I was the official photographer of the night, so the rest of the pictures can be found in a set on Flickr. I have made some nice portraits. And that is not only my opinion. Some of my colleagues have set their portrait as their Facebook profile picture afterwards :)
I have submitted my second paper (Yeah!), I am getting good on my bike again (finally my heart rate at a given power output is almost back down to the level where it was at the end of the last season), the new (Kepler) data I will work on seems quite interesting (and I am not getting excited that easily), my talk for this Thursday is ready (and I will give the same talk in May on a conference, so no stressing in the last minute to produce results), I am almost finished with the resubmission of my Kepler GO Proposal (and it is so much easier now that I know how to use the submission system and that I can work with a once already selected proposal), and my pancakes are delicious. I feel quite motivated! (And I have a beard :D)
Last week I finished working on my co-authors’ comments, so if my supervisor agrees with everything, then I can submit to the journal when I get her comments back. Joy. On Sunday some of us visited Antwerp, and I have to admit that I start to like this city. Now that I know where the real hidden secrets are, and I am not shocked anymore by the shopping street, it is getting much much better. And to make things better it was the day of the city’s New Year’s Reception, so we got free fries and beer on the main square. (It was a huge success, 15000 people attended!) As the main even of the day we visited the new MAS museum (I have been on the top already last year with Elise, but we did not visit the exhibitions).
And this was free too (as I have not only a student, but a personnel card from the KU Leuven too, and the museum is free for ‘teachers’). I really liked the MAS, both the collection and the way the pieces were presented. We spent almost three hours in there, and left just in time to catch the Moon rising over the port. Then we finished with a nice dinner in a nearby restaurant, situated in an old warehouse, or something like that…
I did some training also on the weekend (indoors, of course), and then the first interval training of this year on Monday after work (just before we went out for dinner to a not-that-special-looking-but-delicious Mexican place). I hope spring will come early and I will have lots of cycling this year! The goal is set :)
This time – instead of my traditional summary (read them here: 2008, 2009, 2010) – I will pick out the 10 most memorable things from all the things I have done last year. A bit of extra information behind every entry will help to make it into a nice story.
Making this selection was way more difficult than I expected it to be, so I feel happy about the year. And I did not even mention the great photo-excursions with Elise, the experience I gained in electric assembly, wall painting, and terrace constructions while helping Tijl at his (now almost finished) house, the memories of several exceptional rides alone or with members of the newly formed AstroTeam, my surprise visit to Hungary, finishing the 2010-2011 season with a bronze medal in the Adults’ 1st Division of the Belgian Floorball League (and then quitting floorball…), getting a MacBook Air, etc. So yes, this was a good year. The only thing I still kinda miss is a girlfriend…
But not the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ;) Anyway, I always publish in Astronomy and Astrophysics… Sorry for the bad astronomical joke… (If you can call this a joke…) But as I had no posts recently on the blog, I have to admit there is no better title for this entry. And this might get more and more common in the future, as my motivation for blogging is lower and lower these days.
Starting with a reference to A&A was not completely accidental, as I spent November and the beginning of December working hard to finish my second first-author paper, which I will submit to the mentioned journal in January. I spent several evenings at the Institute to meet my internal deadlines, but it was not that difficult (the stress is on the relative difficulty, I am not complaining that I had not enough pressure or tasks to deal with), as November is the low season in cycling (which means that I basically did not ride at all), so I had nothing else to do. Now the paper is basically 99% finished, and my supervisors – and me too – are very happy with the work I have done. We still need to wait for the final comments from the rest of my co-authors (I have already received two very positive ones with only minor comments to consider), but then it should not take more than a week of work before I can really submit after the Holidays. So I expect to have a second paper by the time I turn 27. Damn, I am getting old…
No matter how much work I have, I do not work on the weekends, this is one of my principles. This way I could join my friends to Bredene (where we played board games, had a great walk along the nice coast of Belgium across high grass and sand dunes in the wind – unluckily I expected crappy weather so I had only my phone with me to take pictures with, instead of my DSLR -, and we went to the concert of the Symfonisch Orkest van de Vrije Universiteit Brussel in which Ilse plays the French horn), help Tijl in building his terrace, play FIFA12 online (sometimes I rock, sometimes I suck, it really depends on how much I can concentrate, so now I do not play it anymore after midnight), and watch Rules of Engagement (thanks to Clio’s suggestion), which is really great (and especially Season 5 is hilarious).
After I was done with the paper, I had time to do other things too. First of all I took part in our programming battle at work (no results yet – update from January, 2012: I won 2 out of the 4 categories, the precision, and the length (so the shortness) -, but it was a nice task to solve, and I did it using python of course), then – maybe I had a bit too much time in my hands – I have written a small code to do N-body simulations in 3D. It was something I always wanted to try, and it was even useful, because I finally managed to figure out how to do 3D plotting in python, and how to do numerical integration using different methods. So it was not a waste of time at the end. (See video and description on Youtube.)
In December I restarted training on the indoor trainer (this is already the beginning of the next cycling season), and the AstroTeam went to the Velodrome in Gent again, now in our custom cycling kit, as a real team. I was a bit annoyed by the fact that I had forgotten my helmet at home, so I had to rent a crappy one, but besides this small mishappening, it was a great evening. I did three twenty minute sessions, and in the last one (which was the best of all) while I was riding with a fast group (at approximately 40-45 km/h), high, near the top of the curve, the guy in front of me crashed (after touching the rear wheel of the biker in front of him), and although I had already accepted the seemingly inevitable, that I would unavoidably crash into him or his bike turned across the slope in front of me, I passed him by centimetres as he slipped down the steep banks quick enough… I was a little bit shocked. I have never been this close to a real, classical bike crash. It was really something you normally see on the TV.
Now I am back in Hungary for the holidays, so I might have time to write about other (hopefully more interesting) things during these two weeks.