Drongos

Tuesday evening, I had dinner and then went out with Adam to play some basketball. We got to the court around 9pm and there was barely anyone there. It was kinda chilly which most Australians think is freezing so I think that was the reason. Adam and I just shot around and played some one on one for a while. It was kinda lackluster and wasn't all that fun. I miss playing on a real court with a real hoop with a real net and basketball. The concrete court with the drains really gives your legs a pounding and after an hour running around on it my shins were hurting. Afterwards I went back, showered, and just relaxed for a little while before going to bed.

Wednesday morning, I went to work and spent the morning talking to volunteers and trying to finish up the phone survey which at the start of the day had 18 people left. I was able to do four surveys by lunch time and schedule six more for after lunch. I had spinach and feta canneloni for lunch which was really good. After lunch I started working on the survey again. I got through two more surveys and then James called and said that he had heard that the online survey was done and he wanted the data seperated by region to show to the regional managers. This is very easy in excel however in a nice format that is easily understandable for someone who doesn't regularly use excel isn't nearly as easy. I used surveymonkey to seperate the survey data by region. This wasn't so easy because I had to create 20 seperate reports along with 20 different filters for the data. The filters were very frustrating because it took some work in order to get them to filter what I wanted to. For example, I would ask the filter to filter out region 4 and it would filter out region 4, 14, and 24. I had to go back and change a lot of the responses and type out fourteen and twenty four and so on for all the numbers so the single numbers filter out correctly. That along with creating links for each of the regions accessible by the regional managers took me the rest of the day. I actually ended up staying late so I could finish it up. James needed region 13 by the next morning so I had to get it done.

I left work around 5:45pm and I got back home at 7:00pm. I had a meeting with my advisers at 7:30pm and it was the same old story so I won't bore you with the details. After the meeting, I had spaghetti for dinner which was boring. After dinner I just relaxed and watched Anger Management with the guys in my room and some of the girls. I also called Pratt and was able to talk to the woman who had contacted me before about applying. Wasn't much help though. She said that hiring will be going on for the next few weeks and that I'll probably hear from someone soon. After the other girls left Katie stayed for another hour and then left. Not even a half an hour later, she called up and came back down. Apparently some of the guys on her floor were "loud" and she couldn't sleep. So of course she slept in our room again. I woke up this morning and headed into work. I ended up riding the tram with Lemone and Salazar by coincidence because they were going to the CFA for our meeting this morning. Being stuck in a tram with them for an hour = hell.

Lamb-Brained Temps

Last night when I got home I had some awesome sundried tomato and chicken pasta for dinner. After that, I went upstairs with John, Tyler and the other guys and watched V for Vendetta. Afterwards we chilled out and shared a nice cigar that we had all pitched in on out on the porch while we enjoyed the view from the 15th floor. Steve left early to go have his phone interview with Pratt and Whitney. I got back to my room around 12:30am and asked Steve about his interview. He said this year all the internships are being hired by the seperate departments and the one he talked to was apparently one of the first to start contacting people. The guy he talked to said he started early because he wanted his choice of the best applicants. This was really encouraging for me because it means I still have time to be contacted. Also, Steve's resume is nearly identical to mine. His GPA is .04 higher and he does swimming; those are about the only advantages he has on me. So I figure someone will at least consider me for an interview. Well I'm holding out, hopefully something will come along. I do not want to work at Indian Rock again. Anyways, after talking to Steve I went to bed.

This morning I woke and went in to work. Back to the 9am-5pm schedule. In the morning I closed the online survey and worked with the Firefly and Brigades Online people to deactivate links and archive the articles. I updated the online survey spreadsheet for the last time, made a summary using surveymonkey, and exported it to PDF for easy printing. I also used the random number generator to draw the name for the 100$ gift certificate to the CFA Shop, very exciting. I went to lunch after that and had some sort of chicken with capers and scalloped potatoes which was really good. I spent the rest of the day working on the phone survey because I had noticed that the totals were wrong and when I compared what we had on surveymonkey and the spreadsheet I found that we were missing 11 data points. So I made a pivot chart to figure out what demographics they were missing from and to my shock I found that almost 40 data points were either missing or misplaced from their proper demographics. I pretty much totally blame the temps because John typed in caps and Allison put zeros before single digit numbers. It was pretty simple to see who screwed up and they made the large majority of the mistakes. It took me forever to figure out which data points when where. I had to use all the demographics to figure out which one was wrong and had placed the data point in the wrong place. I was able to sort it out in about 5 hours and I was left with the original 11 data points that were just outright missing. I replaced them with new candidates using my random selection process and then headed home at 6pm. Once again the temps wasted my time and I spent another half a day fixing the mistake. I'm not very happy about it. I need to go play some basketball or something and blow off some steam tonight. I'm also going to be calling Pratt tonight, hopefully someone answers this time.

Push Bike

On Friday, I ducked out of work early to go play some footy with everyone in a park near the apartments. We played for about an hour and I was absolutely exhausted. It was probably a really bad idea for me to play. I couldn't breathe very well because I was sick. I couldn't run for more than 10 minutes with out being entirely out of breath and almost dead. By the end of the game I was very dizzy and I didn't feel well at all. When I got back, I showered and went to talk to my advisers about seeing a doctor the next day. They gave me a couple places to call. They were all closed and I didn't want to go to the hospital so I just decided to stay in for the night and get some rest. I watched TV while everyone went out and I went to bed early.

I woke up the next morning feeling much the same as the previous night. After I ate some breakfast and took a shower I actually felt much better. I still didn't feel great so I called the clinics and discovered that they were booked for the weekend. I didn't want to go to the hospital and I was feeling a little bit better so I decided to wait it out and see how I felt on Monday. Putnam and I spent the day at an anti-scientology protest just for fun. Putnam had been to the previous one and said it was fun so I decided to see what it was all about. We wore masks and handed out flyers that other people printed out. We talked to other protesters and spent most of the day doing that. After the protest, we went with some of the protesters to a pub and had a couple drinks. Then we went one of the protester's house and hung out for a while. It was cool to hang out with people our age for once. We met some interesting people for sure. At around 10 we decided to head back into the city and meet up with the other guys to go to a club. We barely missed the tram and were dismayed when we saw that the next one wasn't for another 30 minutes. Two girls with bikes walked up to us and asked us for directions. We had no idea where we were and told them we weren't from around here. One of the girls introduced herself as Tommy and asked if we were American. When we said yes she said that she had a friend studying in New York. She said that she and her German friend were going to her friend's birthday party and asked us if we wanted to come. Not wanting to wait for the tram, we said why not. She got a call from her friend who gave her rough directions to the house. She still didn't know where it was so she asked if one of us wanted to ride the other bike with her and find the place. So I decided to take the bike with Tommy to find the place and Putnam decided to walk with the German girl. After about a 2k ride on a bike that was older than me, we found the place. Tommy stayed and I took the bike to lead Putnam and the German girl back to the apartment. The whole ordeal was pretty fun. It was Tommy's friend's 20th birthday. They were all our age and went to the same university. They were very friendly and just real people. It was refreshing to hang out and chill in a home environment with normal people our age. After about an hour the group decided to head into the city to find a club. Chris and I had to go into the city to get back home anyways so we decided to join them. The group took three cabs into the city. The club was exactly what we had been looking for our entire time in Melbourne. It had good music, people our age, it was packed and had cheap drinks. The people in our group paid for the cab, my cover, and my drinks. They were pretty much the nicest people I'd ever met. Tommy was all over Putnam and he wasn't liking it so he left early and went back to the apartment about an hour before I did. At about 3am we left the club and everyone wanted to go to another bar. I told them it was getting late and I would head back to my apartment. I said goodbye and thank you to everyone and walked in the direction they pointed me. After about a block, I knew exactly where I was. Surprisingly, the club was only about a half mile from our apartment. When I got back Steve and Zan were still up and we talked about our nights and then headed to bed around 4am.

We all slept in Sunday till about noon. We went down to the market to buy groceries for the week and then spent the day relaxing and doing work our projects. We had some burgers for dinner and everyone went to bed early in preparation for the work week. By this point, I felt much better compared to Friday and I was sure it was just a cold that had gotten out of hand. I decided to not waste the time or money going to a doctor.

Monday morning I woke up feeling refreshed. My sore throat was gone and my cough was barely still there however I was still congested. It seems like my cold is slowly going away. I spent the day working with my spreadsheets and calling people. By the end of the day we had less than 10 people left to call in the phone survey and over 370 responses to the online survey. It seems we will complete the survey by our goal, which was Wednesday. Today was John's last day as well. We thanked him for his help and headed home at 8pm. We'll spend almost the rest of the project analyzing the data and writing our report. I hope to be booking all tours and flights for after the project with in the next couple of days. It's also time to get souveniours so if you think you'll get one let me know what you want.

