So left for Auckland on Wednesday morning.. Still don’t reckon it’s the greatest city in the world… Straight to the hotel, definitely a nice one.. close to the centre, and big rooms. Was quite surprised that we weren’t sharing rooms.. just for the expense of it all.

So the day was spent meeting our opposite halves in Auckland, was good to see the developers. Funny really to get a view of trying to get outside contractors to do work – it was all about ‘well what priority is your new project, is it more important than the other 15 really important projects…’. Quite familiar…

The evening was fun though. We were there for the Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand – TUANZ awards. Basically a non-profit organisation for the Telecoms industry. We were finalists in two categories. No, we didn’t win, but it was great exposure esp. as two ministers were there and we were the only government department nominated for anything.

It was also a great excuse to dress up

Left to Right – Helen, Louise and Jax

and have a great evening drinking (slightly too much) excellent wine and eating yum food.

Left to Right – Andrew (boss!), Me, Grant

Then the next day we got to have a meeting with a crowd of people who publish the NZ Herald, amongst other things. The reason we were there was to see how they’re using the Nortel equipment in their call centre as we are thinking of doing some of the same things here to do screen pops etc (so when a call comes in, the screen will display pertinent info straight away). Will see how it works.

Finally, saw this in the paper on the way home, well I thought it was funny

All fun, up in Auckland at the moment with work. We’re here for the TUANZ awards – an awards ceremony for Contact Centres throughout NZ. We’re finalists in two categories, but the word on the street is that we’re not the eventual winners.

Still, it’s an all expenses paid trip to Auckland with a black tie dinner (and cocktails too I believe) this evening. So that’s all to the good.

Hopefully going to get Boarding on Friday too if the weather is up to it.

Well, a geeky day.. have played around with RSS (Really Simple Syndication). It’s quite nifty. Basically it generates a feed for your site in XML that newsreaders can pick up and show you the new posts as e-mails.

Or, another way, you can effectively have one program which monitors all the different sites for updates and then generates a sort of e-mail which you can look at.

If you want to try it out…download (this is the only one I’ve tried but it should work with any Atom Enabled newsreader) Newz Crawler and install it, and then refresh the page it should automatically pick up the xml feed. It’s pretty cool really. Has channels for bbc news automatically installed too..

Or, if you use another reader which doesn’t automatically pick up feeds, then you can click on the XML link and paste it in as a new channel.

Well, it’s kept me occupied for an hour.

What kept me occupied quite a bit longer was installing redhat yesterday. It’s a open source (free!) Operating System… AAAaaaanyway they do have they’re ‘little bugs‘ from time to time. And I quote…

There is a bug in Fedora Core 2 that causes the hard disk geometry as reported in the partition table to be altered during installation. This change may cause Windows boot failure. Although this bug is severe, it is recoverable and no data should be lost. It is important not to panic if and when this happens so you do not cause further problems or cause actual loss of data in the process of recovering from the error.

So.. obviously when I went to install I did not know about this bug. So I installed it, and then my lovely new computer wouldn’t start. (I then panicked, seeing as no one had told me not to)

Well, to cut a long story (and anxious hour) short, I did manage to re-install what I needed to get an OS to start. Found this useful link about the bug with XP and Fedora. Followed the instructions to alter the Hard Disk drive geometry.. all fun and games.

So now back with both OS’s and life is grand once more. Not doing such things again for a while!

Right, so enough of the geekiness, what else.. yep, squash yesterday was fun, then headed out to a friend – Pete’s – birthday party. Russian themed.. (Cossacks). So I went along to get some vodka, and saw this bottle called “Russian Cossaks” or something. When I went to buy it, the guy selling it says “If you get it from the cask it’d be $8 instead of $18”. So I left with a lovely plastic bottle of vodka :) Great place NZ!.

Today was supposed to be getting snow boarding, but unfortunately there’s 100km winds up at the ski-field, so won’t be going.

What a day, probably one of the best days I’ve had in NZ to date.. Started at 7am (don’t all great days ;)…. no, but still, this one did. Glynn came over and we headed off snowboarding.

Weather was looking slightly iffy on the way, but as happened the last time, we emerged above the cloud into sunshine for the entire day

Now they say, as they always do, that day 3 is the day when you really get it. And it was totally true for us. Started off straight back onto the green slope (mini one)… falling quite a bit, but by the end of the day we’d taken the chair life (another new thing!) to the top of the field. So that was pretty damn exciting. Even if a skier (who are scum of the earth it’s true… like they own the mountain, when of course it’s snow boarders that really rule the slopes. Anyway, where was I.. – yes – this skier managed to get her skis locked over my board just as the chair lift was coming.. Still, all fun and games even if someone gets impaled.

Ok, so it wasn’t that bad, but seeing as we’re still only on green slopes have to liven it up somehow!

Then, after getting home, was just checking mail and.. Mum was online – on Microsoft Messanger from Uganda. Damn the internet really is cool sometimes.. if any of ye use it my username is patrickdavey@hot… but I never use the e-mail account.. way too much spam.

So yes, that was amazing to chat.. really great. Sounds like they’re having a great time over there, will totally have to visit sometime.

And then to wrap up an excellent day, headed out with a really amazing Scottish lass (Mhairi) who is going to completely kill me at squash tomorrow I am sure.

My first post from Home! So happy… installing the Router and ADSL was so easy.. was surprised.

And tomorrow morning heading off to snowboard in 110 cm of base and 30 cm of fresh powder. Taking the day off. Me happy.