It had been a while since last getting out on the hills. I’d been holed up migrating Snowpool to a newer version of Rails, and just quite a few weddings and parties generally… so we headed away for a quick walk up in the Canterbury foothills.

Good to get out and stretch the legs :)

When I left Egressive, they gave me a Raspberry Pi (a very small computer) to play with. The Raspberry Pi (or Pi) in my opinion, is one of the most exciting developments in computers in the last while. The reason being, it allows, for very little money, people to experiment with programming, with making their own “stuff”… definitely a part / precursor to the Internet of Things. Part of the work of the Raspberry Pi foundation is fostering literacy regarding computers, get kids playing with them early… it has taken off in a big way in the UK (where it started) and as such I would expect in 15 years time to see a lot of exciting developments in the tech scene in the UK.

Anyway, I bought a little camera, hooked it in, wrote a short script to take pictures and turn them into a video, and now, every day, I (automatically) get a new 2 minute timelapse.

Here is one of the better ones (yes, I did change the camera angle 1/2 way through as I was home)

It’s partially documented on my wiki. I also spent a couple of days throwing together my first “single page app” to display the timelapses. So.. if you want to see the very latest ones – just checkout http://timelapses.psdavey.com/.

The site is certainly unfinished, but it does the trick.

I really enjoyed my time working at Egressive (which is no more, now Catalyst), mostly due to the excellent folk who worked there, a more talented bunch of people it would be hard to find. Anyway, it was long overtime for a catch up… so.. a catch up was had.

How much will be remembered is anyone’s guess. Great night though ;)

One of the very lovely happenings to come out of Outward Bound was that of Viv (our instructor!) and Michael (known as Judd) getting together, then engaged, and now married. Photographs were banned during the ceremony, so no pictures of them, but here are two others – Michael (known as Money) and Ryan, with their respective partners, Olivia and Casey.

It was a really nice ceremony, so very many nice touches, it was very special to be invited down for it. I did enjoy the paper lanterns :)

The following day, Maaike and I sneaked off to do Mount Ithsmus…

View Larger Topographic Map

Only 1386m high, but quite a slog to get up there. Great views though :)

I had a final week back in Ireland to hang out with family before heading back to NZ. It was a lovely 5 days, mostly spent hanging out with mum and dad, seeing their new house, meeting up with friends for a pint, dinners with my brothers.. yeah, it was lovely, and far too short.

Then the flight back to NZ, to the tail end of a winter season that I was very happy to have missed, as it seems the snows were just awful, quite possibly a portent of things to come. We’ll see.