Sickie

So yesterday was pretty miserable. I was sick as balls the entire day. I did the usual in work and was able to make it through the day without dying. The entire way home I was dreading our meeting with our advisers and decided to play "I'm sick so lets move it along" card. We got back and I tried looking as sick as possible for our meeting, which wasn't that hard. Our advisers said exactly what I thought they were going to say about our paper. Of course they're also things that can't be fixed until we complete the survey. So what's the use in talking about them? I have no idea. Conversation was slow and uninspiring, at one point Lemone said "Oh I'm usually braindead by this time at night." and all I was thinking was "Lady, that has nothing to do with the time." Finally after some coughing fits they showed some mercy and let us leave.

I went to global gossip afterwords and made a last ditch attempt at getting an internship. Luckily, I found out that Pratt & Whitney is still in the process of choosing interns and hasn't made any of its selections known yet. We'll see I guess. I also updated the spreadsheet while I was there so I wouldn't have to do it in work. The rest of the night I relaxed and tried not to die as I watch some awful Law and Order: SVU. I went to bed and woke up around 10am the next day to get ready for work.

I still felt really sick when I woke up this morning. I got ready though and headed for work. Luckily for me a tram broke down on the tracks in front of us and I was stuck for an hour while they got another tram to tow it away. So I got to work an hour late and immeadiately found out that Allison had screwed up again and called several regions without marking them and now we were getting angry responses. At this point we had probably 90 surveys left to conduct. I decided that I would dumb down my spreadsheet and put it online so I could supervise Allison's activities. She's dumb as a rock, her resume is false, she has the attention span of a puppy. If I had hired her, I would have ripped her a new one. Under the new system she knew she was being watched so she actually made phone calls and actually marked the sheet. It was a pain for me to update the master spreadsheet based on the online one but as the number of candidates left went down the easier it was. Allison left early because of her dumb kid, who I'm sure is a great addition to the world gene pool. Under the new system we completed 33 phone surveys during the course of the day. Even though Allison left halfway through the day, this was the most was had ever completed during one day by a margin of 7 surveys. So it was a productive day. We only have 65 surveys remaining to complete. Max and I decided that tomorrow will be Allison's last day and that we will keep John on until we finish the survey. That made my day. Plus for the first time in days I can breathe in without coughing up a lung. I think I might be getting better, which is good because I dunno how much more I could take.

Thanks for all the comments, I'll be sure to take the advise about the pictures. I hope you all enjoyed the survey, Steve definately had the best answers. Steve what's this about you working in New York all summer? Who's gonna help me make fun of Ben all summer? Who am I supposed to hang out with? Ryan!?!? Well, I will be turning 21 soon. I guess Mike and I will have to hang out more. Any ideas of what I can bring back for our basement aquarium/petting zoo/my mom's nightmare?

Chemist

Yesterday, I brought in some chili from the night before to have for lunch which I ate around 12:30, pretty much when I got there. I spent the first half of the day updating spreadsheets, calling Captains, and fixing stupid Allison's mistakes. To hold me over until dinner I went and got some sushi again, salmon and avocado this time. I spent the rest of the day replacing sample subjects who were no longer in the CFA, had moved, etc. and calling more Captains. I had pretty good success calling Captains as I think there were less than 10 left that we had been unable to reach. We hit the halfway mark about halfway through the day for the phone survey. Hopefully working after hours more will allow us to pick up our rate of surveys completed per day. Throughout the day, I got progressively sicker and sitting in the chair all day definately did not help my back. By the end of the day, I was pretty miserable. I slept on the tram ride home. I got home at 9pm and ate some stir fry. I really wasn't that hungry because I didn't feel good so I packed it up for lunch the next day. I layed on the couch the rest of the night trying not to die coughing. I went to bed around midnight.

The next day, I woke up sick as ever. I woke up at 8:30am because we were going to work 10am-6pm today because we have a meeting with our advisers at 7:30pm. I was moving pretty slow but I knew I had to go into work because no one else knows how to work the spreadsheets. I decided I'd go in late and to fight this sickness and kill it with fire. I walked down to the chemist to get some ammo. That's what they call a pharmacy here, a chemist. The chemist was really nice and hooked me up with the Australian version of Dayquil and some potent cough drops. After that I went next door to the Aldi's and picked up a Power-C vitamin water. I'm not messing around. I took them one after the other and headed into work. Hopefully I can make it through the day and my cold/flu whatever passes before the weekend.

Aerial Ping Pong

So during lunch time, I went to K Mart (yes they have them here) and I bought some cheap athletic pants and some other things I've been meaning to get. Spent the whole day calling people and updating spreadsheets again. At 4pm about a dozen of us met in the field behind the CFA and played some footy. Footy is ok to watch but it's really fun to play. It's sorta like soccer but you can use your hands and still hit people. I was pretty good at it compared to the others because I used to play soccer and I could place the ball reasonably well. We played for three and a half hours and we were all dirty and bruised by the end of it but it was a great time.

Friday night we decided to check out a place that Professor Barnett had told us about. It was called Frostbite and it was supposedly a place where there were cheap drinks and people our age. It was in St. Kilda, on Chapel Street. We had bad luck there before but Professor Barnett had been coming to Melbourne for years. When we got to Chapel Street we asked for directions and started walking. Putnam was tired and just being a general pansy. Zan wasn't helping either as he was just complaining and whining the entire time. After walking down Chapel Street for about 20 minutes we found the place. It was boarded up with trash bags over the windows. It was closed for redevelopment. This was just our luck. Putnam and Zan wanted to go back into the city and they were dragging the some of the expedition with them. Steve, Katie, Cara, Tyler and I decided to find a place we had heard about called Revellers. We found it and went inside without telling Putnam, Zan or the rest of the quitters. It was a very small place but it was packed and had live music. The drinks were prohibitably expensive, we stuck to the cheapest drink there, five dollar shots of cheap vodka. We didn't have many because they were so expensive. We hung out and listened to the music for a couple hours and then we took a van cab home.

On Saturday, We went to the market and spent the morning looking at souveniors. I never really buy anything cause I'm waiting for like the last weekend because I'll prolly lose everything if I buy it now. It's fun to walk around the market though and see what's going on. After the market, we relaxed for a while in the room. Steve and Putnam went to the library and I decided to take a nap. I woke up around 5pm and I got ready for Barnett's party that he was having at a bar somewhere. It was with all of his old colleages and our advisors. He invited the Theta Chi guys as well. Putnam and I decided to go because the price for food and drinks was definately right, free, and as Barnett put it, you might see your advisers drunk and then you'd have a story to tell. The party was at 7pm and Putnam and I got there at 7:30pm. There was some pretty good asian finger food even though I had no idea what it was. Free drinks are good drinks and the footy game was on so we had something to do. Most of the people there knew quite a bit about Barnett and WPI, though most of them were Australian, so we had something to talk about besides the usual cultural differences and sports. Of course we did talk sports as well because a visibly drunk Salazar wanted to talk baseball. Salazar is much much cooler when he's drunk. He's actually a pretty big Yankees fan. Lemone was her usual annoying, dumb self. At one point I remember her saying "My social life is not that good, so this is fun" and I almost laughed right in her face. Hmmm, I wonder why that is. Most of Barnett's friends were really cool. Almost all of them had something to do with the fire protection field so they were all reasonably intelligent, which was quite refreshing after the work week I had. We watched the game and talked until about quarter of ten and then Putnam and I headed out to meet up with the rest of the guys. Steve had picked out a bar he found online that said it was the number one bar for people 18-25 years of age. Putnam and I get less than two blocks away when we get a phone call from Steve telling us NOT to go in. We get to the entrance and there is Steve and the rest of the group looking like they had just seen a ghost. Apparently the place was a gay bar and they had all paid the cover and gone in. Oh man, Steve is NEVER going to hear the end of this. We decided from to hit up CQ again as it was maybe a block away. When we got there we found out it was a members only night. Foiled again, we went to the Joint. We had a couple of beers and eventually found our way to the dance floor. It was packed and it was pretty fun. The rest of guys made fun of Murdy and John the entire time because Murdy dances like a caveman and John dances like a hippie on drugs. During one of last songs we were dancing to, a midget walked up to Cara and sorta pointed and nodded at her; and then he flashed her his nipple and walked away. It was really funny and we laughed about it pretty much the entire way home. When we got back, we watched a movie while Cara and Steve had a shaving cream fight.

We woke up on Sunday and went to the market to buy food for the week. You get the best deals on Sunday because on Monday the market is closed. After the market, we went to the cricket grounds to see another footy game. We found out that if you buy tickets at the stadium, you can get them for only 20$. I've decided to barrack for the Essenden Bombers. It means to support a team. You can't say you root for a team here because it means something entirely different which I'll leave to you guys to figure out. The game was a rivalry, Collingwood Magpies vs. Richmond Tigers. It was a great atmosphere with about 70,000 people in attendance. The game was a blowout by Collingwood. We went back to the apartment around 5pm and I spent most of the night flat on my back. Between being really sore from footy, watching the footy game, and riding the tram my back had just about had it. I could barely walk without being in pain. I'm pretty sure I strained a muscle just like I did in high school playing soccer. It hurt pretty bad but I was still able to do work on my laptop and I had a lot of time to rest as I'm working from 12pm-8pm this week because reaching volunteers during work hours is tough. I went to sleep after I was done typing my paper, around 1am.

