Since I was unable to bring a little saguaro from Arizona (or, at least, didn’t want to risk my chances in customs) my favourite German supermarket had to come to the rescue! 🙂
(and I should definitely set the date on my camera!!)
Category: Uncategorized
Here we go again…
So yeah, after that amazing week in Arizona I’m back in cold, damp England. Well, I can’t really complain – much to my amazement it was quite warm on my arrival, so warm that I was actually roasting inside my car while stuck on yet another M25 traffic jam while returning from the airport!
But the weather here is like a Heaviside step function – Friday evening was still amazing (17 degrees C at 8 PM!!), and by end of Saturday the cold, the wind, and the rain muscled themselves in. As I’m writing this I have outside a balmy 6 degrees C and 95% RH. Anyway, this is not the Met Office so I should probably stop talking about the weather! 🙂
Going back to my trip, I have yet to organise my 1000+ photos I (with some help from the front seat passenger) took whilst on the trip to the Grand Canyon and the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. It is going to take a while but it is going to be worthy, there are some spectacular and exquisite images in there.
Right now I’ve been busying myself with teaching, preparing student chapter activities, researching and thinking about more potential research. Obviously still trying to cram a few runs and sculls in the meantime, especially with S Silvestre so close by (and I have to say that I’m being rubbish at preparing myself for it – I miss the training sessions I was having with my rowing mates back in Porto, here I feel I don’t push the same!!).
Finally got some time to sort out the website and make it look the way I wanted – I feel it is better this way, first time visitors will not go straight into my blog content, which might be a good idea, especially if people from a more “serious kind” end up in these pages!
OK, I think it is time for bed now – tomorrow is going to be a big day, especially since we’ll be hosting a joint colloquium with a few other research groups from different schools within the university. It has all the potential to be quite interesting and to foster potential collaborations between people with a broad range of interests and skills, which is something we definitely lack and that I did see in abundant quantities in the States (more on that in a later post…).
Location update: Tucson, AZ!
And here I am in Tucson! After sleeping the jet lag through (one night’s sleep and I was fine! 🙂 ), we had a very busy day at the OSA Student Leadership Conference, with plenty of inspiring talks and good speakers. Plus, it was quite refreshing to see what kind of activities other student chapters across the world are doing, and eventually – ahem – take some of those ideas back to our own Student Chapter!
Pretty productive day, and met a lot of interesting people so far. And now… let the actual conference begin! 🙂 (and I’m now going to bed, as I still want to cram an early morning run before things start getting busy…)
Some more photos of the glorious sunshine (which turned into rain in the evening, British-weather-style) are available on my Flickr album.
Cheap home insurance, but…
I got this through the post today – they seem to be barking at the wrong tree as we are all students with barely any valuables, but anyway, I kept reading… £100 per year (with the cashback) doesn’t seem that bad – but they have made some assumptions. OK, let me see what they were…
Right, so they got the # of bedrooms wrong, but the house has been recently refurbished so I’ll concede them that. I kept reading, though… hold on, applicant’s age 67 years old??! And how on Earth was I capable of having 5 years of no claims bonus if I’m only in this country for less than 3 years? 😛
The funny bit is that it seems the house has aged significantly since the last letter we’ve received (I think it wasn’t home insurance, it was about refurbs & home insulation) – we went from 1968 to 1955 in just a few weeks! 🙂
Still, I don’t know how Halifax got hold of my mailing address. But that’s fine – they make me laugh from time to time, no grudges held!
Getting back to it!
So yeah, I’m back to Canterbury after a much-needed holiday. Too be absolutely honest, it wasn’t much of a relaxing holiday (with teaching, half-marathons and stuff), but then again it was enough for me to wind down a bit in terms of my lab work (in essence I had a holiday from the lab!).
And now I’m back to “normality” – after more than two years in Canterbury (and over a year and a bit in my current place) I feel I’m already getting slightly rooted to this place, and being in Porto feels foreign, almost as if I’m just visiting from a tourist point of view!
Even though I have just arrived a couple of weeks ago, soon I’ll be off again – I managed to be able to attend a big international conference which is not in Porto (because I’ve done two of those already…). This time I’m off to Tucson, Arizona for Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science 2014, where I’ll be presenting some of the work published earlier in the year (and depending on the outcome of the post-deadline abstract we submitted earlier this week, perhaps even a bit more! But I’m not holding my hopes too high…).
It feels really exciting, as I’ve never been in the States before (actually I’ve never travelled outside Europe!), and this conference in particular seems to have people from virtually all over the world (I’ve been in touch with a few other participating students in order to arrange cheaper accommodation and they do come from basically everywhere, ranging from the United States themselves to the Far East!). And, unlike the two other international conferences I’ve participated so far (EWOFS back in 2010 and RIAO/OPTILAS last year) this time I’m actually giving a talk! Even though I’m quite accustomed to public speaking this is quite a daunting task, especially since there might be some top “celebrities” in our area of research in the room.
