Over the last month, I’ve taken Martin ‘Joey’ Schulze’s excellent Debian Weekly News format and done the same for OpenSolaris. I think it’s proved pretty useful so far, and I’ve been motivated enough to continue them. The results are here, here, here and here. Thanks Martin for the inspiration – owe you a beer, or many beers!
Had a relatively quiet St.Patrick’s day this year, given that I had a cricket final on Saturday morning – The Bog was a little disappointing this year, employing a band who failed to grok that the crowd may actually want to listen to Irish music, rather than the attempted Oasis drivel they subjected us to. And of course, when they did switch over to a bit of U2, they absolutely killed it. Patrick’s blog has a bunch of pictures. Lost the cricket game, felt generally low about life, and at the last minute headed out with Patrick and Mark to watch The Aristocrats at the local film festival which was pretty amusing, if a little sick.
Watched Ireland winning the Triple Crown [Goode blamed ‘Luck of the Irish] early on Sunday morning over at Pete’s house, complete with full Irish Breakfast. After, headed out to the Port Hills and the Tors crag with Patrick, for a bit of a climb. Then over to the Arts Center for a quick Dux pizza and beer, and to watch The Collective, a film about mountain biking – pretty cool if you’re into that stuff, although I can never really see myself quite at that level.
A couple of days ago I finished putting together some of the footage that I took down in Stewart Island. The result is a little 2 minute video here. I still need to figure out some better utilities to convert the high format QuickTime version into a decent quality video – some day I’ll get to it. In the meantime, suffer in your jocks, and enjoy one of the nicest places in New Zealand! [Contains minor nudity].
Marek sent around a great set of blog links – The Cost of Bootstrapping Your App [Part 1, Part 2], an interesting read. Eric Lowe [Solaris kernel developer] also has an interesting piece about the role of documentation in a development process – it’s a good read. Had a successful TVIC last night in the Sunny Garden – people even turned up this time around, and was a good night of food, beer and geek talk.
Had a great weekend climbing up at Mount Sommers with Patrick, Steve, Mark and Blair the other week. Mount Sommers is one of those crags that few Kiwi’s go to on account of the spectacularly shitty walk in. The walk in was about 3 hours, but with heavy packs, whinging Irishmen and darkness it wasn’t much fun for anyone. Fortunately the climbing made up for it. It’s the first time that I’ve trad climbed for about 2 and a half years – it’s just like riding a bicycle, you never really forget how to place gear. It’s more like riding a bicycle without a helmet, you’re just a little bit more cautious.
We did some pretty fantastic routes up the columned faces – mostly lower grade 16’s and 17’s. Steve joined us later on that afternoon, and did a couple of sport routes on the lower pinnacles. Patrick has a few more pictures on his blog. Check out those parallel lines!
Marney mailed today saying that she was leaving Sun – pity, she was one of those really great people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with, although our interaction wasn’t what you’d call frequent. Best of luck Marney!
On her office whiteboard, she’s had a list of questions on it for a long, long time. She calls it the Bonehead List because the questions weren’t rocket science – more often than not they were difficult to answer and rarely asked. For the most part, I think these are an excellent guide to software development. I figured they were worth a blog and pass this on. Marney takes credit for compiling all of them –
Seven years baby and I’ve come out the other side! It’s been my new year’s resolution to organize a dentist appointment this year, after a 7 year absence. It’s pretty embarassing, but somewhere along the line I got this mild fear of dentists – I think it might have been when they pulled out my wisdom teeth causing my first overnight stay in a hospital when I was young, and many tears. Anyway, having turned 28 on Monday, I finally went – and apart from a ‘we’ll give you the benefit of doubt’, things went well, really well. I’m now safe at home, and don’t feel like I have to hide under the bed anymore. Bonus is that I still don’t have any fillings.
Watching late night MTV while reading mail, I came across Jose Gonzalez – really nice acoustic guitar melodies. Predictably, Heartbeats is my favourite and a track I’ve heard before but not associated with. Much like David Kitt in many, many ways. Mick, if you’re reading this, you’d like this one.
Arguably New Zealand’s biggest website, TradeMe has just been sold to Fairfax for a cool $625 million – fortunately Fairfax are the crowd that do the mostly excellent smh.com.au, so it should be in good hands. Probably a bargain too!
I don’t think this blog entry could ever really do the island justice and indeed, Patrick’s blog gives a much better description of the wonderful week we all had down in Stewart Island [and all links are to his great photos]. Such a wonderful place, completely unspoiled and remote – quite like some of the Arann islands back home in many ways.
We packed into a van, complete with deckchairs and made our way down to Bluff, as far south as you can go. Our home was to be the Crystal Voyager, a converted fishing boat. I’ve never slept on board a boat of this size, and that first night, with a strong gale outside, it was a pretty surreal experience. The next morning we headed over to Stewart Island, with some taking the cheap seats at the back.
We had packed some kayaks on board for some paddling. It was a great chance to tag-team with Dave again. We had done some sea kayaking over in Thailand, and I’m really starting to get a bit of a buzz about it. Looking forward to hitting the rivers later this month. Along with Warrick and Dave, I think my technique has significantly improved. We just need to get the rolling right, and we had some fun times trying out some deep water rescues in the various bays. Along with the kayaking, there was plenty of tramping, drinking gin and wine, and eating venison and paua that some hunters gave us that they couldn’t store.
Another absolute highlight was the fishing. Having moored in one of the bays, Gordon, Barry and myself headed out in the kayaks to see what we could catch. After a pretty frustrating hour or two, we finally decided to bait up the lines with some mussel and limpet – a couple of hours later, we had a few spotties that would do great bait for some larger fish. A couple of days later, Warrick and myself headed out in the dingy and had a magical couple of hours – drift after drift, with tingling lines and Warrick whacking them over the head with the end of an oar. Lots of fresh cod for the morning, and Wayne duely battered them up and cooked some hot chips. Yummy. I think I’ll have to take the rod out on a few more trips. The fishing didn’t stop there [Barracuda and Shark makes good bait], and we came up with fresh fillets from about 50+ cod to divide up and take home – lots of nice filleting practice too, which was cool.