Monday morning, my back felt much better but it was still pretty sore. I also woke up sick; sore throat, cough, etc. It was nice to wake up and have time to make breakfast. I made myself some eggs and then headed off to work. The tram ride wasn't very kind to my back as it was killing me by the time I got there. I checked surveymonkey and was really happy with the rate we're collecting responses. We have so far collected over 300 online responses and over 100 phone responses. Hopefully we can at least double that by the end of the project. I updated the spreadsheets and then I called people the rest of the day. I had a ham sandwich I had brought around 3pm, but by 5:30pm I was hungry again. Max and I hopped on a train in the opposite direction we had been going to see if we could find some new food places to eat. Three stops down there was a Subway, a McDonalds, and a sushi place. Max went to the Subway and I went and got some sushi. I've had it several times here in Melbourne and I gotta say I enjoy it. My tastes have definately expanded here and I'll have to share that with you guys when I get back. Anyways, I had a spicy salmon roll and prawn and avocado roll. The great thing about sushi is it tastes good, it's filling, and it's cheap. At most places around here a roll will cost you $1.50-$3.00. After my sushi snack, I called people the rest of the evening and headed home around 8pm. I got home around 9pm and had some awesome chili that Putname made. I relaxed and watched TV for a little while and then headed to the internet cafe, Global Gossip, for the rest of the night. I uploaded about 2/3 of my pictures on a website that Murdy had set up to archive everyone's Australia photos and I also set up a dummy survey for you guys to look through. It's fully functional and it is identical to the one volunteer fire fighters take online. I came back around midnight and went to bed. I woke up the next day did the dishes for about an hour since it was my turn and then headed off for work. The weather around here has been beautiful as of late, 75F and sunny. I've enjoyed working the 12-8pm hours thus far. The commute doesn't take as long and it's not as crowded. The weather is much nicer at 11am as well. I definately don't mind the extra sleep either. I'm still sick but it's just a nuisance really.

In other news, Murdy came up with a travel plan after the project that I might go on. It includes 5 days in Cairns and a 15 day tour of New Zealand. I'm going to research it more but I most likely will do it. So far it'd just be Murdy, Brian, and I on the trip but that's fine because smaller groups are easier to travel with. I'm hoping to do some shark cage diving in Cairns and some glacier hiking in New Zealand. The price comes to 126$ per day so it's pretty reasonable. It would put me home around the 20th of May. I'll let you know more details as I get them.


Here are the links to the photos and the dummy survey
http://australia.enu87.com/v/cmrogan/?g2_page=1

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=KB5IARKONySl7boI0FDMTw_3d_3d

Plonk

Yesterday, I woke up and went in to work. I spent the morning working on updating the spreadsheets. We had a meeting with our advisers and sponsors at 10am. Again, it was a total waste of time. I spent the time before lunch typing up the minutes from the meeting since it was my turn. Had a chicken slouvaki for lunch which was pretty good. I spent the rest of the day calling people. I was really tired by the end of the day so I slept on the tram back. Putnam cooked shrimp linguini for dinner which was really good. After dinner, Adam and I went to the basketball court to see if we could get a pick up game. Adam is the tallest guy on the trip. He's probably 6'4" or 6'5". We got there and we ended up playing a full court five on five game. Adam was a good foot and half taller than anyone else on the court. We were both on the same team and playing with 8 Asians. It was sad, we just destroyed them. The standard of basketball around here definately is sub par.

After basketball, I showered up and headed out with the guys and Cara to the bar. Since it was Thursday a lot of bars had really good deals. We headed to the Joint and just had a couple drinks while relaxing. We left after an hour and a half and when we got back, I just went sleep. I woke up late this morning and I totally forgot that we're playing footy at 4pm today at work so I forgot all my athletic clothes. Hopefully someone will have extra. Maybe I'll just take the tram to the shopping plaza and grab some shorts. We'll see what happens. Not many plans for this weekend except another footy game on Sunday.

the Wet

Tuesday night I went out to the basketball court and started shooting around. I played until some guys asked me if I wanted to play with them. It was two on two. It was me and the only black guy there versus two asians shorter than me. No problem right? Well it turns out that people in Australia suck at basketball. None of these guys had anything on me. The black guy was the worst basketball player of the group by far. It looked like he had just picked up a basketball a week ago. He couldn't shoot, rebound, or defend. He was pretty much useless. The Asians could shoot a mid-range jumper and the one that the black guy was defending could blow right by him for the lay in but they weren't an outside threat. Anyways we played to 21 but my team ended up winning 26-23 because of win by two. I scored 23 points. It was stupid. It makes me feel like I'm really good at basketball.

Anyways on the way home my stomach started to hurt, alot. I don't know what it was but I was sick pretty much the rest of the night. I did not feel good at all. I came back and watched some tv in pain and went to bed early. The next morning I woke up and felt much better so I went in to work. I started to update spreadsheets when I noticed that some of the responses were missing key demographics information here and there as well as a number of stupid mistakes in data entry. I questioned Max and John about it and they said it wasn't them. I checked with Aly and sure enough it was her. I spent most of the morning fixing her mistakes which really didn't make me too happy. On top of that it seemed like she had forgotten almost everything Max and I had taught her the previous day. I had to stop her many times during an interview because she would read a question incorrectly or try to cut corners by not reading all the answers to particular questions. Needless to say I wasn't very happy with her. After she had done a couple interviews, I went into the database to check up on her data entry and to make sure she was doing it correctly. I was shocked to find that there were no data from her interviews for that day. I asked her what was going on and she said that the survey was probably glitching. I told her probably not and asked her to show me exactly what she was doing when she surveyed someone. Sure enough, she was entering data into the survey preview (which was no where near what Max and I had showed her). This doesn't record any data. By this point I was furious with her. I told her the right way to do it, again, and then told her she'd have to call back all the interviews she had done that morning, admit her mistake to them, and reconduct the surveys. I could tell she wasn't happy because the people she'd be calling would probably be pissed off, but I don't have an ounce of compassion for stupid people. Almost as if to prove my point, halfway through her next call I turned around to check up on her and I had to stop her halfway through the interview. She was reading them THE WRONG SURVEY! She was surveying with the online survey. So she had to re-do it again, I'm sure that person on the other side was livid. I was ready to talk to my sponsors about firing her. Unfortunately, if we fire her we probably won't get another temp in time. I probably spent until 2:00pm fixing her problems. It was an extremely frustrating day.

While all of this was going on inside, the second worst storm in the last 20 years was going on outside. We were getting pounded by a typhoon, which is exceedingly rare for Melbourne. There were dangerous conditions outside with pelleting rain and sustained winds of over 110 kph. Two people died during the storm. A wall fell over and killed an old lady and there was a death at a construction site. I heard some of the trams weren't running because of branches on the track. So I decided to take the bus/train home with Max. However, some of the traffic lights were out, traffic was backed up for miles, and I saw that the tram was running in our area. I decided to risk it on the tram, while Max stayed with the bus. It was a good choice on my part. I got home in about an hour like normal. I called Max and asked him where he was. He said he had just gotten on a tram in Glen Waverly (near the bus station which is like an hour and a half back to the city). Apparently he spent 45 minutes in traffic getting to the train station before finding out that none of the trains were running, then he spent another 45 minutes in traffic getting to the tram stop. So that gave him a commute time of three hours as opposed to one for me.

That evening, Jonathan Barnett, the former Melbourne project center head and our former Theta Chi faculty adviser had arrived in Melbourne on vacation and wanted to take the Theta Chi's on the trip (Me, Putnam, and Dahlberg) out to dinner. The trams were still screwed up from the storm so we walked the 3 km to his apartment. We walked another couple of blocks to Minh Minh, which was Barnett's favorite Asian place. It was Vietnamese/Cambodian/Laotion food and we didn't know how to pronounce it so we let Barnett order for us. The food was really good. My favorite was this duck with lemon which was absolutely delicious. We talked about the house and our advisers and he was appalled at our advisers.

After dinner, we took the tram back and watched Golden Eye in our apartment with the guys and Katie. In typical WPI fashion, we talked about the video game the entire movie. It was pretty sad. I went to bed after the movie and left slightly late for work today. It's rather cold out after the storm. Hopefully the weather will improve as the day goes on.

Slog

Monday I woke up and went into work. I literally spent the entire day calling brigade captains. I made over 150 calls during the course of the day. I would tell them my name, where I was calling from, ask them if I could call the brigade member on my list, and that was it. Really the only note of the day was one guy saying "You're calling from CFA headquarters? I thought you were calling from the New York Stock Exchange." Ya, so a pretty dull day but productive. Oh and on a positive note, we learned the temps would be coming the next morning.

I went home and tried to get a game of basketball going since I had found a court, but no one wanted to play because there were a bunch of Asians there. After dinner, which was really good (sweet chilli chicken), I spent several hours editing and writing my paper. I was about to fill out my partner assessment form, which was due the next day, when I realized I couldn't access my email. I stayed up the rest of the night, till 11:30, trying to figure out why. Apparently, WPI just decided to change the password.

