A news item that recently caught my eye involved the issue of exploding German toads. As the famed Dave Barry used to say, “I am not making this up”. Now, being a Queenslander — especially one who did some (physical) growing up in a rural environment — I am not unfamiliar with the ways in which a toad may die, but this is something even my country mates were unable to pull off.

Update: The always Extremely Useful Wikipedia now has an article on the toads.

Since we’ve had such fun doing this blog, we thought it would be a good idea to write up a few significant events that happened prior to starting the blog. I’ve already posted a couple (PhD graduation and Karneval!) but others will also include happenings during our brief transit time in Brisbane (Christmas 04 to early Feb 05) before we moved to Germany.

Update 14 April: Mara has just posted about our trip to Dreamworld.

The website hosting this blog allows you to set the time and date of the post and so we will date the entries around the time they occured, so it should appear chronological and seamless. Thus if you can’t seem to get enough of what we have been doing, feel free to check back in the archives!

Unfortunately, backposts do not appear in the Atom newsfeed for the blog. If you aren’t clear on what an Atom newsfeed is (correct answer is: alternate format to RSS) look here (if you don’t know what RSS is, look here). The Atom article also includes links to some newsreader software but doesn’t include Mozilla Thunderbird which I use and which handles both RSS and Atom feeds. There is even a Windows version!

I find RSS and Atom very convenient for getting a nice sampling of news items from sources and on subjects I prefer. The ABC does them, as does Slashdot and a host of others. The link for the feed of this blog is found on the left under Links or just put this URI http://fentonetal.blogspot.com/atom.xml into your newsreader. Anyway, here endth the lesson.

One of my favourite quotes regarding the internet is

We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
— Robert Wilensky, 1996

(As a sideline, the “infinite monkey theorem” makes some interesting reading, though, of course, for us experimentalists there are the required experiments. Those preferring a more cerebral debate may wish to look nutters.org or in Wikipedia.)

Let me get to the point of this post which is to state the bleeding obvious. There are some very strange things found through the Internet. For instance, what to do if you have a dog which you must exercise, must have control over while doing so and have to get somewhere but decline to use your own power? The obvious — but to me, oddly uncomfortable — answer is to invent The Dog Powered Scooter And the strange thing is, I cannot exactly say why I both want to giggle and scowl disapprovingly at the same time, though I do like the double-dog version. I can say that it almost seems the perfect invention for the many people around here who exercise their dog whilst seated on their bicycle.

After some long-winded discussions with one of my brothers (Jonathan. Well, OK, one email but he was enthusiastic — “I think blogging is a great idea!”), I thought it would be worthwhile to start a weblog. Since there are so many nice people who are interested in how myself and the family (hence the “et al.”) are faring, the idea is to create a central location where they can satisfy their morbid curiosity without the need for many and diverse emails on our part. Apologies for the lack of personalisation, though feel free to comment on the proceedings.

Though the blog bears my name, all immediate family members (who can read and write) are members and (hopefully) should contribute. I expect that the number and diversity of posts will increase once we finally have a full-time internet connection at home. Until then, you’ll just have to make do.

For starters though, I came across this interesting/bizarre article about a future tourist named John Titor. Go Science!

I thought that if George Lucas can do it, then I could write a couple of prequels too (you may recall this blog actually started on the 11 Mar 05). So here is a prequel post regarding my PhD graduation which I was a bit busy at the time to write up. In brief:

• Graudated at the morning ceremony on Thursday 16 December 2004.
• Gaynor and my parents (who kindly flew down from Brisbane) were in attendance.
• Thesis title is Tomographic Visible Spectroscopy of Plasma Emissivity and Ion Temperatures and though it is not read out at the ceremony (as has been the case for some other graduations I have been to at other universities) it was printed in the program.



Getting ‘hooded’ at the ceremony …

• Had time for a couple of quick photographs before Gaynor and my parents had to rush off. We were quite busy that day!
• I toddled (or rather strode purposefully) across campus to the annual departmental Christmas party/lunch. I was definitely (mock-) surprised to find out that formal academic attire wasn’t required!

A couple more quick photos:

What?! It isn’t formal attire??

The Formal Pose in the Garden