Personal Stories

Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue14 1–31 March 2021

I was born and raised in Perth and until the age of 12 lived in the Suburb of Bassendean. Then my family moved to a town just outside Perth called Mundijong.

Growing in Bassendean of course meant I followed Swans Districts in the WAFL but if I recall correctly they were cellar dwellers most of the time.

I went to Armadale High school so imagine my suprise when I started working at Mt Stromlo and discovered there are other alumni from ASHS working here too. After High school I did a Bachelor of Science at UWA majoring in Chemistry and followed that up with a PhD looking into the magnetization distribution in transition metal complexes.

So after wasting several years and making myself unemployable I somehow managed to get a job in the University of Florence Chemisty Department working on magnetic exhange in large transition metal clusters and making myself even more unemployable.  It was while working in Florence that I first started getting involved in system admin work.

After that we returned to Perth briefly before I got a Postdoc at ANU in the RSC working for Richard Bramley on zero-field magnetic resonance.  This was interesting work for several reasons firstly because it scanned microwave frequency measuring absorption instead on the usual practice of having a fixed frequency and using an applied magnetic field to change the energy levels between states. Secondly, because there were no commercial zero-field magnetic resonance instruments and it was all put together mostly from off the shelf components and a few bits and pieces made in the RSC workshops.  This is where I started getting into Linux,  because my supervisor said "Thou shalt progam in C" which I didn't mind except for the fact that the first time I tried to use a C compiler in DOS/Windows for Workgroups, it barfed when I tried to declare a small array (something about far pointers).  So rather than learn how to use Microsoft C compilers I downloaded a linux distribution, which consisted of close to a hundred disk images, copied all the images to floppies and finally installed Linux, which involved swapping floppies every five or ten minutes.  From my perspective this was time well spent.

After finishing at the RSC I moved next door to the Chemistry Department and worked on DFT calculations of transition metal clusters.  I worked on some simple model systems for Photosystem II.  At this point I was completely unemployable so I applied for a job doing IT support in the RSC.

We have a cat that up until a few months ago was allowed to roam freely around the neighbourhood but is now in the process of being converted to an indoor cat. This isn't because we live in a cat containment suburb but because our cat decided to bring home an eastern brown snake to play with it just inside the back door.  Both the snake and the cat survived the encounter.

My favourite Buffy episode is "Hush" and my favourite TV series is Firefly.

 

Christopher Delfs