The next morning, I woke up and immeadiately called WPI. I got the problem fixed after some stupid conversation. Her: Ya your email account was locked at 7:00am this morning.
Me: "Ya that was last night at 11 when I was trying to log on, I'm in Australia" Her: "Oh is this something you need for your project?" Me: "uuhhh YA"

So with that fixed, I headed to work and wrote for my project the whole way there since I was trying to figure out why my email wasn't working while I was supposed to be writing. I got into work early at 8:30 and Max and I met the temps. There's Aly and John. Aly and John are both probably in their late 30's or early 40's. John is a an Asian guy who used to be in the Navy and Aly is a house wife who does some work on the side. They both seem fairly intelligent and I'm pretty happy with the choices made. Max and I split up into different rooms with one temp in each so we wouldn't drown each other out with our phone conversations and Max and I could still supervise the temps. Aly decided to work with me and John with Max. I gave Aly the rest of the Captains to call and she finished that fairly quickly. She didn't have internet access yet so I didn't have much else for her to do as our survey entry is online. I spent most of the morning writing for our project. In the hour before lunch I started updating all of our spreadsheets to reflect who had been called, who needed to be replaced, and who needed to be called back. This was a pretty hefty task. I went to lunch at the cafe again and got some mushroom chicken penne, which was just ok. After lunch, Aly had internet access and I instructed her on how to conduct the survey and off she went. I spent the entire rest of the day updating the spreadsheets and our pivot charts. It was a rather productive day and I'm quite pleased with our progress thus far in the project. Our online survey has 131 responses and we've complete 19 telephone surveys. At this rate we should end up with approximately 400 online responses and we should be able to complete the telephone survey in just over two weeks, which is right about what we planned on. The temps will be a big help and I'm glad we've got them on board. Well I'm on the tram now. I might try and get a pick up game of basketball going versus the Asians but we'll see what happens.

Barrack

I spent Friday at work calling people all day. We're still working our way through the brigade captains. It's taking us much longer than we had anticipated. James and John spoke to us briefly about the possibility of hiring some temps to make phone calls for us. That would cut our work load in half and hasten the project quite a bit. Hopefully this actually happens. I wonder if I'll have to teach them to ride a bike like Ben's temp.

When I got home everyone else was already getting ready to go out. Steve had a list of clubs that he had been given by his surfing instructor last week. We picked one that was close by and decided to check it out. It was called CQ. We left early and got there around 9:30. There was already a very long line. We waited for about 20 minutes when a limo pulled up to the club. Two huge body guards stepped out followed by none other than Dennis Rodman. Yes, Dennis with the crazy hair and 50 piercings; part of the Chicago Bulls dynasty in the 90's. He was escourted swiftly into the club. I was able to snap some pictures though. We got in about 15 minutes after that. This place was absolutely packed. However I think we hit the wrong type of crowd. Most of the people there were wear clothes way more expensive than ours and were about 5-10 years older than us. We were in the young buisness crowd. But there was good music and there were about 8 of us so we decided to stay and enjoy ourselves. While we were hanging out we saw Dennis Rodman leaving the club. He was walking through the dance floor normally and then Flo Rida came on and he threw up his arms and shouted and then just started dancing. It was hilarious. We went home around 1 am. It was a great time.

We woke up Saturday morning and went to the market to shop for souveniors. I didn't buy much but the market has just about everything you could possibly want and at really reasonable prices. I'll definately have to stop there again and stock up on souveniors before I leave. I had a sweet chilli chicken roll for brunch and on the way back I noticed a fishing shop and stopped in for some tackle and some info. I grabbed some hooks and sinkers and a free size and regulations book. Red snapper is the main fish around here. I have some small poles that the front desk had laying around, I'll have to give it a try sometime. Spent the rest of the day relaxing/cleaning and watching footy and Uncle Buck on TV.

After dinner, we picked out another club on Steve's list. This one was in St. Kilda on the infamous Chapel St. Given it's reputation we knew we'd need to get there early. On the website for the club it said there was no cover before 9. St. Kilda was about 30-45 mins away via tram or train so we left around 7:30. We ended up getting there around 8:45 to find no one at the door. We went inside and found employees setting up. Apparently, they don't even open until 9pm when they start charging a 20$ cover. So we walked around for a while and came back only to find that it was a members only club on every night except Thursdays. We asked the bouncers where else we should go and he reccomended the Revolver. We walked around Chapel St. stopping at clubs here and there but they were all either members only or empty. We stopped in a sports bar and asked the bartender what the deal was. Apparently clubs are either really exclusive or they don't start up until late, like midnight or later. So we decided we would wait for the clubs to get going. We got a pitcher of Carlton and sat watching footy at the sports bar till around midnight. We decided we'd try the Revolver. We found that some people had started to come in but it was still relatively empty. The stage featured a DJ wearing a red sox hat and just about the whitest australian girl you could imagine trying to rap. She was absolutely awful and we got out of there before our ears started to bleed. We tried club after club and it was the same things every time. They were either full, members only, or empty. There really was no way we were going to benefit from the situation so we caught the absolute last tram out of St. Kilda and admitted defeat. I guess we need to plan thing.s out better the next time we decided to take on Chapel St.

I slept in pretty late on Sunday. I spent the day doing some serious cleaning and finally got everything unpacked and washed from Adelaide. I did some work on the writing for our project as well. We left at 3:30 to see our first footy game at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds. We saw the North Melbourne Kangaroos defeat the Richmond Tigers pretty handily. The tickets were relatively cheap and footy isn't that hard to get the hang of. It was a pretty fun time. I'm sure we'll go back at some point. I spent the rest of the night working on my project and getting ready to head back to work the next day. In all, it was a pretty quiet weekend but it was nice to kick back and relax a little after the last busy weekend in Adelaide. We're going to be spending the entire week at work calling people and conducting our phone survey. It's gonna be pretty monotonous and I'm not exactly looking forward to it, but at least I'm not counting trees or something.

Flat Out Like a Lizard Drinking

Ok, I've been holding out for the camera cable but I haven't been able to get it. I should be around this weekend so I'll try and put some pictures up for the past posts if I get to it. These entries were getting old so I had to put them up.

So Tuesday, back to work. I woke up tired and slept most of the way to work on the tram. As I got off I realized something horrible. I either had my wallet stolen or it had fallen out of my pocket on the tram ride. My wallet had absolutely everything in it. My license, student ID, money, credit cards, tram pass, and an ems gift card were all in there. So I ran inside and called the tram company and they said they'd look for it and to check again after lunch. It was difficult to concentrate but the rest of the morning I made some last minute formatting and corrections on the surveys and integrated the target samples that both Max and I had selected.

After lunch, I called the tram company and luckily they had found my wallet and it had just fallen out of my pocket. They gave me an address and tram stop I needed to go to so I could pick it up. Luckily, it was on my tram route and on the way home. The rest of the day at work kinda flew by. I made some more pivot charts which linked our sample selections to their brigades and their brigades to their captains. The first step in conducting the survey would be to call the brigade captains and ask permission to talk to the volunteers within their brigades. I also talked to internet services and sent them a link and a press release (which I wrote) to post up on the members only, brigades online website. Max spent the day talking to the regional training managers to let them know what was going on and to spread publicity for our online survey.

On the way home I stopped at the address I was given to pick up my wallet and of course, they were closed. I decided I would pick it up tomorrow on the way to work. In the meantime, I had no money and no way to get any. As a result I spent the rest of the night just chilling in the apartment and washing clothes from the Adelaide trip. It's not like I could go out anyways because it absolutely poured. Some of the hardest rain this region has recieved in years. It just came down in buckets. It was funny watching the Asians get caught on the tennis court in the middle of the monsoon. They were all huddled underneath a tiny overhang which offered almost no protection and took the rain for like 30 minutes. I guess they thought it would stop...nope.

I went to bed early Tuesday night and woke up refreshed on Wednesday. It was still raining pretty hard. On the way into work I was able to get my wallet no problem. Luckily, everything was there and nothing had been taken. In the morning I secured a 100$ gift certificate to the CFA shop as incentive to volunteers to take our online survey. I also worked out the details with one of the online managers to have a link to our survey put in one of their weekly online newsletters. The newsletters are open to the public to view but the link takes you to Brigades Online where you need a password to get in which all members have. So once the newsletter is released with our link in it, I'll send it to you guys to check out. But don't even try to take the survey because you won't be able to. If there is interest I can send out a link for a dummy survey for you guys to check it out. Spent the rest of the day calling Brigade Captains. This signified a change in focus for the project. For the next couple of weeks we will be doing little else except making phone calls. Over 400 of them. We even got cool little telemarketer headsets. We found that a decent amount of people did think we were telemarketers. Apparently that's what a random American voice on the phone means to most people. So the next couple of weeks could be difficult.

