One of my favourite blogs is What If. An excellent post on The Netherlands taking over the world (all you have to do is drain the oceans)

So, without naming names, other than Neil H.. it was his stag this weekend and off to bike The Old Ghost Road we went. I’m an OK mountain biker, and I do enjoy it… and this bike trip was pretty cruisey – at least to the first hut.

The orange thing Neil is wearing is a Morph Suit. Actually quite suits him ;)

Anyway, had an excellent weekend, we had about 30L ish of beer helicoptered up to the hut – and it was almost all consumed – I was most impressed! Fun times, Neil & Ruth make an excellent couple and I certainly am sure there’ll be plenty of fun and adventuresome times ahead of them!

Wow, over a month since my last post. This is awful! I guess I’ve not been doing too many exciting trips lately – but I have been working a little on Snowpool

There were three events coming up to the start of the ski season. First up was the Canterbury Ski Associations Ski Sale. They very kindly let me have a booth, and I get to give out stickers and posters etc. Here’s a picture of me looking sad.

Why am I sad? Well, this time last year Paddy Ryan and Beck were in the country – and Paddy kindly helped out at the CSA Sale… but this year (and for the next while) they’re in Ireland. Sigh. Still, Maaike helped out this year which was fantastic.

I also gave a presentation to The Ministry of Awesome

That went pretty well, there were probably 40 or so people and had a good chat with a few of them afterwards. It certainly made me think about what it was (is) I’m trying to achieve with Snowpool. World domination is probably off the cards, but a good learning opportunity is definitely on the cards. Like, the last couple of weekends I put together a Photo Competition for Snowpool. It’s hosted on heroku (a “cloud” provider) and uses Amazon S3 for storing the images. I’ve certainly run into a few issues hosting the site in that way – mostly because people upload large images and it ties up the webserver which means timeouts (and doing direct uploads is a little trickier). Anyway, next time I’ll probably just roll out my own server using Digital Ocean or similar. It’s amazing what you can get for $5 a month these days.

What else, Maaike has been enjoying the garden. And I’ve been enjoying Maaike enjoying the garden. Not least because we borrowed a friends juicer and juiced a whole bunch of tart apples. That is the best damn apple juice I’ve ever had. Just hope we get to stay in the house to enjoy next years apple crop (it will _not_ be going to waste)

Also, my wonderful friends Shelly & Paul celebrated their first childs first birthday.

Finally, we had a little bit of snow (but the mountains have had a _lot_ of snow)… so should be getting out and about into the hills soon enough :)

Oh.. finally finally… we had a games night – it was heaps of fun. 6 player chinese checkers is hard.

And perhaps the funniest (kinda – certainly impressive) thing was playing cranium. Our friend Dan was paired with Maaike and had to convey “belly flop”. He did a full belly flop onto the carpet. Broke a couple of ribs. Now that is how you play games!

So, Paddy back in Ireland has put together a video of the flight into the Heaphy Trip that we did a few months ago, and of some of the biking itself.

Damn that was a fun trip – I definitely miss having Paddy & Beck around… Still, rocking trip!

So, spent a few weekends working on Snowpool things. Maaike skipped off to see Amy in Melbourne with Michelle. While she was off I got some practice in at “Gap Golf”, which is a 9 hold mini-golf course set up around the City Centre by Gap Filler.

Neil & Fran and I played through. It was … odd, to be back in the city centre again. Definitely walked down roads I’d not been on in over 2 years. I suspect that I’m not alone in having a pretty large mental blind spot when it comes to the city centre. Not for any particularly good reason, it’s just that it’s so badly damaged and has been being demolished for so long that you just get settled into a new routine of finding your way around and just ignore it.

Anyway, all in all it was great to have a walk around, and the golfing itself was great. Neil prevailed against some strong opposition from Fran and I! Rematch!