NZ Life

Photos! 135 of them, pared down from over 500. I haven’t made it to comments yet, but those will be forthcoming slowly but surely. The standard photo set format can viewed as usual, but I’ve also ‘geotagged’ these photos as well. This is a relatively new, very cool Flickr feature that lets you attach coordinates to each photo and have them displayed on a map. To get started visit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kalafut/sets/72157594348060382/map/

Drag the map and zoom in to various areas of NZ with your mouse (double click or mouse wheel) and notice how the little map markers split apart (it can take few seconds to update). Click on one of the bubbles and browse photos from that area. And if you want to see everyone’s photos for that area, click the “Clear All” link to remove the filter.

At first this feature sounded a bit gimmicky, but after sorting through dozens of NZ of lake photos that all look alike, I’m starting to appreciate geotagging 🙂

I spent a little less than 2 weeks in Peoria late September for work.  It was nice to go back home and check out the changes in Peoria.  It was also nice to visit friends and have a good chat.  I stayed at AmericInn, Peoria for a couple of days before moving to Anh’s house.  When the housekeeping helper started calling me “Hey babe!!”  that was enough.  I don’t need anyone referring to me as “babe” going through my stuff!!.  So I seek sanctuary in Chillicothe.  It was nice to stay with Anh, Robbie and Jim (Anh’s Jim not to be confused with my Jim 🙂 ). 

Dinner with Andy,Becky and family and Raj is always a delight.  Thanks for coming to dinner.  We’ll have to do that again next time I am back.  I am still anticipating Lauren to be almost as tall as me when I return next year!!.  As for Alex, I still think he is the jolliest baby I’ve ever met.

Dinner with Ioan, Ali and Rashina, and Huzefa at Flat Top was fun especially when we “married folks” get to pull Huzefa’s leg on “married life”.   He seems quite distraught when we told him that buying funiture online is coming to an end :-).

We completed the first part of our South Island road trip. We made stops at Queenstown, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Franz Josef Glacier, and Punakaiki. I must say the highlight for me personally is hiking up the Franz Josef Glacier. Even though it was raining the whole time we were hiking, the view and the experience of hiking on a glacier was still fantanstic. Half way hiking up the glacier, there were rocks falling off the opposite walls of the mountain. The noise that it made sounded as though a plane was flying right above us. We’ll have to post some pictures of the glacier soon.

Food stops on the way:

Our neighbors Ngaira and Keith invited us over for an authentic Kiwi dinner. We had an excellent meal of whitebait fritters, fish pie, silver beet, asparagus, carrots, and of course pavlova. And in true Kiwi tradition, we were also treated to a healthy dollop of dinner table sarcasm (we’re looking your way, Ngaira).

Thanks for a great evening, and I hope I don’t get in trouble like when I failed to publicly mention your New Year’s hospitality 🙂

So what if North Korea set off a nuke? The first NZ evening newscast did report the story, but only after they led with the death of V8 driver Mark Porter.

The night shift at CNN.com is a little slack too:

They could have at least pulled some archive footage of Ivy Mike.

Up until this morning I’d been using Blogger, but its ideosyncracies and failure to publish from time to time have finally driven me away. I’m now using the open source WordPress and it seems like a fine tool. It has some additional features and better layout control, but the big draw is that it resides right on the blog site which makes a lot more sense than the Blogger arrangement of publishing with FTP. It even let me import all of the Blogger posts and comments, but a number of them with images are a little out of whack. That can all be fixed, once I get around to it.