I went home and had dinner. The rain cleared up and it was nice outside but I had another meeting with my useless advisers at 7:30. I kinda just tune them out now and stare at them like they're speaking Arabic when they talk to me. I have never experienced professors so technically stupid and just culturally inept at WPI. I'm glad that they teach civil and CS because I'll never have to see them again after this project. I thought our advisers were going to be Professor Ault and Barnett when I was interviewing. Then things changed, Professor Barnett stopped working at WPI and Professor Ault got more classes and responsibilities to attend to in Worcester. Had I interviewed with Professor Lemone and Salazar for this trip I would have turned down the invitation to come. They are that bad.

Spent the rest of the night relaxing and hanging out with the roommates. It seems we've gained a 5th roommate. Katie hung out with us all night and actually ended up sleeping on the couch. Zan is her project partner and she's definately got a thing for Putnam. She stayed with us for one night in Adelaide because the other girls had left. So she was the 5th person in our 4 bed room. She said she'd stay on the floor but when it came time to go to bed she wound up sleeping in Putnam's bed. So anyways it's kinda weird but at least she hangs out unlike some of the girls.

Thursday morning I woke up and took the tram to work. It was raining again, it kinda sucks but this region desperately needs it. I had an early meeting with my advisers and sponsors at 10am. Everytime we have one of these meetings Lemone says something borderline racist or at best totally culturally inept right to my sponsors. They kinda just look at her like she has bugs crawling out of her head. She might as well, nothing useful comes out of it. So when Lemone says something stupid/racist then it's Salazar's turn. I was saying in the meeting that firefighters had expressed wanting more hands-on practical training like if you can put up a ladder, show it to me. Everyone understood except Salazar who said "Like a picture?, They want more pictures in their training books?" I swear he was that kid in middle or high school who asked the dumbest questions and it would take the class forever to do anything. One of those people you just want to smack when they open their mouths. It was because of people like him (Lenon, stupid jocks, etc.) that I didn't care senior year of high school. Anyways our sponsors just kinda looked at us with a look that said, "Is this guy seriously that dumb?" and we moved on. Later Salazar would say something dumb again and I'm sure they were like "Wow, he really is that dumb." I now understand why the civil major is such a joke at our school. So in summary, the morning meeting was again totally useless.

We spent the rest of the day calling Brigade Captians. We don't have much else to do. On the bright side our online survey is doing very well. In just 24 hours it managed to get 28 responses. We're pretty excited it has been so popular. We expected to get around 200 responses but it may end up being a lot more than that. We caught an early tram back because we had a practice presentation at Vicdeaf near our apartment. Again it was an idiotic waste of time thought up by our all-knowing advisers. We were supposed to take 15 minutes to talk about our results so far. Barely anyone had real results. We had by far the most with the responses to our online survey. So what it ended up being was just a BS-fest. No one wanted to make a 5 minute presentation when we were allotted 15 minutes. It was flat out painful. We didn't get out of there until 8pm by which time we were all starving. It was too late to cook much so I made myself and egg and ham sandwich. Again we just hung out because it was kinda too late to do anything cool. Again, Katie hung out all night with us and ended up sleeping on the couch again. Well weekend soon. I don't have many plans but we'll see what happens. Possibly clubing on Friday and a footy game on Sunday.

Mallee

Mt. Lofty

On Saturday we woke up around 8am. Our bus for Mt. Lofty left at 9:30. We had plenty of time to catch the bus but we didn't because the only girl left in the group, Katie, was late. So we ended up taking another bus that ended at the eastern foot of Mt. Lofty where there are no trails. on the bus ride up, I noticed that Dahlberg was reading "A Walk in the Woods" by Bill Bryson. I remembered from reading Ben's blog last year that it was a good book. He was just finishing up with it so I took it when he was finished and started reading it. We hiked up the road to the summit, which is barely a mountain at 2,360 ft of elevation. At the top was a large visitor center/restaurant and a fantastic view of Adelaide. What Mt. Dandenong was for Melbourne, Mt. Lofty was for Adelaide. On the west side of the mountain there were a bunch of trails including one that apparently featured several water falls, which, if you ask Steve, are my favorite. It was a great walk down the mountain with lots of unique fauna I had never seen before. It was a pretty easy hike, however having slow and inexperienced hikers we didn't move too fast (and none of us went a half mile ahead like Ben woud have).

About half way down we came to the spot where the first waterfall was supposed to be and I was not surprised to see it was all dried up, a dust fall. We continued down the mountain and finally began to see some water and a stream. With that came a lot more wildlife including colorful parrot-like birds, grey tounged skinks, many insects, and even a few small fish. Right before we came to the second falls I was able to catch a grey tounge, which are much smaller and faster than blue tounges. It was extremely small perhaps an inch or two in length. We saw some as big as about 6 inches but I only caught the one small one. They're really quick. At the second falls there was actually a waterfall about 10-12ft high. I took off my boots and stuck my head in the water. Just another 800 meters down the trail we found the 3rd and last falls. The drop had to have been maybe 80-100 ft. The volume of water wasn't much but it was impressive. At the bottom of the falls there was another restaurant as well as a concession stand. We got some ice cream and headed quickly back up the mountain because it was getting late. The hike up was annoying at best. Katie probably hadn't walked let alone hike this distance (approx. 10km) at any time in her life before and it showed. She was hurting and we had to wait for her every couple hundred meters.

When we finally made it to the top in was nearly 6pm and the sun was sinking low. We decided that even though the restaurant at the top was expensive, it had kangaroo on the menu and the view was fantastic. Matt and I shared some gnnoci as an appetizer and we each had the kangaroo for dinner. All of the food was excedeingly delicious and it definately matched it's prize tag in flavor. Kangaroo is a very tough meat to cook because it has almost no fat. However the restaurant did a really good job cooking it. The flavor was good but mild and the meat was very tender. I have to say I prefer a big, juicy beef steak to a kangaroo one but it was pretty good and definately worth the experience. As an added bonus we watched the sun go down on top of the mountain which was really pretty.

We walked down the mountain to our bus stop in darkness. We got a pretty good look at the stars. On the southern half of the sky there are stars we had never seen before which was pretty cool. On the northern hemisphere there were the stars we're used to but slightly different and during the wrong season. For example, down here Orien is sideways and is coming into view just as we would be losing sight of him in New England. The bus ride back was uneventful but I got some more time to read "A Walk in the Woods" and I found that Ben was right about the book. It was an awesome book and I couldn't take my eyes off of it. It is a true story describing the author's attempt at the Appalacian Trail. I ended up finishing it before I left Adelaide. It was very well written and very funny. I'd reccommend it to anyone, particulary hikers.

When we got back to the hostel everyone was tired but I knew that Saturday would be our only chance to go out because of Easter weekend. Matt was the only other taker so we got cleaned up and went downstairs to the bar in the hostel. We asked him where the good clubs were in Adelaide and it turns out they were only three blocks directly behind the hostel. He told us that the best place in town was a place called "The Dog and Duck." Matt and I found it relatively easily but the line was around the corner. It was almost 10:30 so we decided to go to the place next door "The Red Square" figuring it would fill up with over flow from the Dog and Duck. It was pretty empty at first but an hour later you almost couldn't walk in the place. It had two dance floors with several DJs, professional dancers, and young people everywhere. It really was a lot of fun and I'm glad I went.

The next day we woke up very early 6:00 am; we were told to be at the bus stop at 6:15 am to check in for our bus to Kangaroo Island which left at 6:45 am. Thanks to good planning the hostel was right across the street from the bus station so we had no problem making it. The bus ride to the ferry was about an hour and a half long and featured exquiste landscape views. Even though I was very tired, between the views and the book I didn't sleep much. The ferry ride to the island was 45 minutes long and again the views were fantastic. The water was shockingly clear and I saw several fish on the way over. After we got off the ferry we made our way onto the bus. It then drove us across the island, about an hours drive, for lunch. Lunch was a barbeque and was pretty good. After lunch we got up and walked around for a bit and saw some wallabies and koalas. After lunch the bus took us to a place known as Remarkable Rocks. They were located on the South side of the island and were formed from thousands of years of waves pounding them and washing away the softer materials. They were really and awesome sight. In fact the entire Southern coast line was quite impressive. It jutted out of the ocean straight up several hundred feet in to the air. The vegetation was impressive also because it grew on almost entirely bald rock. It was scragly but yet colorful green. There were many shear cliffs and unique formations that dotted the coast line. I saw some of the most scenic views I've ever seen there.

In between each stop on the tour, there was a 30 minute to an hour bus ride. The scenery was nice but almost exactly the same everywhere. We saw several Kangaroo Island kangaroos, which are there own species. They're smaller and darker then their mainland cousins. Eventually we got bored of the bus rides and started talking to the other passengers. Our group ended up meeting two German girls, Michaela and Julia, who were roughly our age (19 and 20). They were traveling after graduating from high school (which ends when you're 19 in Germany). They hung out with our group for pretty much the rest of the tour. They were just generally nice people and we ended up learning a lot about Germany and I'm sure they learned a lot about the States.