So yeah, it will be fun. And after the conference I’ll head to the Grand Canyon for a couple of days – very looking forward for the drive, even though it will be quite a long one (380 miles just from Tucson to Page, by the Glen Canyon Dam). Better get some appropriate soundtrack for it!
And on the meantime I’ve just been busying myself with more lab work (some exciting things and collaborations seem to be happening, with a lot of potential research avenues to explore! Although I will need to start forging a concise path soon, as I only have 1 year of PhD left…), teaching (can you believe that the undergrads are back already?? Soon there will be tonnes of marking as well… 🙁 ) and lots of rowing and running (the weather has been relatively kind to me, even though it got significantly colder over the previous weekend!). And I have to prepare Sao Silvestre – it is already in December and my goal for this year (which seems a bit too overly-ambitious) is to go under 40 minutes… (at least I need have a better time than my 43 minutes and something from last year!)
OK, I’m off! Catch up soon.
And… done!
Already completely recovered from this past Sunday, which is surprisingly good! (today I’m already going out for a “light” training session, just to get the blood flowing)
The race was great, weather-wise it was a bit dodgy at first with some thunderstorms and the skies blackening up but when the time came the weather actually cooperated! Only a little breeze and relatively cool temperatures (esp. when compared to last year, although it did not prevent me from having some fantastic tanlines – see below!). This year I did most of the 21.1k accompanied by one of my rowing buddies (he did push a bit further at the end) which helped keeping the pace constant. We were averaging about 4:27/km during the first half of the course, dropping slightly to 4:28/km in the end which enabled an overall time of 1h35m01s (656th out of about 4400: not bad!) – more than 12′ less than last year!
I’m very happy with this, although this now means that the stakes are now much higher for next year – I need to go under 1h30m! 🙂
Later on I’ll be having a very well-deserved francesinha with all the people that have trained with me. And this coming weekend we have our annual river descent, so I’m very looking forward to that too. And then… I say goodbye to Portugal, as I’m only back for Xmas (and S Silvestre… 🙂 ). Definitely a good send-off, and I am now fully energised for another term of research and teaching!
Next Sunday!
Porto half-marathon. All the trainings have been done, just have to retrieve my race numbers and relax… 🙂
Getting there!
Actively preparing for the Porto half-marathon which will take place in about a month’s time. My aim this year is to go under 1h40… we’ll see about that 🙂 😛
Plan for this evening…
Lovely little route, mostly traffic-free! Now don’t tell me I’m not good to you… 🙂
Vauxhall/Opel Corsa B heating control panel lights servicing
When I first got my car I was a bit surprised for not having any illumination of the heating controls, which can be a problem especially in the Winter, when the days are short and you need to use these controls a lot more!
Anyway, there is illumination indeed, the issue here is that the lighting is designed to stay on regardless of whatever setting you may have on your outside lights. Add to it incandescent bulbs and a horrible procedure to extract them from the panel (more on that later) and no wonder most old Corsas lying around have no functioning lights any more – the owners are coping with it the best way they know, either by turning on the courtesy light or simply by memorising the position of the controls.
Not for me, though! 🙂 – I hate knowing something could be working but it isn’t, but at the same time I hate forking out money on seemingly “little” things (and Vauxhall charges £50+ for the “privilege” of sorting these lights for you!). Hence, armed with some LEDs I got from eBay, my Haynes manual and a few more bits and pieces, I set on trying to sort this out.
Firstly, here is the part in question which holds the lights in place. It definitely doesn’t look familiar to anyone owning one of these cars, as it is buried deep into the fascia:
Or, as it sits in the fascia (I took the previous photo as I was testing the lights hooking the part to a 12 V DC power supply),
To access this holder all you have to do is follow the instructions from the Haynes manual: pushing the vents down to reveal the screws behind them, which will in turn release the multi-function display on top; and after removing the air recirculation switch and the knobs you can finally get to the lights.
Unfortunately there is something the Haynes manual misses – of these three bulbs only two of them are socketed, given that GM changed the design of this holder in ’97 and with that the central bulb became soldered inside the central switch (the one that controls the fan and the demister). Hence, I had to pry it open in order to get to the bulb,
thus separating it from the remaining bulbs, which sit on those two arms:
Given that I had intended to replace these lights with LEDs in order to avoid going through this procedure all over again in a year or two’s time, I had to be careful with the polarity. The pins on the back of the assembly are labelled as far as I remember, one of them having a plus sign, hence you can always test with a DC power supply before you take apart half of the car to replace the lights.
My advice – given that you will necessarily have to pry the fan/demister switch open to replace the light, get a used one off eBay or a scrapyard (they should be cheap…) and work on that one – in this way you can just replace the whole unit and be sure it effectively works correctly.
That’s it, folks! Hope you’ve enjoyed the tutorial, I felt I should do one as I kind of missed one when I attempted to do this myself (there were a few images in an enthusiast forum, but they have since been removed…). Any questions, please do ask!
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