemons where the sun don't shine.

[Rant Mode ON]
Yesterday, I had some rather insulting news. We had our end-of-year Faculty forum. At this function they tell us what a wonderful Faculty we've been, how awesomely we've served our students and in general they pat us all on the back. This event is also when they announce the winners of the Performance Awards. These awards are given to those staff who have shown excellent performance over the past year. This year, the head of our discipline nominated myself and my assistant for these awards. He's been most pleased with our performance this year and thought we deserved recognition. I felt pretty good when he told us this as its been a tough year and we've still managed to pull through. That was about 3 months ago.

No one finds out if they've won an award until they announce it at the end-of-year forum. Today, they flashed up the names of the winners. I wasn't amongst them. O.K., I can deal with that. My assistant's name was up there. Wait, what? We've been working together on the same projects. I've been doing longer hours and working at least as hard as, if not harder than my assistant has and she gets the award while I miss out!?! I've rearranged my home life to commit to work more, spending less time with my family and getting more stressed than I have been for the last 15 years and apparently I'M the one who is not performing while she IS!?! What the hell is up with that!?! Frankly, I find it highly insulting. I'm pretty angry about the whole thing and if I didn't need the money to support my family, I'd storm into the office on Monday and tell our Dean that he can stick my job where his sun don't shine. How can you possibly award one person for their performance at a set of tasks when their workmate who is not only working along side them but is also supervising them and taking the responsibility for those self-same tasks is not also awarded?

Here, life. Take these here lemons and stick them where your sun doth not shine. I've had it with this cr@p.
[Rant Mode OFF]

Where HAVE you been?

Wow. The months fly by. Its such a cliche but at the same time its not uncommon to look up and think, "Geez! Where did that time go?". And so it's been for me. So what has been keeping me so busy?

Gaming.
I've mentioned my liking for the miniature games Warmachine and Hordes before. What I may not have mentioned that I am a volunteer rep for the company that produces them. For those of you not familiar with these games and their parent company, Privateer Press, we reps are called Press Gangers (Privateer Press - Press Gangers; get it?). Each year in Australia we hold a National Championship for these games to crown an Australian Champion. Its normally held at GenCon Australia, formerly Australia's "Premier Gaming Event" and this year I volunteered to run it. About 8 weeks out from the event, GenCon Australia announced they would not be running this year due to "financial concerns". This created a few hiccups around the traps but eventually we found a new venue and ploughed ahead with running our National Titles anyway. I wanted to make this event the biggest and best Nationals ever seen and to that end I wanted to give every player a prize-pack for coming along. It was quite a lot of work getting it all together. I could bore you with all the details but to make a long story short, I ran the event (with much help from friends and fellow Press Gangers), the players played and walked away with their swag of stuff and the various champions walked away with a swag of prizes. I thought the event went along pretty well on the whole but it ate a large chunk of my spare time.

Work.
I won't say much about work as you never know who's reading your blog and don't want to unnecessarily offend certain people. Suffice to say that I've had some big issues at work and have been focusing on getting under control there. Its been pretty stressful and I'll be glad when its all sorted out some more or I go on holidays a few weeks (yay January!).

Family.
Before you get worried, my wife and son are fine. We still have a few sleep issues with our boy but they are slowly improving. He goes to sleep much better now than he used to, he just gets pretty restless some nights and finds it hard to settle himself. We're working on it. Other than that, our boy is a pretty happy lad who is fairly easy to take care of. He has his good days and bad days but on the whole, the good far outweighs the bad. My wife is enjoying being back working at least two days a week and feels like she's contributing something (as if looking after our son wasn't enough). No, my family issues have been with one of my brothers. He suffers from pretty severe depression and recently it got the better of him. Thankfully, nothing tragic happened but it was touch and go for quite a while. While I didn't have to deal with most of the problems, it still made me worry a lot at a time when I had lots of worries already. Depression is a very serious mental health issue that many people don't realise is quite so bad until they have to deal with it (and I didn't deal very well with it I have to say).

But thank heavens a lot of it has passed and things are looking up. I hope to be blogging more regularly in the near future. I'm heading to Canberra to play in an Apocalypse tourney being run by my mate Bart in January and I am really looking forward to it so to motivate myself to get my figures ready I'll try and blog about my progress. Stay tuned.

Science is fun and cool.

On the whole, I like my job. Sure I b!tch a lot about undergraduate students and the fact that they can't follow the simplest of instructions or break everything they go near but on the whole my job is pretty good.

And days like today show just how interesting science can be. Today, the students are looking at Rheology. One of the compounds they make is called Carbomer 940. At a concentration of 1% in water it forms a fairly fluid gel (like runny hair gel). The students make a 0.2% solution (which is nearly as fluid as water) and measure its viscosity. This comes out to be very, very low (close to water). Then they add a 2.0% (0.5M) Sodium Hydroxide solution (otherwise known as Caustic Soda). This causes the pH of the solution to increase (become more alkaline). The effect on the gel is dramatic. It goes from being very fluid to being a thick gel in a matter of seconds. The mechanism behind this is that the Carbomer is tightly coiled at very low and very high pH levels and as such is quite liquid. At a neutral pH the carbomer molecule uncoils, making it very thick. The students continue to increase the pH until the solution is quite alkaline and see that the gel goes very thick at neutral pH and then becomes fluid again. Its very, very cool to watch as the change is so dramatic.

Another compound they work with is Methylcellulose. It’s weird stuff. It’s dispersible only in hot water but only soluble in cold water (I'm not sure why). So to make the solution, you need to have very hot water and disperse the powder in it. It will not dissolve, despite the high temperature. You then add ice cold water and you notice that the solution goes from a cloudy fluid to a thick, clear gel in a matter of seconds. And it’s fun stuff. Completely non-toxic (it’s edible), it’s the classic goo. It’s actually the stuff they use in movies for goo and saliva special effects. Ever seen Aliens? Remember the saliva that dripped menacingly from the aliens' jaws? Methylcellulose goo. The goo the Gremlin's had dripping off them when they came out of their cocoons? Methylcellulose. A guy in Scandinavia once tried to make ice-cream that stayed solid at room temperature and he used methylcellulose as the base. It worked apart from one fatal flaw: it tasted terrible.

Science is fun.