Make a Quid

Sorry for the long posts recently but I've been doing two days per post trying to catch up. I finally got my laptop today from work and I have an hour long commute each way so I'll plenty of time to write my posts. Once I catch up and start writing posts daily they'll get much shorter.

So I had previously finished up till Friday so I'll start there. Friday morning each group set out to find their work places and get set up. There are two groups with a total of five WPI students working at the CFA headquarters in Burrville, which is about an hour long tram ride. We found the place with minimumal difficulty and arrived at 9am. Our sponsors, John Butler and James Stitz, weren't in on Friday so we were led on a tour by one of their secretaries. The CFA headquarters is pretty much like any typical office. Cubicles, coffee stations, and water coolers etc. The only real exception is that they have this really cool command center for when crazy bush fires breakout. If you've ever seen the movie Apollo 13, which if you ask Steve is my favorite movie, it looks like their command center where everyone has a headset on, looks really tense, and everyone is looking at a really big screen. It was empty at the time but I could totally see people sitting there trying to make an oxygen filter out of duct tape and some coffee filters. Our office space is pretty nice. Luckily it's not a cubicle. It has big windows along with two desktops and two fancy telephones. The big dissapointment, however, was that they had nothing ready for us. We didn't have access cards, user names or passwords, laptops, or even our tram passes ready for us. We went to a nearby cafe for some lunch, where I had some sort of italian stuffed croissant, and we headed home.

I got off at the library stop and set up the blog. I checked my email and found out what my MQP will be. For those of you who don't know an MQP is sorta like your senior project at WPI. You sign up for a selection process and professors pick you. I ended up getting my second choice. I'll be working from WPI with the Army Airborne Division in Maryland on the design of a new transforming canopy parachute. I don't know much about the project yet but I assume the different canopies will be for high altitude and low altitude with some piloting capability. I'll have a project team of four people. I know all of them and I'm pretty excited to work on it next year. By the time I left the library it was time for dinner. Luckily, Putnam can cook and he made this delicious italian sun dried tomato chicken and ravioli meal.

Friday night we decided to try and find a bar that we had heard about called the Trader Bar. Jim, you'll like this concept. Basically each drink has a base price which fluctuates through out the night based upon demand. If you buy an American beer, the price of American beer will go up and the price of other beers will go down. So if you buy your drinks at the right time you can get a cheaper price. We got lost once, but after 30 mins of searching we eventually found it. The stock gag was kinda fun but definately would have been cooler if it were a bigger bar. American beer was down when we first got there but predictably sky rocketed after we brought 15 Americans to the bar. After the price of American beer went up I tried some New Zealand beer which wasn't bad. Anyways the gag was fun but the bar was much smaller than we expected so we still hadn't found the scale of nightlife we were looking for. We got home relatively early and watched Charlie's Angels (awful movie to watch with a bunch of engineers) with the girls on TV.

Saturday morning we woke up and went to the market to grab some breakfast. Our plan for the day was to go to the Yarra River in Melbourne where the Moomba festival was happening all weekend. Apparently it's a festival celebrating the diversity of the city. We got there and found the river banks packed with people. There were carnival rides and games, world championship water sking and wakeboarding on the river, skateparks, food and much more. We spent a good 4-5 hours there and it was a great time. We went back to the room and had some dinner and got ready to go out again. We were going to try a bar called The Joint on Saturday. The bouncer from the Trader Bar had told us about it. Apparently it was a hot spot for young people like us. We found it relatively easy. It was a pretty nice place. We found some of the cheapest beer prices we'd seen since arriving and there were a decent amount of people our age hanging out. We found a pool table and had a few rounds over some games of pool. The girls dragged us out to the dance floor, which was tiny. Danced for a little bit and met some Irish girls who were also studying abroad. They had been in Melbourne since January and we asked them where to go clubbing in the city. They said the best place in town is the region around St. Kilda where we had gone to the beach earlier. On the way back to the apartment we decided that we would plan a trip to St. Kilda for next weekend to check it out. Even though Monday is a holiday it would most likely be deserted on a Sunday based on what we'd seen earlier in the week.

We had Monday off, it was the Australian Veterans Day. So we decided to go to the beach. We wanted to try something different so we left for Williamstown Beach. It's about 45 mins away from Melbourne by train, it's a suburb of Melbourne. It was obsenely hot, about 37 degrees centigrade. When we got there the sun was oppressive and most of us were already burnt so we made sure to put on an excessive amount of sunscreen. Williamstown was a much cleaner beach and it was packed. We couldn't stay out of the water for more than 30 mins at a time because it was so hot. We spent about 3-4 hours there and headed back to the apartments for another boring orientation meeting. The rest of the night we just hung around, cleaned up the apartment, and got ready for our first real day of work. Oh, also I was watching the Australian Basketball finals and I saw some guy wearing a Uconn basketball t-shirt. By the way, Melbourne is up 2 games to 1 in a 5 game series.

Today we made it to work just over an hour, around 9. We found that our sponsors we still totally unprepared and no where to be seen. Throughout the day their secretaries and IT guys slowly fixed our problems. We got our tram passes,our logins,my laptop, and fixed IT issues all before 2. When they first brought me my laptop I just laughed. It was anchient. It ran windows 2000 millenium edition. It even had the little annoying paper clip guy in Word. Anyways, I told them I needed Microsoft Office 2003 and they were able to upgrade me with a much more modern laptop. We didn't have internet access until around 12:30 so we had basically nothing to do except wait for our sponsors. Max and I kicked some minesweeper ass for a couple of hours. Finally our sponsors showed up around 1pm. They seem like really cool guys and they're actually excited about our project. They took us out to lunch at a nearby cafe where I had some kalimari which was really good and we chatted about cultural differences and sports. When we got back to our office we talked about the project and their input will change some of our methodology drastically but it will help the project focus on what it should be which is the opinions of the volunteers. We set up a preliminary time line and got to work creating a interview plan for our first step, which is interviewing CFA training instructors. We finished a basic interview plan by 4pm and headed out around 4:30pm to get home around 5:30-6:00. Right now we're making some chili from stuff we bought at the market and preliminary plans for tonight are to head out to an area we haven't explored yet close to the river and maybe find a bar for a beer or two. Anyways I'm caught up now and now that I've got a laptop keeping up should be easy and the length of my posts will go down. OK, well I have to go help with dinner. Talk to you guys later.