We danced warm cheek to cold cheek.

Update:Thesis reviews here. Some choice excerpts:

• "This thesis presents a number of important new results relevant to the analysis and design of communication systems. Along the way fundamental techniques for dealing with random matrices are developed, techniques which are significant in their own right, and which should prove useful in many other application areas."
  
• "The results from this thesis have been published in the best journal of the field of information and communications theory and in numerous conferences. Overall, the thesis represents an outstanding achievement, well above what would be expected of PhD ..."
  
• "This thesis is a truly outstanding piece of work and I have no hesitation in recommending the degree of PhD be awarded. If there is a prize for the PhD thesis at the University of Sydney then I believe this thesis would be a very strong candidate."
  
• "I have been impressed by this simple, but not straightforward at all, approach. (Dr. Cok) has demonstrated in this chapter that he is a creative researcher."
  
• "This thesis is an exciting piece of work. It contains many new results that have important engineering implications, as well as new mathematical methods to study the limit eigenvalue distribution of certain random matrix ensembles. The manuscript has been prepared with great care, and is easy to read. Almost all the technical proofs are sound and rigorous, a remarkable fact for an engineering oriented work. This is one of the best theses I have had to review."
  

Toffee caught her nail in a fence when I chucked a pine cone for her, and she had to go to the vet and get it clipped off and bandaged up. Aww! Injured animals are so cute it almost makes it ok to belt them up.

The lowdown: I've been fencing for the last two weeks or so and I was too buggered to update. Now I'm in Sydney, trying frantically to get this book chapter done.

Last Sunday however, I went to the Gay Fair Day in Victoria park in Sydney. I had a smashing afternoon sitting in the sun drinking with Pete, Phil, and others. After half of bottle of JB and a longneck each, we went for booze reinforcements and bought a bottle of wild turkey, plus a bottle of absinthe. We walked to a makeshift gay club in the park, sat down, then Pete and I drank the whole bottle of absinthe very quickly. After this, I have simply no memories. Pete claims that we then drank the Turkey, but I have no memory of opening the bottle, and therefore have been ripped off. Now, I have a lot of cuts and bruises on my head, including a big whack on my temple, and significant memory loss. Therefore, I can only assume that I fell over and knocked myself out. Pete says Paramedics were trying to take me away, but he was pretty sure that I was fine. Apparently my comatose body was somehow lifted into Phil's car by several people. The next memory I have is waking up in Pete's garden, with:

• concussion (presumably),
  
• missing shirt,
  
• missing wallet,
  
• missing thongs,
  
• cracked screen on my phone,
  
• all the signs of having been hosed off recently,
  
• a strange series of measles-like dots on my left forearm,
  
• missing all the stuff out of the front pocket of my bag, which included a nasal hair trimmer, a bunch of awesome condoms I found on the ground at the BDO, and all the receipts from the reef trip, and my Perth conference. Uh-oh. Luckily I had removed my passport from that compartment earlier that day. Cripes.
  

My phone was ringing as I lay on the cement, and I answered it. This is an accurate transcript of the conversation:

• W: Where are you?
  
• M: I'm in a paddock.
  
• W: What? Whereabouts? Are you ok?
  
• M: I'm fine, I'm in a paddock.
  
• W: Which paddock? Who are you with?
  
• M: I'm in a paddock with my Uncle Andrew, down the road from Pete's house. Don't worry, we're fine.
  
• W: (hysterical sounds, during which I get up and walk into the house and start calling everyone bastards, and asking where my bottle of Turkey has gone)
  

This is called drinking too much. I do not condone this behaviour.

So yeh. Less of that and more nerding it up. Peace out.