Life is so good, it gets better every day

Mount Sommers – Climbing

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’s Bonehead List

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 –

1. Is it accessible to people with disabilities or people in special situations? (Trivial example: can you run it without a mouse?)
2. Is it fully internationalized, with a localization plan?
3. Is someone else in SMI doing anything like this? Might someone have useful insights?
4. Who is affected by or has an interest in this? How are the needs of internal or external partners met by this?
5. Who are the users? What problem in their lives are we trying to address? How will this feature/product/system achieve that?
6. Specifically, concretely, and measurably: What are the goals, at what cost? Especially: What does “ease of use” mean for this?
7. How do we want customers to perceive this? What are the marketing messages that our design should support?
8. Two years from now, how will this be used?
9. Can or should this be done in phases?
10. What are the internal and external dependencies? What other products, platforms, or technologies are required for this to work? What are the detailed implications of those dependencies?
11. How do users transition from what they’re using to this new feature/product/system?
12. How do open source considerations affect this? How will existing open source communities react to this? Will this accommodate open source or third-party apps running on or with it?
13. Describe the boundaries of this feature, application or system you are designing. What’s on the other side of the boundary? (For example, how did the user start this feature/app or enter this world? What happens when he or she stops using it?)
14. What aspects of this might be patentable?
15. How do competitive products do this?

Life Achievement

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.

Jose Gonzalez

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.

TradeMe Traded

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!

Stewart Island Frolics

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.

Apricot Seeds

These days you take everything with a pinch of salt, so if you’re reading this, you should probably do similar. All of us had the pleasure of Dennis’ company and conspiracy theories last week on Stewart Island [blog to follow]. He showed us a bunch of documentaries about how 911 was a conspiracy which proved to be pretty amusing. I’ve not really heard much of this before, but certainly the evidence seems to stack up for something more sinister. He also introduced a whole heap of facts about common law, money and other stuff that I was so overwhelmed with, that I’ve promptly forgotten.

One of the more interesting theories was that by eating apricot seeds you could basically stop a cancer from growing – the fact that more people are developing cancer presumably being due to a chance in our diets and not eating as many seeds in various breads. Dennis swore by it when he was diagnosed with cancer in the bone. Of course why we don’t have a modern day cure for cancer? Well that’s another conspiracy theory….

An interesting and eye opening week.

She Wants Me

shewantsme is another craze [with a bit of a family connection I’ll explain sometime later] spreading right across Australia and New Zealand, and maybe the rest of the world. You can way more fun with this than those rip-off Armstrong style wristbands that tell you that you’ll stay a virgin for the rest of your life or some other silly motto. Mine arrives in the post next week.

The Love is Back!

It’s the middle of February. Who would have thought that in 4 months time we’ll all be flying over to Vilanova i la Geltru for GUADEC 2006. The website is a little hard to navigate still, but if you haven’t created a profile there, you should do so now and start your GUADEC FEVER.

The call for presentations is also open, so if you would like to give a session, login and submit a session. I’ve already done mine – The GNOME Love Wall is back for GUADEC 2006.

Life Bits

My parents dropped over to New Zealand for 10 days, and we’ve toured a little around the top end of the south island. It was lovely to see them, and for the most part we got pretty good weather during their time here. We headed off on Friday over to Hanmer Springs, a quiet little town with some thermal hot pools to dip in – much more commercial in contrast to Maruia Springs, a Japanese bath house further along the Lewis Pass. After that, we headed up to Nelson for a couple of days, and Dad got some time on the river fly fishing, and a days walk on the Abel Tasman. Following that, we headed over to Blenheim for another couple of days. Blenheim is Marlborough country, so not only do you have the fantastic sounds and a days walk on the Queen Charlotte track [we got drowned on], but also some amazing vineyards. I feel like I’ve been steadily drinking since November last year, so may cut back on the juice over the next couple of weeks.

At LCA this year, my mobile phone died. Jeff kindly donated his old mobile phone the last time my mobile died, but I figured it was about time to spend some cash on a new mobile, and solve the problem of not having a small pocket sized digital camera. I’ve always been a Nokia fan but having had a look at their recent efforts I was pretty disappointed [I’m loving their tablet though]. Instead, on the advice of Dave, I went for a Sony Ericsson W800i. With a 2 megapixel camera, and handy things like using a Duo memory stick [same as my PSP, bonus!], and LED light, and some other nice bits and pieces, I’m mostly happy with the phone. Can’t seem to turn on vibrate alert for texts though…