Firstly – climbing. Headed climbing outside (in Christchurch) with Julia for my first time since the earthquakes. Most of the crags have been closed because of rockfall hazard, but they’ve made a couple of them safe – so off we went. You can still see the rocks across the summit road where they fell in February?

Still, it was a great days climbing… lovely to be outside again.

Next, my first ever foray into the world of rhubarb and apple crumble (an unmitigated success)

Finally.. I’ve spent the last month or so (again, with lots of help from Paddy and Becks) working up to getting the word out about Snowpool. The first attempt at which was going to the CSA Ski Sale and handing out flyers.

Beck helped out with the graphic design and so we had flyers (and hoodies) to give out / show off. I’d ordered 1000 stickers from the US () which is a great site. I uploaded the image, they had a proof ready within an hour and printed within 2 days. Then it went to USPS to (priority) ship to New Zealand 7-10 days… and it arrived 24 days later one day after the ski sale. More than slightly irritating. Anyway, stickermule kindly gave me a discount off the next purchase, and life goes on with slightly more stickers than I was expecting to have left!

I’ve made video’s to show ski fields how to take info from Snowpool and put it into their websites and twitter, facebook etc. It’s quite ridiculous how hard it is to get the ski fields to do this. I mean.. here’s a service that will

• Save people money
• Be more environmentally friendly
• Get more people up the hills to their fields if they help promote
• Less wear and tear on their roads

And probably a lot of other reasons… you think they’d be proactive about it. But no. It’s completely ridiculous.

Anyway, rant over… hopefully it’ll be a great ski season… I’m intruiged to see whether all this marketing will give a real boost to the numbers. We’ll see.

The Dance-o-mat

This was our route for a two day tramp over Easter. I spent the other two days working on Snowpool a bit (yes, it is rather all consuming… but I love it!) Sylvia came along for the tramp too which was excellent. She took me on one of my first tramps back in 2004! 2004… I really have been here a while.

Anyway, some pictures.

There was quite a bit of river hopping getting to Hamilton Hut.. It was quite busy as it was Easter. There were hunters (even one person we saw with a bow and arrows!).. there was one .. nutter.. who upon seeing a possum we’d found with our torches (by accident) went inside to get his rifle. At 9pm (dark) with people around. Unbeknownst to us there was another hunter bivving on the ground closeish to where the possum had last been seen (he escaped, thankfully)… you can see how accidents happen. Nutter.

Nice walk out the next day though ;)

All in all a lovely tramp, and definitely good to get out and stretch the legs.

of happiness.

Also filled in at the last minute on an Adventure Race up at Anakiwa (the home of Outward Bound). Again, very bad at taking photographs, especially this time as I’d left my camera at home .. makes it very hard. Went up with Andrew & Gabrielle from my Outward Bound course, and met up with another, Mike, there.. it was a pretty savage course really:

The first leg (reddish) was the kayaking.. 8k? Then the blue mtb leg (going from sea level up to 700m) then a run. Gabrielle and I were “short coursed” as we didn’t make it back after the mtb leg in time to do the full run. Good thing too.. I was knackered (most people were cut off).

After the race, met up with Viv and Chee (our instructors)… lovely to see them of course, but odd now that the master-slave-student relationship is altered ;) Also tended our Ake-Ake tree which was planeted (a root of which is pictured with Seamus – who has returned)

Mike B, who is a savage, the next morning (i.e. after the long adventure race) went and did a 1/2 Triathlon. Mad

Anyway, had a lovely weekend – good to get me away from the computer and Snowpool all weekend!

I will be doing a presentation to the local Ruby on Rails group here in ChCh about it.. which frankly has me slightly freaked out. I’d not realised just how absolutely impressive some of these people are (building the major Refinery CMS for one). In comparison my little app is very plain. Still… it was fun. I used Phone Gap to build the application.. it allows you to right straight HTML & CSS & JavaScript and it compiles to a native app.. very nice. I layered mine on top of JQuery mobile. If you want to .. you can download the whole code on GitHug. And yes, I had to write a little bit of an API for snowpool to make this work.. now.. to document the damn thing!

Anyway, other than that.. I’ve been trying to get posters and stickers printed, source advertisers for this year etc. etc. I think this year is going to be a decent one – as there’s finally time to actually do the marketing.

snowpool pdf

Other than that, not too much, a 6 hour rogaine with Steve and my climbing partner Chloe… absolutely shockingly miserable weather and a tricky course. Lots of fun.

And a few walks up the track behind my house (this is literally the back doorstep)

Anyway, slightly techy post this one… but lots of fun.

It was here:

View Larger Topographic Map

Just a nice cruisey loop on a track.. didn’t see another soul – which was surprising as it’s (apparently) the only loop track in Arthurs Pass… though our tramping book is a little out of date so maybe that has changed.

These trees were interesting…

I’m no botanist.. but the ground was pretty clear beneath them (little bush).. so I’m assuming they’re some sort of old growth trees? No idea.. feel free to comment if you do know. Feel free to comment if you don’t know. Generally, just feel free to comment. Unless you’re a spammer… then you can go away and not comment. Right.. back to task..

Where we camped on Friday night was probably the worst case of sandflies I’ve ever experienced.. the air was just *thick* with them. We got in and out of the tent as fast as possible.. but still had to kill about 200 of the things that got inside in the seconds the fly was open. Nasty.

All up a nice tramp… but there are probably other ones to do before this one will be repeated … especially with the sandflies!

Malc organised it at Cheeseman Ski Field. I’m afraid I don’t have any pictures… and, while I did feel a little out of my depth for quite a bit of it (mistake of sitting at the table with the people from the States!), it was fun. Every evening (for some reason) Werewolf is played. Definitely one of my favourite games to play. I was outclassed though.. there were some good players about.

So yes, it was fun to be there, I should have open-sourced Snowpool (maybe next year… – or, at least, after this season)… I do enjoy working in Ruby on Rails (it is _so_ nice to work with)… but yes, definitely at the bottom of the pecking order :)

Oh – and this was pretty cool

Glider at Mt Cockayne summit – Rails Camp NZ 2012 from Mark Haylock