ok ok ookkkkkkkkkaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy I’ve been a wee bit slack on ye olde blog front lately. Guilty as charged. Still, you try to find another (non professional) blog from someone born in Shankill, Ireland in 1979 which is about New Zealand and has been updated more regularly than this one. I think not.
Anyway, I have been really busy (too busy some might say. Those some might be people’s who’s names start with an M and end in aaike. Fair cop too really I guess. I’ve been working hard trying to get Snowpool up and running and completely rebuilt using the latest web framework – Ruby on Rails. Quite the learning curve for me, but the development server is live at : http://snowpool.heroku.com, and I’m pretty happy with how it’s looking.
Anyway, now for a big catch up over the last – almost 3 months. In no particular order (except chronological) ;)
My Aunt Mary came down for a weekend. It was Maaike and my Christmas present to her. Basically she’s been threatening to come visit for years.. but it *never quite happens*. So we took matters into our own gentle hands and bought her tickets down from Palmy.
We had a lovely time out at Akaroa, eating cheese, drinking wine, playing mini-golf (not as much fun as last time somehow) going for a walk at the Hinewai Reserve and altogether the weekend was over far too quickly. The only disappointing thing was that ChCh didn’t put on a decent earthquake to show Mary what it’s really like. Sigh ;)
Another weekend we went out to visit our friends Mike and Heather. They bought a chunk of forest to farm and live in. It’s wonderful. They have chickens, turkeys (unfortunately the odd stoat too), water, electricity, internet, veges… and a perfect place to play hide and go seek.
And they have an outside bath.
1) Take an ordinary bath & fill it with water
2) Light a fire underneath
3) *put a plank of wood on the bottom (else your bum gets fried)
4) Enjoy
And a quick video
Glynn and Jayne were down for a visit, with their little Isla. Isla is now walking, and talking a lot more. This is change.
Isla did make a beeline at the end of the night towards the Isla(y) malts..
Can’t blame her myself.
Finally for this catch up, was a trip (over Easter) with Maaike, Ivor and Berit to Mt Cook NP. Got some climbing in on real rock again. Rock which hasn’t been munched by an Earthquake. Great to be out there again. Ivor led me up a 3* multipitch.. it was wonderful to be “out there” again. Need to get back into climbing I think. So much to do. So little time.
Domhnall
May 30, 2011 at 5:37 pm
snowpool site looks good – now all Tassie needs is some snow!!! What route on Sebastopol Bluffs is that?
Patrick
May 30, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Want some posters to put up? ;)
The route is called “red arete” I think.
Marcel
May 31, 2011 at 7:19 am
Snowpool thinks I’m in NZ. I’m not, I can’t even choose the country I’m in. So there you go, I won’t use it!
Patrick
May 31, 2011 at 9:13 am
I would say “grow some mountains” .. but you have those. And yes, it defaults to NZ if it doesn’t know where you are. I might update that to a message something like : “not from around here are ya boy?””.. or something ;)
Would Germany like a Snowpool? ;) easy to do (now)
Marcel
May 31, 2011 at 9:44 pm
I suggest an IP to Country Database, this is the first free one I found: http://software77.net/geo-ip/
Southern Germany may need a snowpool. Here in Austria, there are ski busses that you can take. There is also http://www.mitfahrgelegenheit.de/ which is used for city-to-city transport and (new) going to big events (like concerts) – so ski resorts may be an add on.
Patrick
May 31, 2011 at 10:22 pm
Totally have the IP lookup.. but as there are only four countries in the database it needs a fallback option. Interestingly if you use the IP and redirect people automatically then you run into issues with search engines as they don’t see all your content.