This photo of me was taken by a colleague of mine as I fixed together a mounting to lower the camera in the water and take photos of sediment. That was after a long lunch at a sushi restaurant. I love my job *Smug*
Don't believe me? Here's just a couple of examples from this week:
I sent an email with an attachment of a data plot I had made. When a reply came back with the image embedded in the email, I discovered (to my horror) that in the figure's title, I had spelt the word 'count' without an 'o'
I got a bike. I had broken it within a couple of hours by cycling up a steep hill, reaching the top, and changing gear without pedalling, snapping the chain in half
I went to a sandwich shop. There wasn't so much a queue as a pile of people obtaining sandwiches in random order. No-one seemed to be queuing, or ordering, just receiving. I thought that there must have been a rush of orders just before I walked in, and they wouldn't take any more orders - including mine - until they had cleared the backlog. No-one looked friendly enough to ask, and those who did were either on their mobile phones, or chatting with friends. I stood and waited and watched. As soon as people who came in after me started to receive sandwiches, I said to the man next to me "well, this is just ridiculous!" and I left the shop. Later I recounted my story to a colleague ... how was I to know they only took telephone orders?
At work I needed access to a secure ftp server, so made the necessary enquiries and got myself a username and password on the system. It didn't work. I tried again, several times, and no joy. I called an IT technician - we went through different possibilities - firewalls, admin permissions, different sftp software, command line sftp - you name it. The 2nd technician called a 3rd, and the afternoon rolled on. Eventually we realised that the only possible thing was that - yep, you guessed it - I had been typing my password incorrectly.
Ok I'm going now, I'll try not to break anything as I press 'publish'
So, for those who dont know, I'm going to be working as a post-doctoral research assistant in the Institute of Marine Sciences (http://ims.ucsc.edu/) at the University of California Santa Cruz (http://www.ucsc.edu/public/). My day-to-day tasks will be heping set up a long-term seafloor observatory with the good people of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Santa Cruz (http://walrus.wr.usgs.gov/). The science behind the project is improving understanding of sediment resuspension and ripples under waves, to inform better models of sediment transport and shoreline change.
ok?
