I'm at a conference :D
Adventures in Sydney!
This morning, I bid my wonderful lizard farewell (having ensured he had a week's supply of Mealworms and lettuce good to go), hopped on a coach and made it allll the way to Sydney without being ill. I'd like to say yay for willpower, but I really should say yay for travel sickness pills, copious amounts of lemonade, and an audio book so I wasn't tempted into the nausea-inducing passtime of reading.
Things went smoothly, despite my need to frequently stop and frown at a map, and lo, I was checked in to my accommodation (a modest but clean little room) with plenty of time find my way to the ACSPRI 8th International Conference on Social Science Methodology registration. I stopped on the way there to enjoy the pretty park, and took a few photos, including...
Anyhoo, the conference officially starts tomorrow, but they had workshops this afternoon. I squished in some networking (read: barging up to innocent academics, striking up a conversation, and thrusting my research business cards at them) before going to Assessing the Quality of Survey Data presented by Joerg Blasius. He had some very inspiring ideas about uses for PCA, categorical PCA, and multiple correspondence analysis, and I look forward to exploring the ca package in R to impliment his suggestions on a secondary dataset I hope to analyse later this month.
Night was just falling as the workshop finished, and I decided to bipass the conference “welcome cocktails” and instead go in search of food. Being me, I managed to get rather impressively lost, and distracted by the prettiness of the Sydney University campus at night.
Eventually, I ended up wandering around in the dark for quite a while before stumbling across a nice lady (who was a football coach who had just finished “icing her team”, literally applying ice to various muscles post-exercise). She pointed me to one of the busy roads bordering the campus, and after a considerable meander eventually I managed to grab myself a none-too-sumptuous meal of takeaway chicken nuggets, which I munched through as I skittered back to where I hoped the accommodation was (which it was, phew).
The internet here is serviceable enough for basic online browsing, but cannot cope with things like loading YouTube videos in more than frustrating stutters, FTP uploads, or multiplayer games on Steam. So, having spent my early evening cleaning out the backlog of DeviantART messages, emails, I've decided to get back into playing Terraria. Last time I got a number of windfalls from Snarfie, who had a much more advanced character than I, leaving Aargn (my player character) hilariously overpowered for such an early stage in the game. So, this week, I'm starting a new world and playing as Little Aargn, living his adventures before his wings grew and his teeth could easily gnaw through metal, lovingly rendered here using the complimentary stationary offered by the conference.
This morning, I bid my wonderful lizard farewell (having ensured he had a week's supply of Mealworms and lettuce good to go), hopped on a coach and made it allll the way to Sydney without being ill. I'd like to say yay for willpower, but I really should say yay for travel sickness pills, copious amounts of lemonade, and an audio book so I wasn't tempted into the nausea-inducing passtime of reading.
Things went smoothly, despite my need to frequently stop and frown at a map, and lo, I was checked in to my accommodation (a modest but clean little room) with plenty of time find my way to the ACSPRI 8th International Conference on Social Science Methodology registration. I stopped on the way there to enjoy the pretty park, and took a few photos, including...
Anyhoo, the conference officially starts tomorrow, but they had workshops this afternoon. I squished in some networking (read: barging up to innocent academics, striking up a conversation, and thrusting my research business cards at them) before going to Assessing the Quality of Survey Data presented by Joerg Blasius. He had some very inspiring ideas about uses for PCA, categorical PCA, and multiple correspondence analysis, and I look forward to exploring the ca package in R to impliment his suggestions on a secondary dataset I hope to analyse later this month.
Night was just falling as the workshop finished, and I decided to bipass the conference “welcome cocktails” and instead go in search of food. Being me, I managed to get rather impressively lost, and distracted by the prettiness of the Sydney University campus at night.
Eventually, I ended up wandering around in the dark for quite a while before stumbling across a nice lady (who was a football coach who had just finished “icing her team”, literally applying ice to various muscles post-exercise). She pointed me to one of the busy roads bordering the campus, and after a considerable meander eventually I managed to grab myself a none-too-sumptuous meal of takeaway chicken nuggets, which I munched through as I skittered back to where I hoped the accommodation was (which it was, phew).
The internet here is serviceable enough for basic online browsing, but cannot cope with things like loading YouTube videos in more than frustrating stutters, FTP uploads, or multiplayer games on Steam. So, having spent my early evening cleaning out the backlog of DeviantART messages, emails, I've decided to get back into playing Terraria. Last time I got a number of windfalls from Snarfie, who had a much more advanced character than I, leaving Aargn (my player character) hilariously overpowered for such an early stage in the game. So, this week, I'm starting a new world and playing as Little Aargn, living his adventures before his wings grew and his teeth could easily gnaw through metal, lovingly rendered here using the complimentary stationary offered by the conference.