So I imagine people wondering, what is a typical day at Harvard-CfA like for Grant? Here is my ‘typical’ day…
So after wandering down to school through a crisp morning with patches of snow, I find there are some people I know passing through. I go and meet Anna who lives in Texas, and also see Martin and Ken from Australia. I then go to a talk by a guy from Caltech who does cool theoretical planet work, and later to a talk by another guy who does cool observational planet work. Finally I go out to dinner with more people who do things I’m interested in. And the best thing: dinner was free, thanks ITC!
Meeting three or four people in a day who do research directly related to what I do is very cool, and hasn’t even come close to happening in two years in Australia.
Of course some days I just sit at my desk at play with my computer…
Boston is apparently the most Irish city in the USA. They make the most of this by having a huge parade through South Boston each year, which all those not too hungover from the Saturday night before attend. Halvar and I didn’t fall into that category so of we went.
It was pretty cold standing around watching various police, army, schools, local youth, and lots of guns of varying degrees of reality being wielded with varying degrees of sobriety parading past.
The best photo I took was of Dorothy’s mate the Tin Man. I missed the reasoning behind the costumes but they were handing out green lollies, which was god enough for me…
Highlight of the day was a guy in the parade spotting some kids in a back yard shooting hoops, requesting a ball, and downing a ‘nothing but net’ three from the street. He knew it was good the instant it left his hands and was twenty meters away by the time it went in. Nice.
Pics are here.
Today it snowed. A lot. In fact it’s still snowing outside right now. There is a nice little snow bank building up next to the fence and there’s a weird light outside as if the sun didn’t quite go all the way down.
I left school a bit after 2pm and watched the second innings of NZ vs. England live from the Caribbean in a reasonably warm bar with cold beer. I can now say I’ve trekked through snow to watch cricket…
This is Halvar outside after the game. He’s doing thumbs up because we beat the poms.
So I arrive in Boston, and my friends show me a photo of a poster for a new movie, Black Sheep. I look at the picture for a second, and then realise I grew up about two doors down from the lead actor. We used to skate together back in the day…
Nice one Nathan!
I wasted a lot of time trying to import mail from Windows XP Thunderbird into Apple Mail. I found a failsafe (well twice) way to totally crash my new Macbook Pro by trying to import mail when I’d already done so.
Eventually I found Eudora Mailbox Cleaner, which pretty much does everything. The only extra step is to go through and rebuild all the imported mailboxes. It didn’t do a totally perfect job, missing one folder for some reason, but otherwise worked beautifully.
It was really cold today, like -10degC. How does it get that cold? I survived the 25 minute walk to school ok, though I was glad to be in the warm when I arrived…
I’m getting settled in somewhat, at school anyway now that I’ve almost run out of procrastination type things to stop me from doing some science for a change.
I made it! After various delays in flights, and rather longer visits to Auckland and LAX airports than I’d hoped, I arrived in Boston on the red-eye at 7am. There was snow all over the place as we flew in, and the city looked rather grey and concrete-like.
I followed Halvar’s directions to Harvard, and walked a rather long distance to the Center for Astrophysics. I then met my officemate, and eventually my supervisor. It was a little weird after already talking to him for a year and a half, but good too. I can’t use the “I haven’t met my supervisor joke anymore however..”
I am now in P342, with my supervisor a few doors down. I’m not sure that I’ll actually talk to him more than in the past, but at least it will be in person!
I didn’t really feel like I’d arrived until I saw my first squirrel…
You can see where my office is at this link. The satellite image was taken during summer I think…
