Back from Conference

The Australian conference was well worth going to. I met some interesting people from Australia and around the world. My talk won me the Alan H. Gibson Memorial Prize for best student oral presentation.

The weather was poor for most of the week, but the day after the conference the weather cleared, and I went sightseeing. Above is a picture of the "three sisters" rock formation.

Australian Nitrogen Fixation Conference

Tomorrow I leave on the plane for Sydney, where (at Katoomba in the Blue Mountains) I will attend the 14th Australian Nitrogen Fixation Conference. Here I will be giving a talk on my PhD research.

Snail Attack!

I have had strange snail bites in my mail for weeks. Now I have finally caught the culprits.

iframe

Thanks to the wonders of iframe you can now read this blog from within my news page at www.rhizobia.co.nz/news.html.

New site design

I have changed the design for my website (www.rhizobia.co.nz) slightly to a new colour scheme. Hopefully it will make it nicer to read, although I am not sure about the background at the moment.

Sinorhizobium to Ensifer

This blog replaces the news page on my website. One major change I have made is changing all Sinorhizobium names to Ensifer. Ensifer is the earlier heterotypic synonym and thus takes priority (Young, 2003). This means that all Sinorhizobium spp. must be renamed as Ensifer spp. according to the Bacteriological code.

Reference:

Young J. M. (2003). The genus name Ensifer Casida 1982 takes priority over Sinorhizobium Chen et al. 1988, and Sinorhizobium morelense Wang et al. 2002 is a later synonym of Ensifer adhaerens Casida 1982. Is the combination "Sinorhizobium adhaerens" (Casida 1982) Willems et al. 2003 legitimate? Request for an Opinion. Int J Syst Evol Microbiol. 53, 2107-2110. (IJSEM Link)

Matt's Wedding

From left to right: Dave, Gareth, Matt, Dean, and Me at Matt's wedding

Bibliography database

My latest addition to my website is a HTML dump of my endnote bibliography database, currently this has 466 papers listed. These are some of the papers I will cite in my PhD thesis, however the list is incomplete.

If I have a paper missing that you think I should have read, please tell me about it.

10,000 Visits

My website http://www.rhizobia.co.nz has now had over ten thousand visits since August 15, 2003. Most popular are my rhizobia taxonomy page and my step by step modeltest guide.

Spam and Viruses

This graph shows the number of spam and viruses I have recieved over the last ten months.

Three Years

On the first of March 2002, three years ago I officially started my PhD thesis. Now it has officially ended, along with my pay.

Fortunately I am nearly finished the experimental work, and then will just have the writing to go.

Gmail invites

Gmail is a free web based email system that gives you 1000 MB of storage, but is invite only - currently you can't sign up. However, I now have 50 invites to give away. Leave me a message if you want one (with email address).

Skype

I found out today about an interesting program called Skype http://www.skype.com. It is a program that allows you to talk (actually talk not type) over the internet at very high quality. But its most interesting thing is that can call land line phones as well (for a few cents a minute). My Skype user name is: onco_p53

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