Life is so good, it gets better every day

Software Freedom Day

The Wellingtonites, led by my very own Jayne, launched their initiative for Software Freedom Day. The event will, predictably, held on Saturday 20th September at the Convention Centre. We’re planning on having a hackfest organized by SuperHappyDevHouse (and br3nda), an installfest organized by WellyLug, and best of all, an open source BarCamp.

Really looking forward to this, and hoping a large crowd get out and register for this event. It’ll be a lot of fun. I’ll be doing a quick session on OpenSolaris, DTrace, and anything else I’m asked to do (perhaps an impromtu GNOME session?).

Hoping this is going to charge up the other teams around NZ into organizing events!

Could it get any worse?

The best bit about having a house right on the shores of Lake Dunstan is the ability to decide at 7pm to take the kayak out, grab a rod, and try fishing for an hour before the crew catering begins. The worst bit about being right besides the shores is the poor expectations you set yourself thinking it’s time to catch one of the buggers. After trying a variety of methods (spinning, trolling, fly) I’ve yet to see a rise. The kayak has worked out surprisingly well, though proves to have quite a fast drift – which is nice for covering a lot of ground, but an absolute pain having to paddle into the driving wind to start a new one. We’re here for another week and a bit – fingers crossed for better times ahead.

Food and data wrangling at the OK Corral

Jayne and I are down in central New Zealand, taking a little time out of our busy Wellington lives to help her brother Mike, and partner Inge, shoot a western, of the Pavlova variety. When we first got asked to help, I imagined both of us, sitting on the porch of some gold mining town, rocking in the chairs watching some stranger walk into town. Unfortunately our first movie roles would have to take a back seat for another while and we were propositioned to be part of the catering staff for the movie.

Jayne’s done a pretty phenomenal job pulling together the plans 3 weeks worth of food for our time here, with us putting out breakfast, lunch and dinner for a core crew of 18 people, and the occasional posse. It’s been pretty tough trying to find the variety to keep the hardest working crew with satisfied bellies, but we’re getting there, on our second week in. We’ve both lost our appetites, but the crew are liking what we’ve done so far.

I’ve also been data wrangling for them, copying the data off the camera cards onto multiple USB drives. It’s mostly been without a hitch, though did lose one filesystem (HFS+) due to some sort of weird super block error, and didn’t manage to fix it – I bet Apple are looking forward to using ZFS soon.

The shooting has gone really well, and I’ve had the fortune of being able to review most of the shots each evening. Matt put together a quick first cut for a few scenes during the weekend, and the result looked sensational.

We’re now down in Cromwell, housed beside Lake Dunstan, and have full wireless access – it’s been a good chance to catch up on work from the previous week, as Tekapo turned out to be a bit of a melon in terms of network access (though thanks to the lovely Jenny for sharing her house for a few days). It’s nearly 1am here, so time to hit the sack. MI Films coming to a cinema near you – Jayney’s already working on the marketing campaign!

Digital Future Summit

Day 2 at the Digital Summit. Hasn’t quite had the same fizz as yesterday morning, but enjoyable nonetheless. Didn’t think Cullen was half as good as Cunliffe. As usual, there’s some random babbling notes from today too.

Digital Future Summit

I’m attending the Digital Future Summit up in Auckland today and tomorrow. While not quite as interactive as I’d like (and seriously, there’s a lot of paper materials for a digital summit), it’s been a pretty fascinating set of speakers. I’ve been uploading a set of random babbling notes from time to time.

Back from Wanaka

Just back from an extended weekend down in the south island. We flew down to Christchurch, and hooked up with Jayne’s sister and family and drove down to Wanaka. The house was pretty excellent, and plenty spacious for the group of us. We opted to snowboard down in Cardrona, which seemed ideal for a family environment and relatively easy slopes. The snow conditions proved to be pretty good, and had 3 excellent days boarding. Patrick was down there too with his brother and sister in law, and we also caught up briefly with Carole. Fortunately Sunday morning greeted us with a fresh dump of snow, about 15cm, and spent the entire day with Brett absolutely munting ourselves (and my board) on a whole heap of drop-offs and jumps. Great fun, and mostly soft landings though ended up the day with a little concussion, dehydration, and sun burn. Great times and feel like my boarding is improving, but was slightly disappointed by the 40cm dump the day we had to leave though!