Hello. Welcome to my blog. Thanks for reading my first post. I've started this blog to let people know about what I'm doing in Antarctica without sending mass emails - which I regularly delete when others send them to me but then feel guilty that I haven't taken an interest in their lives. I guess there's actually very little difference between this and the mass email, but it appeals to me more.

Ramble.

Having spoken to a couple of people who write/wrote/considered writing a blog, I've realised it can be tough talking about your life or opinions over an extended period of time without boring people to death and sounding massively self-indulgent. I bore people and am pretty self absorbed anyway though. This could be a bad thing. Oh well.

On with the blog.

I'm currently a PhD student at UCL working on ANITA (ANtarctic Transient Antenna - worse acronyms are out there, trust me). ANITA is an ultra high energy neutrino detector, it is balloon borne and will

circle the Antarctic continent for around a month, carried by seasonal winds. Basically it uses an array of horn antennas to detect radio emission from the Antarctic ice. When a UHE neutrino enters the ice it could interact and cause a cascade of particles. The idea is that these will emit strongly enough in radio frequencies. It is these very short (nanosecond) pulses that

ANITA will hopefully find.

Right now I'm in Christchurch, New Zealand. I've just been for my cold weather clothing issue, much fun pulling on and off thermal stuff, and have also had a flu shot which made me bleed. There really isn't much to write about the trip yet though, I haven't had much time to look around, only to buy some rather posh whisky (to keep me going out there when all I can get in the way of alcohol is piss beer) and some relatively OK prices Oakleys ... backup sunglasses indeed.

Now my computer is running low on battery and I don't have an adapter. Shit. So I guess I'll write again soon!