Next we were taken further down the coast to a large rock overhang which seals used for shelter from the sun and waves. Kangaroo Island is home to some of the only remaining Australian Seals. Apparently several hundred years ago Americans sailed to Australia and slaughtered nearly all of them for their skins and oil. Figures as much. Anyways the seals were pretty cool even though they smelled awful (they eat fish), but what was really impressive was the rock structure that they used for shelter. Also where there are seals, there are sharks. Our tour guide said that Kangaroo Island does support a reasonably sized great white shark population. I saw advertisements for shark tours but it was very expensive and we would have had to book ahead of time. That's too bad because if I had known I definately would have booked a tour and gotten in that cage. Finally the tour guide took us to a beach where sea lions were living. We could actually walk on the beach with the sea lions as long as we didn't get with in 10 meters of them (ya ok). It was very cool. After that we got on the bus, hit up the gift shop, and then boarded the ferry home. We left on the ferry just as the sun was going down. It was quite a site to see. However none of us could get a good picture because of the rolling of the boat. By the time we got back to the mainland it was dark.

On the hour and a half ride back into Adelaide, we chatted with the German girls more and we ended up inviting them to hang out with us at the bar in our hostel. It was Sunday night and even though we knew Monday was a public holiday, we also knew that it was Easter and all the clubs would be dead. We had a pretty fun time just chilling and chatting at the hostel bar with Michaela and Julia. We didn't have any plans for the next day and we had an early afternoon flight (3:00pm) so we decided we'd sleep in and then meet the German girls for lunch. So the next day we all had pizza with the Germans and we all ended up exchanging addresses and emails. They said they'd send us post cards from Ayer's Rock, which we wouldn't have time to see. We also all got invited to go to Germany next summer. Guess I better start working on my German, haha. So after lunch, we caught a cab to the airport and boarded our flight back to Melbourne. We got back to the apartments right as dinner was ready. Didn't do much except clean up and do some laundry the rest of the night because I was pretty tired.

So in summary, Adelaide was not nearly as boring as everyone said it was and I had a great time. I guess you just have to know where to go and plan ahead. It was probably the best weekend I've had here yet.

Schooner

Mt. Dandenong

"Everyone say cancelled!"

The Americans (black shorts) defeating the Australians

Thursday morning we left for the MTD meeting. It was being held at someplace in the country called The Country Place. As the name suggests it was in the boonies. It was a pretty cool drive though. At the meeting we presented our survey to the managers and they were impressed. There were a few minor language issues and they also wanted to add a question about online learning materials but that was it. As we were leaving one of the managers told us that if we took the scenic route we could pay a small fee to drive our car up to the summit of Mt. Dandenong. The mountain overlooks the entire city. It was an absolutely awesome view. I snapped a couple of pictures and we continued on our way back to work. The drive back was pretty awesome, very scenic. When we got back we found that the entire ofice had moved outside to the parking lot. The company's Christmas party had been moved to right before Easter weekend because there was a flood before the orginal one. Anyways the theme was Salsabration and people were wearing sombreros and nachos. One guy even home brewed beer for the entire company. The Mexican food over here is pretty bad because of the lack of corn and proximity to Mexico. So it was about the equivalent of freezer snacks but free food is good food. I headed home early to get packed for Adelaide.

There were seven of us leaving for Adelaide. Me, Putnam, Dahlberg, Murdy, Katie, Elyssa, and Cara arrived at the airport an hour early and got in line to check in. Fifteen minutes later, an announcer gets on the PA and tells us that our flight has been cancelled. Apparently, our plane got into a fender bender on the runway in Sydney and wouldn't make it to pick us up in time since the Adelaide airport closed at midnight. This was a problem because our tour was booked for the following morning at 6 am. Our replacement flight was scheduled to take off at 7:00. We called our tour company and at first it looked like we would lose all of our 400 dollar tour. After about 45 mins of negociating we were finally able to get a small refund and we switched from a two day tour of Kangaroo Island to a one day tour. The hotel provided us with some pretty nice accomatations at a near by hotel and we slept for a couple of hours before we had to go back to the airport.

When we landed in Adelaide the pilot announced what the local time was and it confused me because it was 30 minutes off of what I had. Apparently they have half hour time zones here. We took a cab from the airport to our hostel which was in the middle of Adelaide. The hostel was unique compared to any other type of accomadation I had ever stayed at. It cost 22$ per night for a four bed room. There were communal bathrooms, kitchen, game room, etc. Everything inch was painted a bright color. The closest that comes to it would probably be a dorm.

We dropped our stuff and decided we should go to the beach because they were supposedly pristine in Adelaide. The trams were shut down for Good Friday so we took the bus. When we got to the beach we saw that there was some sort of event going on. There were lots of vendors and bleachers set up. We soon found out that the Australian volleyball championships were going on this weekend. We hit the beach first and it was pretty nice. No garbage, not too many people, fine white sand. We walked down the beach some and it didn't take long for me to find some nice shells. When we got back from our walk it was getting near lunch time, so we hit the boardwalk to find some grub. We ended up going to another greek/mediterrean falafel/gyro place. The lamb gyros are quickly becoming a favorite of mine.

With food in hand, we decided to check out the volleyball championships. I gotta say, it was really cool. Most of the people competing would be in the Olympics this summer. We watched the top ranked US team vs. the top ranked Aussie team (which was number one in the world) and the Americans were able to not only pull an upset but simply dominate the Aussies. It's a unique feeling rooting for your country while in a foriegn country. There were a few other American fans there so we weren't alone. We ended up staying there for the rest of our time at the beach. It was top level play and it was exciting, the competitors hit really hard and there were some crazy digs. We watched 3 more matches, one mens and two womens, including the match up of the top ranked womens German team vs. the top ranked womens Aussie team (also number one in the world). The Australians won in an exciting and close third set. After spending all day in the sun and dealing with our airplane fiasco the night before we were all really tired so we headed back to the hostel.

When we got back, we said bye to the girls because they were staying at a different, nicer, more expensive hotel. They also had a different tour than us with the exception of Katie. So we didn't expect to see them again the rest of the trip. We cleaned up and headed down to the bar in the hostel to get a few beers. We met a group of guys from Melbourne who had come down to Adelaide to see their footy (Australian Rules Football) team begin the season, which started on Thursday. We played a couple rounds of pool and chatted about cultural differences and one of the Australian's experiences studying abroad in New Hampshire. We went to bed early because we wanted to get up early to hike Mt. Lofty.

Bush (Tuesday 3/18)

We went into work on Tuesday an hour late since we had been out so late the night before working. It took us only about 45 mins to drive out to the CFA from the city. We spent the morning working on the drafts of sections that would be due this coming morning. We started to work survey around 11 and by lunch we had gotten access to surveymonkey which is an online tool for making and distributing surveys and collecting responses. I spent the most of the rest of the day working on setting up the online survey which we would begin distributing next week. I input all the questions and formatting including section divisions, path logic for different sections, and coloring and schemes. Towards the end of the day I had produced a very professional looking survey that I was sure the volunteers would understand and appreciate. I had a little bit of time left so went down to human resources and negotiated the terms with them for giving me information from their volunteer database which was quite difficult because of privacy issues and the scale of the data (approximately 40,000 volunteers). In exchange for agreeing to contact brigade heads for permission along with agreeing that the data wouldn't leave the building I was able to get all the necessary demographics that I needed ordered. I should have them before the end of the week. The demographics I was able to get include: age bracket, gender, region, position/rank, brigade, and name along with their buisiness and after hours phone numbers. After wrapping that up, we left to go visit the rural brigade in Parkenham Upper.

We noticed very quickly the definition of rural here was quite a bit more extreme than our definition in the states. There was no town center in this place. Just farms and woods everywhere. It wasn't as dry as Ballarat, it was more like temperate forest. In between the woods we saw plenty of cows; they most definately out numbered people here. In between cow fields there were large sections of forest including wildlife and fauna reserves. We saw many signs for kangaroo and wombat crossing as the road switched between paved and dirt. As we drove on we were able spot some kangaroos bounding away from the car through the dense forest. It was pretty weird to see because I always thought that kangaroos were more grassland dwelling. Apparently that's not the case. We didn't have an address for the brigade but we did know what road it was on. Unfortunately that road is about 20km long. We were getting pretty worried but eventually we found the brigade at the very end of the road.

The brigade was much smaller than the previous urban brigade. It was a simple metal garage. It was basically meant to store the trucks and nothing else. We met in the captain's small office in the back of the brigade. We met with 4 of the 20 members in the brigade. Again we administered the survey and then facilitated discussion about it and the issues we were investigating. These guys were much more laid back the then previous group, however they still had a lot issues with their training that they had strong opinions about. Issues included skills maintainence, learning materials not matching standards, a lack of a learning materials repository and much more. It was much more a discussion with a bunch of guys than a focus group. We had a couple beers (not Max who was driving) and shot the ****. It was really relaxed and fun but it also was very informative. As we were leaving, they gave us some CFA Volunteer baseball caps which was awesome.

On our way home, Max almost killed us by driving on the wrong side of the road almost immeadiately after leaving the brigade. It took a pair of headlights and a horn ahead to remind him so it was pretty scary even though we weren't that close to a collision. When I got home, I ate dinner (some pretty good stir-fry), put in a load of laundry, and went to bed early.

