A visit to AAEE2015, Sydney U, Macquarie U, and Saluda

This is the first trip I have taken without carrying a separate camera; I used only the camera in my iPhone. Not even as good as the AW100, but easy to carry and always there.

Just before I left, school ended for Merinda for the year---her penultimate year of high school. We celebrated with margheritas, the previous trip having replenished the prickly-pear supply.

The AAEE conference was held in "Melbourne", or so the blurb went. In reality it was in Torquay, a coastal surfing town about 20 minutes south of Geelong, which, although billed on occasion as a "suburb" of Melbourne, is in reality an hour's drive south of Melbourne already. Driving 90 minutes from Melbourne's Tullamarine airport was the only realistic option.

All that said, Torquay is near Deakin University, and the resort, although outrageously expensive, is luxurious. Not brilliant value, mind, but very pleasant. My room had a huge and well-appointed bathroom, a huge main room, and great views, especially if you like surf and golf.
I don't.
As it happened, I was unable to book the cheapest rooms for my whole stay, and I had to move rooms. The expensive ones were, as far as I could establish, exactly the same as the $50-cheaper ones, but one floor up and provided with a cube of bath salts. The iPhone performs well in sunlight for sure.

To give some idea of how close this isn't to a city, this is a picture of the Geelong South railway station. Note the single track arrangement looking towards Melbourne. I drove for about 25 minutes to reach this proximity, and then rode the train for about an hour to get to Melbourne Central.

Veni, vidi, visa, and then I met up with my friend Susan who now lives in Brunswick. It was good to catch up after so long.

The AAEE conference was better than I had anticipated. It was good to see colleagues, almost as good conversation as FIE earlier in the year, and Antipodean-centric.

It was also interesting to see that now universities such as Sydney and ANU, who had once no need to bother with teaching quality, were represented. Even UWS, er WUS, was there. Of course UTS was there. No Macquarie. No Curtin (I think). Quite a bit of NZ, too.

In Sydney I met first with my collague Alistair at Sydney. Alistair was once a student to whom I lectured, and is now one of the biomedical people on staff in the EE school. Later that day we went to the now well known EE lunch, attended (almost) exclusively by ex-EE people. On the second occasion, my colleague and old friend Eric came too. At immediate left you see Eric, my original supervisor Godfrey, and Vic who once lectured me in power drives (or something like that). Immediately below, Vic and Hansen. Below Bob, Keith and the rest of the troops.

This institution (the lunch, not the university) is venerable and magnificent.


My visit to Macquarie U was very exciting. They seem to have a lot of money for research-related things at the moment. (Don't talk about teaching.) Tony has just had screened rooms installed. These are real, effective, working screened rooms, unlike the ones at Waikato which were designed by people who do not appear to have known what they were doing, are subject to no particular RF specifications of which I am aware, and were installed by the plain-vanilla university tradespeople. The Waikato ones look like ordinary rooms wrapped in tin foil and provided with an isolating transformer. A Sydney barrister friend was once involved in a law suit around the failure of screened rooms ordered by some embassy, and knowing how mercilessly obliterated he is likely to have left his clients' adversaries I reckon there's a few people in Sydney who do now know just what "screened room" really means. Those guys may have built these rooms.

The new MU screened room has proper double-run electromagnetic spring seals, lever-seal door latches, and line filters with specified attenuation, if not from "dc to daylight" at least from 14kHz. We tested our mobiles. They lost signal completely, even the iPhones, WiFi, G4, LTE, the lot, and base stations are pretty much close enough to lick.


I walked the new Sydney version of the High Line in Manhattan. Not in the same league, but very pleasant nonetheless. There is a huge number of UTS buildings around that precinct. This is their business school.


In the mean time, there is the Sydney food... the food and the friends I miss. Ming is faring OK, though the hunts for that missing word are a sight, aphasia lives.


We started off with cocktails, I suppose we better finish with them. I arrived back in Hamilton late in the evening, and my family had waited for me to have dinner. Merinda made the cocktails. It was good to be home.