Friendly Fired

It's been a while hasn't it folks? The days are getting harder, with more work to be done and assignments to hand in. But, it will be all good in the end. Two main events to be noted today.

Reports. Now I got a fairly decent report, but my brother got a really crap one. I won't go into exact numbers, but the marks for all subjects were below average and under 50%. This report could possibly attributed to the obscene amount of time he spends playing games. Obviously, he's been more stringently banned from playing, but I've been caught in the web as well, even though I play less hours and have a better report. So that throws I few things out of whack, but I think I'm alright with it. It could have been worse.

Next up, the Physics excursion to the University of Sydney. We took the train to Redfern and spent most of our time doing the crosswords and listening to music. The walk was short and the uni was HUGE. We spent quite a bit of time to get to where we were supposed to go. The classes was divided into two group and we did the same things but in a different order. I got stuck in Fearnside's group. We attended the lecture first. It went for an hour or so and was on binary and variable stars, and how they are used in astronomy. It was quite interesting, but became a bit boring during the middle part. Still, the end was quite fascinating with several exotic types of binary stars and these cool animations.

We then had a two hour break. Eating was going to be on the agenda, but firstly we visited the Macleay Musuem of Natural History. It was an interesting collection of stuff, ranging from beetles to butterflies to Aboriginal instruments. If you ever visit USyd, a quick visit to Macleay should be on your agenda. We had lunch at the Manning Bar. Well not actually at the bar, because they were serving alcoholic drinks, so we were stuck on the two lower levels. They had a bunch of decent food, but it was expensive and a rip as far as we were concerned. Charles bought these sandwiches with beef, lettuce and stuff and it was immensely satisfying to the stomach, but a pain in the hip pocket at $4. The Uni has a whole bunch of activities going on as part of Life Week, some excuse to do silly stuff. One little diversion was to throw a rubber chicken up 2-3 metres into a crate. If you did get it in, then you were in the running to win an iPod shuffle. Several Seftoners tried, but none were successful. Also there were a whole bunch of stress balls in the image of cricket balls beening given away for free. Land and Phuong were the first to strike, and quickly set off a chain reaction of Seftoners running to get some free stuff.

After all this fun, and suitably refilled and refreshed, when went back again to the School of Physics to attend some lab work sessions. Just before entering, we were told that they weren't ready for us yet, so we had some fun on the nearby oval. Most people were throwing the stress balls, but a whole bunch of us started to play shuttlecock, drawing a few stares from the Uni students.

The lab work was quite cool. It was basically what we had done in class, but with much superior equipment, that a University can afford. We didn't finish all of the activities as we were pressed for time, but we did managed to do the superconducting one, and our 2nd year students-guides were joking around with the liquid nitrogen. Liquid nitrogen is so cool. They had their own supply in a giant tower outside. Man, I gotta get liquid nitrogen. My greatest disappointment was that I didn't bring a thermos flask to leech some liquid nitrogen.

Still it was great fun. On the way back to Sefton, a whole bunch of people had early leavers. Still 23 people were supposed to be back on Sefton station and there were only 12 students. Hmmm, looks like some people just decided to leave. Don't know whether Fearnside will follow it up though. Nah, probably not...