Roo Bar (Wednesday 3/19)

This morning we went into work early to turn in the car by 8:30. We didn't make it until 9am because traffic was horrendous. We spent the morning working on condensing notes from the instructor interviews and focus groups. We then started working on the final draft of our survey. At lunch, we went to the diner across the street again. I had spinach risotto-stuffed chicken with scalloped potatoes. It was really good, probably the best meal I've had there yet.

After lunch, I fooled around with excel for a while trying to figure out pivot tables so I could use them to compare demographics next week and easily select people to interview this week. By the time I figured it out, I got an email from HR and to my surprise they had finished compiling the data I had asked for early. I worked on selecting samples using a combination of pivot tables and the random number generator function. Basically, with a sample size of approximately 250-260 people and 20 regions there needs to be 13 samples per a region. The percentages we got from HR about gender and age give 2 females and 11 males per a region and from there it's broken down into how many people per an age group. The first thing I did was make a table representing the age group distribution. I then used the random number generator function to pick two age groups that I would take the females for. Then using the pivot table I seperated all the females in those age groups and using the random number function I was able to select one femal from each group. I then filled the rest of the age group quotas with males using the same random number generator function. This created a relatively random, stratified sample. After I did this for several regions it was getting late, so we did a final run through and review of our survey, made sure we had all the materials we would need for our meeting the next day with the MTDs, and we took the car home.

When I got home, I had some dinner (just some pasta). I had a meeting at 7:30 with my advisers. They are so useless. They have no clue what our project is about and they have no idea what they're doing. It's so frustrating because they're the ones who are grading us. We've been writing our methodology by the book according to the examples posted online. They tell us at the meeting that our methodology just isn't right and it needs to be totally re-written. We absolutely do not have the time for that. We're getting behind just doing the project let alone writing the paper. We're a short handed group and yet our project requires some of the most work of any project at this center. I don't know what we're going to do. Some how we're going to have to revise it or they'll flip. It's really frustrating, I have no idea when we're going to do it.

I spent the rest of the night working on sample selection and doing laundry in preparation for my trip this weekend to Adeliade and Kangaroo Island. At least tomorrow is the last day of the week and I have a four day weekend coming. Apparently Adeliade is dead zone when it comes to social life, which is ok with me because I'm mostly going there to hike. Well I've got to go, you'll prolly hear from me again on Monday or Tuesday.

Good on ya

This morning I woke up probably the most tired I've been since getting over the jet lag. We tried to work the bus/train system and improve upon our transit time again. It didn't work, we ended up spending and hour and a half getting to work. Even if I have to do it myself, I'm taking the tram next time.

We spent the morning working on our survey and making a second draft of it. Becky made the first draft when we were in Worcester so it needed heavy editing. We finished that up shortly after lunch and got to work on the plan for our focus group. We spent pretty much the rest of the day finishing that and gathering materials in preparation of our focus group. Come 5:30 we grabbed the Tom Tom (or Steve Steve?) and hopped in the CFA mobile. Driving on the right side certainly was an interesting experience. It's not that much different surprisingly. I only went on the wrong side of the road once, and that was in the CFA parking lot pulling out. I didn't kill us both surprisingly enough. Even when we encountered several rotaries (roundabouts, we got laughed at when we called them rotaries) we made it through unscathed. We drove for an hour out to a little po-dunk town called Hastings. The center of town consisted of two streets with a couple store fronts and that's about it. It was right on the east coast (the one with waves) on the eastern peninsula of the bay that Melbourne sits in. We found the brigade really easily because it was on one of the two at the center of town. We got there an hour early so we decided to grab some dinner. Got some fish and chips at a small cafe down by the water. After dinner we went into the brigade and met the firefighters in person for the first time.

We found out that even though Hastings is so small, the brigade is considered an urban brigade. It seems Hastings was only small by our standards. They did have a steel mill and an industrial shipping port that the brigad have to look after as well. The volunteers were amazingly dedicated. They were a bunch of very normal looking people. They trained extensively within the brigade and out at training centers (several hours of work). The officers had to manage an amazing amount of work for being volunteers. All of these people had full time jobs and families. There were about 40 members in the brigade and we got to meet with approximately 15 of them. HQ had arranged the focus group and they knew we were coming. We explained our project and who we were and then we administered our survey. We timed them without their knowledge to see how long it would take them to complete the survey. It took them between 10 and 15 minutes to complete the survey, which is right around our target area. Then we had a discussion about our survey with them. There wasn't much that they said we needed to change or remove but when we got around to what we should add we had a lot of input. When it came to their training, the volunteers had a lot to say. There were many complaints and flaws that were revealed to us by the volunteers. Many issues were corroborated by other members with in the brigade. The spectrum of issues was widespread from issues with learning materials to the lack of practical assessments. The focus group by far was the best resource for gaining insight we've come across so far. We finished by 9:00pm and drove home.

We finally got home from work around 10:15pm on St. Patty's Day. Of course, no one was in the apartments. They had all gone out for the holiday. I tried to find out where they were but the club they were in was so loud that I couldn't hear what they were saying. Text messaging didn't work either because the street they thought they were on didn't exist. So I ended up spending a quiet St. Patty's day evening doing laundry and going to bed early.

Roo

My plans changed a lot this past weekend but I still had a lot of fun. Friday night most everyone was beat from the first work week and a lot of people had plans for early in the morning. So we skipped the clubs in favor of something a little bit more tame. We grabbed the football and headed out to find a park to play catch. When we got to the park finally figured out why we hadn't seen any squirrels or mammals during the day. It's because they come out at night. They're called possums and they're the size of a small cat (like a third the size of Steve's cat). They're not afraid of people at all because Asian tourist are always feeding them. They're kinda creepy cause they'll sneak right up on ya, especially if they think you have food. We must have looked like a bunch of fools yelling out where they were and taking pictures of Australia's squirrel equivalent. It was really fun though. We kept walking and of course we got lost. So we ended up exploring parts of Melbourne we hadn't seen yet for about an hour until we realized where we were and made our way back home. We went to bed pretty early with big plans in the morning.

No one wanted to wake up early enough the next day to go fishing. We decided instead to head to the wildlife preserve at Ballarat. We took the noon train to Ballarat, which is about an hour long trip. On the way there we finally got to see some of the country outside the city. It's desolate. Red colored earth with scattered trees and dry grass. Every so often it would be interrupted by a bulbous looking hill covered in trees or a valley/dry river bed. Victoria has been in a decade long drought and it shows. Water was scarce and we only saw it in cultivated areas of which there weren't many. When we arrived in Ballarat we took a cab to the wildlife preserve. The preserve was really cool. It was a large caged in area, kangaroos and emus roamed in the open. They were almost completely domesticated and used to people. You could buy bags of feed and feed and pet them like in a petting zoo. It was really hot again (in the 100s), so many of the animals were pretty inactive. There was also several caged in exhibits within the park. We saw koalas, wombats, echinads, wallabies, crocs, and many other reptiles and smaller marsupials. I was dissapointed in the reptile house because they didn't have any skinks. Emus are just about the scariest thing ever. They're pretty much velociraptors without teeth. They make this ridiculous thumping sound which is just creepy and it freaks you out. Anyways as a whole, the experience was awesome and made me feel like I really was in Australia.

We walked back to the train station and stopped in a little hole in the wall pizza place. The type of place we would hit on the way home from a Beaver Fever trip. Australian pizza....not so great. Good enough though cause we were beat and starving. The heat pretty much wiped us out. We got back to the apartment around 7:30. Another group of people got back from surfing that day as well so pretty much noone wanted to go out. We just stuck around the apartment building and watched rugby and cricket.

The next morning Putnam, Dahlberg, Morgan, Adam, and I went to the F1 Races. The event was enormous, well over 100,000 people in attendance. It was probably the hottest day yet as well. I drank probably 5 liters of water and didn't need to go to the bathroom once. We were sweating bullets all day. The sun was brutal as well, there was very little cover from the sun and we spent most of our time walking or standing. We all had heat exhaustion (headaces,nausea etc.) by the end of the day. The races themselves were awesome. They had one race with all Porches (Carrera), a V8 Super Car race, and a celebrity challenge race as a warm up. There was a rollover in the celebrity challenge which was pretty funny. Also saw a motorcycle trick rider eat it big time. We bought ear plugs at the beginning of the day and we definately needed them once the real race started. On the first turn there was a crash that knocked one racer out of the race. This would become a trend as only 6 out 16 cars would finish the race. The sun was really sapping my energy but the race was exciting so I was able to make it through the full 58 laps. BMW Mclearn won the race in an exciting finish. All the Mercedes cars didn't finish. I bought myself a BMW Mclearn jersey that makes me look like I really know my stuff. By the end of the races we were all hot and dehydrated to a pretty bad extent. I still wanted to see the complimentary Kiss (the guys with face paint, hair, and big tounges) concert but no one else was willing to stay. I was pretty exhausted myself so I decided I didn't want to go to the concert by myself. So we went home and crashed like out of control F1 cars (hard).

After not wanting to move for several hours, I finally got up and got to work on my methodology since Max refused to work on it this weekend. Even though I was exhausted, I stayed up until 2am working on it. The draft was due Monday morning at 9am. After that I went straight to bed.

