Long-Awaited Update

I finally have some time to update all of my beloved fans of my progress. Actually, I’m siting in class right now and I’m very bored. The class is on probability. It makes sense to educate climate science grad students on probability, however, owing to our diverse backgrounds, it is also necessary to begin at the very beginning as not everyone is into maths in quite the way that I am. Right now, we are learning about calculating the probability of getting a sum total of 7 from rolling two 6-sided dice

I went to world championships in Cali, Colombia. This did not go well. It began rather ominously with the missing of a flight due to some rather incompetant miscommunication on the part of the early morning virgin blue domestic staff. I eventually… after a great deal of struggle… managed to get myself to Cali. I didn’t skate particularly well, but that was no surprise considering the amount of training that I had done (6 weeks). I had my camera, laptop and ipod stolen from my locked hotel room (which was, miraulously, still locked on my return) during the 30 minutes that it took for us to eat dinner. Various other things went badly in the running of the competition which will be outlined in more detailed in a strongly-worded letter/petition which I will be writing to the organisers. On a slightly more upbeat note, I did finish the marathon… all 42km of it without being lapped by the main peleton. No small achievement for a time trial specialist such as myself.

New York is a pretty crazy place, and for at least the next twelve months, I will call it home. I touched down at about 1am on Monday the 27th of August. By sunset on Monday, I had brought a new Laptop, registered my existence at the international students and scholars office, applied for a social security number, obtained a Columbia (the university, not the country) ID card and eaten at least one meal. There are few places in the world where so many things can be done in one day. Getting an apartment was another story altogether and I was without a home until only last Tuesday. This was a little tricky because I didn’t have any furniture until the following Friday. Lucky for my friend Peter McNamara who was coming down to watch some football who would arrive on Saturday.

My academic life is certainly a highlight of recent events. My electives are “Introduction to International Development”, “Contemporary Diplomacy” and “Human Rights and Development Policy”. Those with whom I have spoken recently will note that I was supposed to choose two electives and above are listed three. Despite being swamped with reading, I have decided to overload (I may un-decide soon…) mostly due to the fact that my climate science core subjects (like my probability class) are, for mathematically trained people such as myself, extremely straightforward.

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a means to connect my “spare” point-and-shoot camera to my computer, so those of you who have been waiting eagerly for photos will have to wait a little longer. I will probably not replace my DSLR arrangement for quite some time, at least until I can get some of the insurance money back from the theft in Colombia (the country).