Nice to be able to reuse the map from the last time we were at lake Mavis. Funnily enough, I wasn’t expecting to find it quite as easy as last time, but actually it was fine. Unsure why! Nice enough walk in, if busy, as there were quite a lot of people out practising for the Coast to Coast race (early Feb)

Saw these guys on the way up..

And, submitted again to naturewatch. I do love that website :)

Anyway, I don’t think either of us were expecting snow on the tops, or the lake to be icy.. but it sure was. Definitely a different experience from the last time we were there.

The walk down is always a fun one, but the knees didn’t complain that much. I can strongly recommend walking poles for making life a bit easier with heavy packs.

So all in all a lovely walk for the weekend.. it’s nice having such beautiful places only an hour and a bits drive away (ok, and a 6-7 hour walk uphill ;)

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 :)