Had a quick trip out to Mike & Heathers to help them move into their house. I wasn’t the best photo taker that weekend – but was quite captivated by the turkeys (they have lots now)… and the fact that turkeys *love* bananas. Fair enough too I say.

Also filled in at the last minute on an Adventure Race up at Anakiwa (the home of Outward Bound). Again, very bad at taking photographs, especially this time as I’d left my camera at home .. makes it very hard. Went up with Andrew & Gabrielle from my Outward Bound course, and met up with another, Mike, there.. it was a pretty savage course really:

The first leg (reddish) was the kayaking.. 8k? Then the blue mtb leg (going from sea level up to 700m) then a run. Gabrielle and I were “short coursed” as we didn’t make it back after the mtb leg in time to do the full run. Good thing too.. I was knackered (most people were cut off).

After the race, met up with Viv and Chee (our instructors)… lovely to see them of course, but odd now that the master-slave-student relationship is altered ;) Also tended our Ake-Ake tree which was planeted (a root of which is pictured with Seamus – who has returned)

Mike B, who is a savage, the next morning (i.e. after the long adventure race) went and did a 1/2 Triathlon. Mad

Anyway, had a lovely weekend – good to get me away from the computer and Snowpool all weekend!

Maaike’s parents very kindly gave me a tripod for Christmas.. which I’ve been playing with a bit. Definitely still need to go back to school for some SLR lessons!

So I have been a little preoccupied of late… spending quite a bit of time working on Snowpool. It has been fun.. there’s now an Android App… which has been the fruit of quite a bit of labour. If you do have an Android Phone.. it would be most appreciated if you’d download it and preferably give it a review (the more favourable the better.. ;)

I will be doing a presentation to the local Ruby on Rails group here in ChCh about it.. which frankly has me slightly freaked out. I’d not realised just how absolutely impressive some of these people are (building the major Refinery CMS for one). In comparison my little app is very plain. Still… it was fun. I used Phone Gap to build the application.. it allows you to right straight HTML & CSS & JavaScript and it compiles to a native app.. very nice. I layered mine on top of JQuery mobile. If you want to .. you can download the whole code on GitHug. And yes, I had to write a little bit of an API for snowpool to make this work.. now.. to document the damn thing!

Anyway, other than that.. I’ve been trying to get posters and stickers printed, source advertisers for this year etc. etc. I think this year is going to be a decent one – as there’s finally time to actually do the marketing.

snowpool pdf

Other than that, not too much, a 6 hour rogaine with Steve and my climbing partner Chloe… absolutely shockingly miserable weather and a tricky course. Lots of fun.

And a few walks up the track behind my house (this is literally the back doorstep)

Anyway, slightly techy post this one… but lots of fun.

Off to stretch the legs again this weekend. Not quite as exciting as the Brass Monkey Biv trip … but surprisingly I was pretty tired by the end of the day… not quite sure why really as it should have been fine!

It was here:

View Larger Topographic Map

Just a nice cruisey loop on a track.. didn’t see another soul – which was surprising as it’s (apparently) the only loop track in Arthurs Pass… though our tramping book is a little out of date so maybe that has changed.

These trees were interesting…

I’m no botanist.. but the ground was pretty clear beneath them (little bush).. so I’m assuming they’re some sort of old growth trees? No idea.. feel free to comment if you do know. Feel free to comment if you don’t know. Generally, just feel free to comment. Unless you’re a spammer… then you can go away and not comment. Right.. back to task..

Where we camped on Friday night was probably the worst case of sandflies I’ve ever experienced.. the air was just *thick* with them. We got in and out of the tent as fast as possible.. but still had to kill about 200 of the things that got inside in the seconds the fly was open. Nasty.

All up a nice tramp… but there are probably other ones to do before this one will be repeated … especially with the sandflies!

So… Malc who helped me rebuild Snowpool last year in Ruby on Rails organised this years RailsCamp. It’s the first conference of this kind I’ve been to. A Geek conference. It’s called a Camp because the idea is that there’s no internet…

Malc organised it at Cheeseman Ski Field. I’m afraid I don’t have any pictures… and, while I did feel a little out of my depth for quite a bit of it (mistake of sitting at the table with the people from the States!), it was fun. Every evening (for some reason) Werewolf is played. Definitely one of my favourite games to play. I was outclassed though.. there were some good players about.

So yes, it was fun to be there, I should have open-sourced Snowpool (maybe next year… – or, at least, after this season)… I do enjoy working in Ruby on Rails (it is _so_ nice to work with)… but yes, definitely at the bottom of the pecking order :)

Oh – and this was pretty cool

Glider at Mt Cockayne summit – Rails Camp NZ 2012 from Mark Haylock