This was our route for a two day tramp over Easter. I spent the other two days working on Snowpool a bit (yes, it is rather all consuming… but I love it!) Sylvia came along for the tramp too which was excellent. She took me on one of my first tramps back in 2004! 2004… I really have been here a while.

Anyway, some pictures.

There was quite a bit of river hopping getting to Hamilton Hut.. It was quite busy as it was Easter. There were hunters (even one person we saw with a bow and arrows!).. there was one .. nutter.. who upon seeing a possum we’d found with our torches (by accident) went inside to get his rifle. At 9pm (dark) with people around. Unbeknownst to us there was another hunter bivving on the ground closeish to where the possum had last been seen (he escaped, thankfully)… you can see how accidents happen. Nutter.

Nice walk out the next day though ;)

All in all a lovely tramp, and definitely good to get out and stretch the legs.

This actually brought tears to my eyes!

of happiness.

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.