So, pretty full week and weekend really.. Monday had squash off as it’s the end of the league.. Tuesday climbing as per usual, Wed my Aunt was in town so headed out for dinner.. yum, then off to the CUTC meet, where a tramp was organised leaving on Thursday evening.. It’s great working here and being able to just take time off when wanted.

So Thursday evening headed off on the St. James Walk. It was bucketing rain on Thursday evening, really incredibly dark and stormy weather (forked lightning too), but it cheered up. So walked 7km in on the Thursday night..

Both Friday and Sat hiked 30km each day pretty much. It was very straightforward hiking really, very flat terrain, but it was long.

My knees really don’t like going downhill with a rucksack any more… which is a little disconcerting as they used to not mind… keep thinking about heading to the Phisio on ACC.. will see about that.

There were some pretty cute views though, esp in the snow. And lots of lovely swing bridges to walk across, most of them being 1 person bridges.

The ‘summmit’ of the walk really didn’t look like one! :) It was an excellent group of people though, and funny, it was the first trip I’d been on that the kiwis outnumbered the foreigners.. 7:3.

The other thing we did see on the walk (apparently it’s something to look out for as they’re all over the place) were wild horses. So here are some wild horses… (didn’t look super wild to me, no stamping of the hooves, rearing / charging or anything)

Then on Saturday night when we got back in, headed out for mussles and fries to the Belgian themed restauraunt, washed down with nice Leffe Brun. Will totally be going there with Glynn after pool sometime.. Like for sure for sure ;)

What else, Sunday was quite lazy, slighly surprised when I got a phone call saying that our squash team got through to the semi finals and so I have to play on Monday.. which I’m not really looking forward to as I’m quite wrecked really.

Mind you, we did have an earthquake 4.3.. so that was fun.

Looking into Laser Eye surgery this week too. Well, not laser eye surgery exactly.. it’s not like I’m going to have an eye that shoots lasers.. though could be good for lining up pool shots.. hmmmm.. but will see about that, have been tempted for a long time now.

Fantastico weekend really, went off snowboarding for Saturday and Sunday. Wasn’t looking at all promising really as Jana, Mhairi and I drove down on Friday evening. Huge amount of rain falling and forecast. But we made good time down to Twizel where we met Clare, Marcel and Neil.

Then Sat morning it was off to Ohau skifield. Conveniently covered by my ski pass. And it’s by far and away the best place I’ve snow boarded. Ok, so the only other place I’ve ever snowboarded was Hutt (and after sunday, Mt. Dobson too), but it was a great place. Quite nice and small, not to crowded, but it had a *great* feeling about the place.

Really was getting the hang of boarding, getting down the blue runs pretty well by the end of the day.

The highlight, was taking the chairlift to the top of the ski field, and then hiking up the ridge at the back…

Bit of a slog up the hill, but the views from the top was just fantastic, right down over the lake, just beautiful.

Then snowboarded off down a pretty steep – nice and wide with lots of powder – off piste slope. And it was just the best feeling flying along in deep powder. Was on a total high after doing that run.

Then back to the chalet we were staying in to cook Mexican – twas yum. Unfortunatly the Bombay Sapphire had run out from last night… Anna arrived – another CUTC member so twas quite the party really!

L to R – Jana, Clare, Anna and Marcel

–sunday–

Then on Sunday it was off to Mt. Dobson, another ski field on the way back to ChCh. It was good, but a lot more packed and I was slightly wrecked from Ohau, so did not enjoy it quite as much. But still, am really getting my turns now. Well, kinda anyway.

So yes, a fantastic weekend, would really love to get back to Ohau again. Tomorrow :)

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.