Three words, WORLD’S STEEPEST STREET. Pass me that bike …

Thanks to the ever intrepid Anton, we even have a movie of the death-defying descent, check it out (Warning: may lead to motion sickness).

And yes, we may be crazy, but we did ride up as well as down.

View the photos »

Simply for presenting a half decent talk at LCA, and more importantly because the LCA organisers are champions, I got to go for a chopper ride over Dunedin before heading home the other Sunday.

It was awesome. I’d never been in one of those crazy gravity defying things before, but always thought it must rock, and it did. I want one. Where’s that astronaut guy when you need him … or at least his cheque book.

Lots of photos, some good, some rushed, all from a damn helicopter! …

View the photos »

Dr T

Whoever submitted my blog to Planet LCA 2006 is gonna be in some serious trouble if I win the $100 photo-blog competition! You have been warned.

Over an awesome breakfast at Bean Scene, I convinced Anton & Jeremy to hire bikes too – they didn’t really require much convincing to be honest.

So we headed down to the bike shop and got another couple of 2nd hand bikes, helmets & locks. We rode up to the conference, dodging traffic, and hung out for a bit in the lounge checking email etc.

After a while we headed out to Lunch at the Governor on George St. After lunch we decided to make a little detour on the way back to the conference, via Lanarch Castle – a quick 40 something KM round trip.

The weather was awesome, warm, but not too hot, although the sun was burning, even through sunscreen.

We took Highcliffe Road, which heads along the ridge of the peninsula, so to start with we had a bit of climb. After that there were a few minor hills, though nothing too killer.

After about 8 KM along the ridge we finally got to the castle. Having ridden for two hours to get there I thought they might shout us the entry fee, haha. Regardless we hung out in the garden for a while, drank a bit and took a few photos.

The ride down was awesome, what took us about an hour of climbing took literally 5 minutes to come down, at serious speed. My great slick city tires weren’t gripping too well under brakes, which made the whole experience a little more fun. At one point I locked both wheels up and slid for a good 20 metres on the smooth bitumen, weeee.

The ride home along the seaside road was great, although the traffic was a little annoying. It’s dead flat, funny that, and quite smooth, so we made really good time.

Another awesome day in Dunedin.

Thanks to the Blanchinator for some of the photos.

View the photos »

Took it pretty easy on Saturday, needed to catch up on some sleep after the last few weeks. Got some breaky at a cool place called “The Metro”, which has a map of the London Underground on the wall. I amused myself for quite a while reading all the names, Bottomleigh, Chudsworth, Pudding Mill Lane .. OK I made those up, but the real names are funny too.

I found a cool internet cafe, hence the blogging, with awesome hot chocolate. After years of Tilley’s made-to-order hot chocolate I’m pretty picky. But this was pretty damn good, and further reinforced my opinion that hot chocolate must come with marshmallows, and preferably in the chocolate.

Today (Sunday) started with rain, which was a bit of a downer, I’d been keen to ride out to the castle on the peninsula. Instead I took my time, waited for the rain to stop, and eventually it did. So I raced down to the bike shop, and after very little haggling had myself a pretty decent mountain bike, but with slick tires for around town, all for $100/week.

By mid afternoon the sun was out, so I just started riding north for the hell of it. After a while I saw signs to “Signal Hill” which sounded promising. 90 minutes of serious hill later, I found myself at a pretty cracking look out. Check out the photos if you care.

Needless to say the ride down was pretty awesome. About 10 minutes of serious speed, if I get the time I might ride up again just for the descent.

View the photos »

Phew. Got into Dunedin about 5pm last night, after a bit of a long day. Owing to certain commitments, cough, I only got about 3 hours sleep on Thursday night, so I was a bit stroppy for the flying yesterday.

After unpacking I felt a bit saner though, so I thought I should get out for a walk – especially seeing the sun was shining, something that doesn’t happen that often ’round here apparently.

I ambled up the nearest hill, looking for a view. I never quite got the panorama I was after, but it was pretty spec’y anyway.

There’s some gorgeous little places around here, perched on the sides of hills and such. There’s lots of greenery up above the hotel too, which is lovely, little sections of (maybe) natural bush.

After about three hours I made it down to the Octagon and set about finding some food. There’s a bunch of places a few blocks north, some a bit pricey, but others look like my style.

Was keen to find a pub to sit in and watch the cricket, but by the time I started looking the South Africans had made a balls up of it so it wasn’t really worth the trouble. A rockin’ day tho anyway.

Although I didn’t buy any, of course (hi mum :D), I stumbled across a shop, in the main street, selling “Party Pills”. They apparently contain BZP, which is somewhat similar to Ecstasy, but legal and regulated. Far out. I wonder what the bikey gangs do for money over here?

A few pics from ’round the place …

ps. Woodford pics are coming soon I promise!

View the photos »

Update: It’s warming up!

Every day should start like this.

There was a freezing rain alert last night, quite the chaos.

Things were pretty nuts on the roads, cars sliding around on the ice everywhere. Despite the alert we decided to head downtown to check out some crazy xmas light action. On the way back we struggled to get over one overpass, the incline and a big patch of ice meant we had 0 traction – but we got up eventually.

A lot of people weren’t so lucky, with nearly 170 prangs overnight and this morning.

We saw a 4WD which had hit the guard rail hard, it might even have rolled given the huge dent in the roof – although the occupants seemed ok. There were numerous other minor bingles, four cars parked perpendicular to the traffic just near the hotel, and Ambulances flying ’round all night. Nuts nuts nuts.

I noticed Chris’ post WRT the relative slowness of gnome-terminal vs xterm.

I’m waiting just now to take Kate’s remaining belongings to her brothers’, so while I’ve got a few minutes I thought I’d investigate myself.

Chris was winging about make clean, which is obviously going to be the worst case. Although that’s interesting, I thought I’d look at an actual compile, so I benchmarked a kernel compile.

~src/kernel/2.6.9-uml$ time make ARCH=um V=1

Obviously konsole on another desktop is sort of cheating. The konsoles, gnome-terminal and aterm are all running transparent. That is with the desktop image showing through but slightly faded towards white. xterm is just using a plain white background. konsole and gnome-terminal are also using anti-aliased fonts, whereas aterm and xterm aren’t.

Chris, being one of the fvwm crowd ;), likes the speed of xterm, and fair enough. Personally I like to see my pretty desktop backgrounds, and anti-aliased fonts I can’t live without – so I’ll stick with konsole.

It’s good to know though that if I’m running some compile that generates lots of output for no good reason, I should plonk the window on another desktop. I actually do that usually anyway, to stop it annoying me. I use this little script to let me know when a long compile or the like has finished.

#!/bin/bash

eval $@
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
    kdialog --msgbox "Command '$@' in $(pwd) completed." 2> /dev/null
else
    kdialog --error "Command '$@' in $(pwd) failed!" 2> /dev/null
    exit 1
fi
exit 0

And now I’m off to deliver some boxes. One step closer to a sane house!