The Giant Magellan Telescope

As you’d have known by now, my laptop is suffering from a problem that manages to display a myriad of inexplicable distorted colours that pretty much screws up whatever I see, which meant that editing pictures is a bitch and I’m going by intuition – and I have no absolute clue at all if my pictures have turned out nice or downright ugly, plus everytime I’m on Skype to use the webcam, friends and family alike are Smurfs, in that their skin colour have taken a blue tinge.

I went to attend the RMIT Orientation on Wednesday, but on arriving 20 minutes late than the scheduled 11am (I was actually on the phone with an Optus representative initially to cancel my plan, but the girl on the other line suggested that I downgrade my plan instead – long story short, I proceeded with the cancellation but after about 10 minutes decided to downgrade instead wtf. The guy on the other line was like, “So you called earlier to cancel and now you called again to cancel the cancellation?” lol), it was so chokeful of people that the lecture theatre was filled up completely, and the rest had to be turned away and asked to come back on Friday.

Met up with Ethan and Alex at about 12pm+, we ate the free lunch provided, walked around CBD to go to a 3 shop (a telecommunications company) as Alex wanted to ask some questions, then I dropped by at the Melbourne International Film Festival’s ticket counter at Forum Theatre and purchased two tickets (initially wanted to purchase 1) to Humpday and Love Exposure, the latter being an almost 4-hour Japanese movie – I’ve only vague ideas what it’s going to be like, plus the imdb rating is fairly high at 8.8 at the time of writing, so it sounds good enough to me. Each ticket costs AUD$14 at a concession price, and after conversion, yeah, bleeding expensive indeed – but Matt advised me that if I don’t go for it, the only memory I’d have of Melbourne is me being in my room lol, which I thought was rather true.

Ethan and I eventually just walked around Flagstaff Gardens, one of my favourite spots in Melbourne:

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#6 Moi.

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#8 The spaghetti I cooked that night. It actually tasted okay with the exception of the spaghetti which was still a tad bit too hard – managed to get the right softness a few nights later.

Met up with Sarah, Jean Hwei, their friend Min Li (sp?), and Kai Zhou on Thursday – I was actually late wtf despite being there in CBD a bit early ‘cause I uh, turned to the wrong end of Lonsdale St and found out too late that QV (out meet-up point) was at the other end of the street, 10-15 minutes away by foot. -___- We then went to:

#9 The same Vietnamese shop on Swanston St that Ghavin and Nat brought me too the first day I was there haha.

#10 Sarah!

We then moved to an underground café (literally in the basement) at Bourke St, right opposite RMIT Building 108, which supposedly sells pretty good bubble tea.

#11 Min Li and Jean Hwei.

#12 Sarah and me.

#13 Kai Zhou and Sarah.

On Friday, I missed out on the 2nd Orientation ‘cause I woke up too late, so I went for the MATE programme (a mentor/mentee sorta thing) instead and met up with Ethan there – befriended an Iranian dude called Ali, who at one point told me about a free astronomy lecture which would be delivered at the University of Melbourne.

Matt also taught me how to cook an omelette, so uh my 2nd try on that night netted this result:

#14 Omelette with mushrooms and minced turkey, with toasted bread.

It actually didn’t taste half-bad. :)

At about 6.40pm, I left my place and hitched the free City Circle tram to Swanston St, then walked all the way to the University of Melbourne at Carlton – had to stop and ask a few people along the way before I was led to the Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre A. I didn’t manage to get through Ali’s phone, so I chose what I thought was the perfect location, sat two seats away from someone.. and realised a few minutes later when he called to me that he was indeed Ali wtf.

Now, what’s most amusing to me was the fact that the average age of the attendees there was between 50-60, the men were balding white-haired people and with the exception of the occasional kid, it does look like as if both Ali and I were the only young people around. I’ve never felt more nerdy wtf.

I drifted in and out of sleep during the first quarter or so of the lecture when I felt incessantly sleepy and tired and the lecturer was talking about the history of telescopes. When he finally talked about the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which could take unprecedented high quality images of the outer space and the universe, I finally sat up and pay attention. Much of the lecture was technical (which explains the tremendous turnout of senior citizens wtf), especially since the both of us are not from the physics field, but it was still interesting all the same.

I learned that the GMT will only be finished in its construction at 2016 or thereabouts, and that it’s also a time machine of sorts because (now I found this interesting because I’ve never actually thought about it) of the speed of light is known – we were given the following example: if you look at the moon, you’re looking at the moon as it was a few seconds ago (because of the time required by the reflected light of the moon to reach Earth), if you look at Jupiter you’d have looked at it a few minutes ago, the list goes on.

Very interesting stuff.

The lecture ended at about 9pm, I hitched a tram illegally to Swanston St, and initially waited for a tram to ride on at the La Trobe St / Swanston St stop, but in the end after about 10-15 minutes when no tram arrived, I walked back instead – I found out through the Metlink website that night that no tram was running that route at night, and I assume every night too. =/

I spent my entire weekend (literally nearly two full days) researching about flying to New York and the US visa it requires (and it’s giving me a headache now), after having a stroke of this idea when I was walking alone – for some reason, being alone made me think a lot (as if I’d otherwise never think of), and seriously, thinking was what I’ve been doing a lot recently and I think it’s taking a toll on my mental health.