Young Geotechnical Professionals Conference

Well, I'm back from the conference and have a few minutes now to make a bit of a post about it. I had a good time. I got to see a lot of interesting presentation about geotechnical practice in New Zealand and Australia. I also got received some interesting feed-back on my work. I've got some stuff to work on from those comments, but I think it will make my results more useful.

Anyways, here's a couple of pictures. I'm not that great a photographer, and I certainly don't even try at enough pictures most of the time. Wellington is hugely different from Auckland. The geography defines the shape of the city in a way that many from the Western US would understand. We were treated to 4 beautiful days and I count that as fortunate. I've heard that Wellington can be pretty nasty with wind and rain.

Laptop Death

My laptop died this weekend. Another dead hard disk. Somehow, I just seem to have terrible luck with these things. I'm trying to write my article for the Young Geotechnical Professionals Conferance, but the words just don't want to come today. My experiment is going well today though. There has been a definite peak in the strength curve, so that makes things pretty cool. Also, the bank actually found a way to make things more convenient for me, simply by changing what type of account I use for my savings.

New Visa

I've finally gotten my new student visa and permit. After several weeks of annoying set backs and spending about two hours waiting in line, I'm legal to be in NZ for another year. Now, I just have to jump through a few hoops to get Crystal's permit renewed and everything will be ducky. I still think the fees that are charged for this process are pretty exorbitant. $130 for mine and $280 for Crystal's. Assuming a billing rate of about $30 per hour, that would mean that someone is looking at my permit application for about 4 hours. Crystal's gets over 9 hours of inspection. Somehow, I really doubt this is actually the case. Besides that, if you apply from within the US, there is no fee. I would assume that there would be less of a fee when you are involved with the main branch rather than an international office. But since when has reason or logic ever permeated into any form of government, let alone immigration.

We are supplying to INZ a copy of our marriage certificate and proof of our address, which should be sufficient to prove both "living together" and "in a genuine partnership". I think what annoys me, is that in principal, my permit is easier to get than Crystal's, when I think that the opposite should be the case. I.E, I feel that once I have proven myself here for legitimate reasons, Crystal should pretty much just be allowed to be here. After all, that's what the law states. Partners (not necessarily spouses) are guaranteed a work permit for the period of the main applicants student permit. After my experiences last year, I've decided that INZ requires an annoying amount of proving of a partnership, especially when marriage is not enough to satisfy them.

In any case, I no longer feel nervous about not having my passport in my possession. Since it is the only ID that I have that everyone in NZ will accept for everything (especially the procurement of alcohol) I don't like being without it.

Anyway, study is still going well. I have an abstract and article due at the end of this week, though I am primarily waiting for feedback from Colin before I send them off. In fact, I'm just waiting for a final ok from John before I send the abstract off. I think it all looks pretty good and am excited at the prospect of presenting at these conferences. Crystal wants to come along to the one in Egypt, and I can't blame her for that.

Plane tickets

Well, I've been bad about updating for the last few weeks. Christmas is over, and life is pretty much back to routine for both Crystal and me.

We are however, finally seriously looking at purchasing plane tickets for a trip home. The plan is to spend three weeks at the end of May back home. We are just organizing to make sure that we have all the money stuff figured out.

I've been doing a lot of field and lab work lately, and I'll be in the field again next week. I'm also getting a short article ready for a conference in September. Thankfully, this conference is in Auckland so that I won't have to do any sort of travel to go there.

Ready for the Conference

I don't think that I have posted this at any point, but I'm getting ready to go to a conference in Australia starting this Sunday. I've got everything set up finally, including airfare, hotel, and transport to and from the airport. I'll try to post a few comments while I'm there, but I'm not sure how internet access will be, and I'm not sure how busy that I will be.

I've got a new office finally. I've been moved to a new office with two other PhD students. I like it a whole lot. I have a computer in the office even. So things are a lot nicer than in my old office.

Things are generally looking good now. I have my last day of tutoring for the semester tomorrow, then I'll just have about 40 webpage assignments to grade and will then be completely free to continue my research.