A collection of desks
A collection of desks
I spent half a year doing crystallography at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. I had a great time there. Not just working at the lab but also in my first real apartment. It was situated in North Melbourne, at walking distance from the lab. Going to the city centre was just a convenient tram ride away and still the neighbourhood was very quiet.
The apartment was fully furbished; it had almost everything one could wish for: washer, dryer, fully equipped kitchen, TV, DVD, video, and stereo. Unfortunately it lacked a proper desk. That is why you see my laptop on that small table. I spent many hours kneeling in front of it, playing computer games. The TV shows a program called Sunrise
that was the breakfast television show that got me up in the morning.
A few detail on the picture: I often bought pizzas at Pizza Hut, hence the boxes. The DVDs you see are all Anime: Cowboy Bebop (spent a lot of quality time with friends watching it), Serial experiments Lain, and Akira. My place, like many houses in Melbourne, didn't have central heating (or insulation for that matter). The radiator was the only thing that kept me warm during the winter.
This was my desk at WEHI. It was in a dark (but nicely quiet) corner of the lab, next to the crystal room. It had brilliant air conditioning. Some may even say a bit too good: it was a bit cold in there, even by my standards.
It wasn't all work and no play at my desk: I started my on-line diary there. Near the end of my internship, I even started working on the first version of my IBO2004 website. I didn't have an internet connection at home so I had to do all the remote administration of my computer back in Nijmegen from the lab. It wasn't ideal but it worked quite well.
See the wireless mouse on my desk? It caused a lot of trouble when some guy in the lab under mine also got a wireless mouse. It turned out that the radio signal can pass through floors and interfere with other people's equipment.
Another picture of my desk at WEHI, this time featuring yours truly. You can see my laptop again, although it is mostly obscured by my shoulder. That is quite remarkable because I didn't bring it to the lab that often. The reason was simple: we were not allowed to hook it to the network with giving up administrative rights to our own computer. How unlikely is that? I allow nobody to screw around with my computers unless I can trust them. Very few people have reached that point.
Not being able to connect to the network meant having to burn a lot of CD-RWs. It was very annoying some times but it was worth the annoyance.