People
Warning: this post may contain rants.
The last two days have been very long. What with summer school lectures and tutorials all day yesterday, Macc Astro last night, data reduction tutorials today and then taking groups on tours around the observatory, followed by the conference dinner, I'm a bit tired now. To top it all off, coming back from retrieving my bicycle which I left at the physics department school earlier this afternoon, I was nearly run over by a lunatic in a car who decided to try and run me off the road. I was coming back down a side street near my house when a car coming the other way drove straight at me. I ended up with my tyres touching the curb and I still collided heavily with his wing mirror. I'm still shaking now and I've been home for half an hour. It's not like I was invisible either as I had bright lights on the front and back of my bicycle, and a rather colourful top on. Some people are very, very strange.
Have you ever had one of those dreams where you find yourself in front of a lecture theatre full of people, expecting you to give a lecture on ancient Sanskrit? Today felt like that. We were helping people learn how to reduce data from the PdB interferometer, a high frequency telescope in France, using a package called Gildas. Up until this morning, the software had not worked properly and it was only thanks to hard work on the part of our computer expert, Ant, that we managed to do anything. As none of the tutors had ever got the software to work properly before hand, we were not much use to start with. After a while we worked out most of the problems and could help most people get through the tutorial without too much of a problem.
The afternoon consisted of a trip out to the observatory for all of the summer school students. I was hoping to get a bit of work done, since other people were supposed to be doing the tours. In the end, just as I had sat down with a cup of tea, I was asked to help out as the plan had gone somewhat haywire. In the end, both Dave and I ended up guiding groups around, explaining various things about the observatory and trying to fill as much time as possible. Still, the dinner was nice.
There are just two days left of the summer school now. I plan on staying in bed all day on Saturday.
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