It's not my turn to shout

Last night was pretty awesome. First off when I got home Putnam made some awesome lemon and pepper chicken with coconut rice. Pretty good. After dinner we got a call from one of the guys in one of the other rooms. They went out and found a bar that had 4$ jugs which is amazing around here. The pictures are of the some of the group having fun there. Aparently it was a one time thing, a celebration for the upcoming grand prix. It was in the basement of this hotel and it definately had a fraternity feel but I like that anyways. It took forever to get some beer and predictably it was pretty bad but at least it was really cheap. Eventually the most of the WPI group made their way over to the bar and even though this was about the first time we had gone somewhere with a ton of people our age, we all hung out together and we had a really good time. It was the first time we had all hung out socially as a cohesive group. What was funny was the birthday girl was the only one not hanging out, she was off talking to guys and scamming free drinks. One guy ordered her a shot that consisted of absinth,tequila, and tabasco sauce. I was not jealous of her for that one. We finally made it home pretty late but it was worth cause we had an awesome time.

Woke up in the morning really tired. Slept an extra 10 mins instead of eating breakfast. We decided to try another route to work that consisted of taking the tram to the train station, a train to the train station, and a bus to work. I thought it was a stupid complicated idea but I went along with it anyways. Long story short, we took the wrong bus for about 20 mins and by the time we caught another one and found our way to work the whole commute took about 2 hours. So ya, my vote is for the tram.

Spent the first half of the day interviewing training instructors over the phone. They were all really cool and eager to give input for the project. We asked them mainly about the volunteers' opinions that they had heard. Some of them were too eager and ended up giving us their point of view but most of them gave us some really good insight that we can use to further refine our survey. Went to a new place for lunch today, it was ok. It was called Nando's, it's like one of those fast food nice place hybrids. Had some chili (as in pepper) chicken sandwhich and chips. It was just ok. It was another scorcher today. Up around 40 degrees centigrade. We got back to work around 1 and we finished up the instructor interviews by about 2:30. We started to work on an updated methodology, which a draft of is due on Monday. Worked on that for the rest of the day. Talked to Steve a bit (5mins) on AIM Express which I finally got to work on my computer. I made fun of him for Brett Farve retiring. He made fun of me for the blog. The usual Steve conversation. I heard Uconn lost, which means Ben's grumpy. Anyways we made ok progress on our draft due Monday but by 5pm we hadn't gotten to nearly the level at which I wanted it to be. Max kinda frustrated me because he wanted to leave but was unwilling to work on it at all this weekend. He basically refused. I mean I can understand why but still the work has to get done some how and I don't wanna do the entire thing. I'll figure something out this weekend I guess. In summary, a productive though frustrating day.

I've got some pretty big plans for this weekend. If it all works out we'll be going down to St. Kilda tonight where there are apparently some awesome clubs, I'm going charter fishing tomorrow morning, and I'll be going to the F1 Melbourne Grand Prix/Kiss concert on Sunday. Should be tons of fun even if I have to squeeze some writing in between everything. Cheers.

P.S. This is an old post; I wrote it on Friday but I'm posting it now. But I got a camera cable so enjoy the pictures.

Sunnies

Wow, today was a hot one. The sun was intense. Up over 100 degrees at one point. Even most of the Australians were complaining about the heat. James Stitz, one of my sponsors, said the weather is very rare for this time of year. Remember it's supposed to be fall over here. Global warming strikes again I guess. Better get Al Gore on that...or Steve, one or the other.

Spent the first part of the day doing more demographics targeting. Finished expected target numbers before noon. The region and gender demographics we should have no problem with but the age demographics might have been hard to reach with out knowlege of the subjects age before contact. I made sure to ask James about it later in the day. Spent the rest of the time before lunch preparing for our sponsor and adviser meeting. Also created a calendar to outline our when we planned to do each of the tasks that needed to be completed before we launched our survey.

For lunch, Max and I headed to that cafe we had lunch at the day before. I had some spinach and feta lasagne thing which was really good. After lunch we headed back to our office and printed out agendas and other papers for our meeting. Our meeting began at 1:30 and lasted about an hour. Again our advisers are completely useless however James helped to refine our instructor interview plan and our objectives for our methodology. We spent most of the time trying to explain our plan to our advisers who don't understand anything the first time they see it for some reason.

After the meeting we spent the rest of the day making revisions to our interview plan, typing up minutes from our meeting, and creating an actual script from our interview plan to use for tomorrow. We also got all the contact information for the instructors we would interview tomorrow. All in all it was a pretty productive day, however I am kinda worried that we hadn't made much progress on actually typing up our methodology, of which a draft is due on Monday. Hopefully the interviews won't take long tomorrow and we'll have a lot of time to work on it.

Well I'm on the tram now, on my way home. It's pretty miserable. It's packed and really hot. Hopefully it will cool down this evening. Anyways it's one of the girls birthday tonight, Nicky (the one I hate, she's a real b****), so we're prolly all going out to celebrate. I'll prolly go since we all are going, hopefully it'll be somewhere cool.

On a Good Wicket

When I last left off on Monday night we were cooking chili. The chili didn't really turn out as good as we expected. It tasted really good but the texture was awful. We bought dehydrated beans at the market and didn't realize until it was much too late that we were supposed to soak them for like 24 hours or something. It turned our pretty crunchy. The rest of the night was pretty boring. We didn't go out like we had planned because we were all too tired. So we just stayed in and watched some rugby.

The next day I woke up around 7am, had some nutella on toast (which is awesome hazelnut spread, try it if you haven't already), and left around 8am. The five of us tried an alternate route by taking the train to Box Hill and then a bus to Burrville. It really wasn't worth it. Took about the same amount of time except with more waiting and running around. I think I'm just going to take the tram from now on even if it's slow.

When we got to our office we continued our work on the interview plan for the training instructor interviews we have planned for Friday. By mid-day we had finished that and scheduled an appointment for after lunch to review it with John Butler, one of our sponsors. We headed out to a near by cafe for lunch and I had some tortellini with bacon which was really good.

So it's been brought to my attention that some of you don't know what my project is about. I'm going to take a little break in my story here to tell you. Basically, the CFA or Country Fire Authority is the largest fire protection agency in the state of Victoria. It's government and corporately funded and it has a work force of approximately 60,000 volunteer firefighters. Wildfires are a big problem here, sorta like in California. Recently the CFA has had a lot of complaints from the volunteers about their training. Our project is to somehow evaluate those concerns and complaints; determining approximately how widespread they are, what exactly are the concerns and complaints, and what the sources of the problems are. In order to complete this task we'll be using several different methods. The first couple of weeks will be spent interviewing training instructors, conducting volunteer firefighter focus groups, and meeting with the CFA's Managers of Training and Development. The data collected from those methods will be used to create a phone and online survey of volunteer firefighters. From there we'll analyze the data, draw conclusions, and present a report to the CFA detailing our research and results.

After lunch, we met with John Butler and he gave us some useful insight to edit our interview plan with. For example, instead of asking the instructors which brigades do they train; John gave us a memo detailing what's called risk categories of brigades and we can get more useful information by asking them which risk categories of brigades they train. He also suggested that instead of asking about what the instructors knew of the volunteers' opinions during and after training, we ask about what the instructors knew of the volunteers' opinions during training and during assessment. After our meeting with John we spent another hour or so editing the plan and adding the privacy statement to it.

After we completed the interview plan we began working on our demographics targeting plan for our phone survey. Even though the phone survey is a couple of weeks off we need to begin working on the targeting plan right away because it's a crucial part of our project. Basically, for those of you who have taken statistics it's what is known as a stratified random sample. For those of you who haven't it creates a crossection of the sample being studied. For example if the CFA consists of 25% women then our sample should contain 25% women. The demographics we're targeting are gender, age, and region. Our targeted sample size is 250 people. We made a really cool table outlining how we plan obtain our target with all of the demographics represented. We got a report from human resources detailing the percentages of our demographics and from there it was just math.

The ride home was long and boring as usual. However did see some like 14 year old kids drinking SoCo and Cola cans. When we got back, Max and I had a meeting with our advisers to talk about methodology and our paper. It was boring and definately not useful. I swear Lemone and Salazar have to be the dumbest professors on campus and we end up with them as our advisers. After the meeting ended (7:30-8:00pmish) I went to finally get something to eat. We ran out of food for meals so it was everyone for themselves. I made ham and eggs which was ok. The best part about it was I didn't burn it or the food. A couple of us went out around 9pm to get some ice cream and explore a little. We got some ice cream and hit up china town. Lots of restaurants and live tanks. The china town aquarium was pretty cool. It made our bass tank this past summer look like a mansion. Fish we absolutely packed into tanks. Pretty funny. Went to bed early, around 11. I'm hoping to do more demographic targeting in work today and we have our first Sponsor and Adviser meeting today, which should be awful. Anyways I'll write more tomorrow, later.

p.s. I'll try to get pictures up soon but I don't have a cable for the camera so I'll have to buy one.