I don't know how many of you noticed but I'm trying to post more regularly after my slackness period over the summer (winter if you are in Oz). My posting dropped off a bit last week though due to my completely hectic schedule.
Among other things, we finally managed to get out our registration announcement for IQING 5. This involved getting a real website up and running, though this was made significantly easier than it could have been because iWeb is so damned easy to use.
One of the big "other things" that I did last week was to start applying for a postdocs. Some of you may have seen Dave (aka The Quantum Pontiff's) advertisement for the Santa Fe Institute's postdoc fellowships? I applied for one of those. The Santa Fe Institute is a cross disciplinary privately run institute that encourages people to work across multiple fields. Their working style appeals to me a lot, as do the areas of research in which they are specialized. In order to apply for that position I had to write a new personal research statement, something I hadn't done in over two years. Needless to say, it was difficult to write. Maybe I'll post in the future a bit about what was contained in it.
Well, that was last week. This week I'm visiting Frank Verstraete's group (which at the moment is pretty much Frank) in Vienna. I'm giving a talk there on Thursday that I should be writing now. This visit should be fun, I've only been to Vienna twice before. The first time was just to get a connecting flight (so it doesn't count really). The second time was for a frisbee tournament, which also doesn't really count because I didn't see anything other than frisbee fields and the inside of a restaurant for two days.
Oh, and the other cool thing is that I'm writing this all on the train on the way to Vienna. They have powerpoints in this train so you can plug in your laptop, I think that's very cool. I should get a lot of work done on this trip if I can only find a decent caffeine source on the train...
