Well, it was off to Wellington for the weekend. Maaike had been sent by CPIT to a committee which was sorting out education for the whole of New Zealand or something ;) … So, we split the flights up and had a lovely weekend catching up with Glynn & Jayne & Isla & Emerson. I didn’t take enough pictures (as per normal).. but … some cycling was done, ice cream eating, managed to get a few games of pool in with Glynn.. Settlers of Catan.. good times. Oh, and cronuts – the delicious looking thing on the right – a cross between a croissant and a doughnut.

It was also Saint Patrick’s Day while we were up there. Maaike (with some help from little Isla) made a lemon cake, which was delicious. I also got to hang out for the day in New Zealand’s hottest tech startup Xero where my friend Ronan whom I went to primary school with works. I worked remotely for the day, but we did have time for a quick pint after work.

Oh, and finally, we had a 100 year flood (second in 30 years) in Christchurch. It was really, really wet! It’s the same bridge in the photo, before and (slightly) after. You really feel for the people who have been damaged by earthquakes and now flooded (especially as the water table as altered in some places so now some places which weren’t so flood prone now are..)

Well, I had a great time at RailsCamp this year. RailsCamp is an unconference where a whole bunch of Ruby / Rails devs get together and give talks, hack on things, play games, drink beer and generally have a great time.

I have wrote up a fuller account over on the Resolve Digital Blog and some of this will be a duplication.

I had a great time hanging out with Tim from work. Tim is our latest recruit and an awesome dude as well as a great coder. He very kindly offered to help me get started building a native iPhone app for snowpool.. It’s not finished yet, but it’s getting there (all open sourced on GitHub).

The Kea were quite interested in my tent, very annoying as they came around at 6am pretty much and woke me up. This picture (of the tent) was taken by Kale Worsley, a former colleague and all round genius from Egressive days.

But anyway, it was a great conference. I’ll leave you with a couple more of Malcolm Locke’s excellent pictures and a final video of Tim playing his AirPipes app (which you can buy on the app store..)

Also, please note, all of these pictures are Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic, and were taken by Malcolm Locke and Kale Worsley.

Finally Finally, I must say, one of my favourite things about being in the Ruby Community is that it’s just _such_ a nice bunch of people. Really really good times. I mean just look at that group shot, pretty much everyone smiling broadly. Wonderful. More pictures (and some awesome astrophotography) on Malc’s Flickr Stream.

Up to Arthurs Pass for a quick getaway this weekend. Initially we had thought of going to Lake Mavis, but, as there were already 16 people going there (a massive crowd in NZ terms) Maaike decided that she wasn’t happy with tramping with too many other people (her words not mine! ;) we decided instead to go for a shortish walk up Avalanche Peak and down Scotts track.

We stayed in Arthurs Pass for the weekend, just camping in the van.. lovely to get away (I also achieved a new high score on Flappy Wings, which was a huge triumph).

Not too much to report, headed to see the outwits (local comedy / performance artists) in the park. This year they were doing a short history of rock ‘n roll. It was good, but, I have to be honest here, a lot of it was lost on me.

They did take the time to celebrate (and obviously slag off a little bit – but definitely in a celebratory manner) Lorde (a New Zealand artist who has won a huge amount of awards recently… video here has 205 million views…)

As you can see… they look almost identical!

Well done Lorde!

And slightly crazy weather, super hot one day, hailing the next…. harrumph.

This weekend it was off up to the Kelly Range (on the far side of Arthurs Pass). It was a good excuse to try out the new GPS ..

It’s a pretty steep climb up, but at least it gets you up on the tops relatively quickly. We did meet a couple of hunters on the way down (one father and his two kids – they’d shot 3 chamois). One of them warned us to ‘use a torch at night.. and wear bright clothing…) which really didn’t fill me with confidence I must say. Hunters are, obviously, supposed to positively identify their targets as being non-human. Still, better safe than dead.

So.. once up on the tops the idea was to cruise around off track and follow the ridge along until we hit the tarns at the end.

We didn’t quite make it as far as we wanted.. and the GPS really came in useful as the terrain was really broken and we were aiming for a very small tarn. I think we could have navigated correctly to it, but it was .. very handy, to get the GPS out when we knew we were close and have it go “it’s 100m over there, here, let me show you”.

So.. the tarn:

Really nice spot.. and actually warm enough to have a rinse in. Not quite deep enough to have a swim in (which was probably closely related to why it was warm enough ;)

Nice sunset too..

Walk out the next day was pretty uneventful, much quicker than on the way in… and my wasp? sting (I got stung at the very start of the tramp) was beginning to go down, which was nice.

More nice views!

So yes, all in all an excellent tramp, great to be off the beaten bath a little bit.

Oh, a link to the Topomap .. it really was quite a small tarn!