Anotherblog

Town of the future

We were driving through a series of small towns in New Zealand on the way from Christchurch to Queenstown. One of them had a sign, something like “Ashburton: town of the future”.

“Village of the present,” said Dave immediately.

Stress & games

I’m stressing about work again. It didn’t take long after the weekend to get this way, and I’m annoyed with myself because it really makes it harder to do the work when I’m feeling stressed about it.

The weekend, at least, was nice. I played the Ravnica prerelease (it’s an expansion of Magic the Gathering) on Saturday and Sunday mornings, which was fun. I ended up winning 12 boosters, which I’ll use in work booster drafts – finished 6/50 and 12/28 on each day, and I found it entertaining and distracting. The games finished at about 3:00pm on Saturday, which gave me enough time to dash down to the pub and watch the second half of the Swans/WCE game. Very thrilling indeed – almost too painfully close to watch at times, which is often (as in this case) the best kind of game there is.

Then music and DVDs and Thai food with Jon & Kate on Sunday evening. We watched some of the new Battlestar Galactica and some of the very old Farscape, and watched some of the interviews and snippets from Hal Hartley’s “Trust”. Lovely way to conclude the weekend.

Now, back to the stress.

Anna’s second trip

We had a bit of excitement yesterday when we realised that the tickets for Anna’s trip to the US, which we thought were booked and paid for, turned out not to be. Oopsy! Fortunately, we were able to rebook for negligably more money.

This was particularly good, because she was leaving on the same day that we found out the error. There was a bit of running around that morning. But now she’s off in LA for two weeks, and I’m moping around the house doing midnight teleconferences and going for jogs and eating healthily and really having a lot of trouble getting back into any kind of a productive mood.

Bleah.

Back, and tired

We’re back from the NZ ski trip, and work has already exhausted me. We decided to extend the number of teleconferences for the SVG working group, so I was up until 2:30am last night on a conference call.

Anyway.

The NZ trip was great. We arrived in Christchurch, discovered that the snow on Mt Hutt was lousy, and immediately drove to Queenstown, thus immediately throwing our bookings and travel plans into complete disarray. But we found a mountain with a smidgeon of snow on it (the Remarkables) and hired out gear. Dave, Ev, me and Anna decided to try snowboarding (though Simon stayed with skis, and Fiona skipped the whole thing), since we were rather better at skiing anyway, and it’s much more interested to go down the same basic runs again and again if you’re learning.

I could write a great deal about the holidays, but I’m not going to due to the aforementioned tiredness from work, so I’ll summarise in work-easy bullet points:

- Ev’s snowboard was accidentally nicked. Someone from one of the other ski rental places took his board, and left their own. This was a major bummer, as we ended up having to pay for it, since Ev’s board hadn’t been returned by the time we left Queenstown.

- None of us were seriously injured, though there were certainly many bruises. Anna and Simon had problems with their boots that caused them both to lose about a day’s worth of skiing. Particularly annoying for Anna, because one of the big advantages of snowboarding is the more comfortable boots!

- We got pretty decent at snowboarding by the end of it. The snow started out in poor condition (“soft spring snow”) and stayed pretty much the same throughout, getting slightly worse by the end of it. But it was fine for beginners, really. We got pretty tired of going down the same two runs over and over again, and were able to liven it up by having snowball fights, which I suppose does demonstrate that we had achieved a certain level of skill by the end of it.

- The jetboat tour was a big bunch of high-powered fun. It had one of the best safety features I’ve seen – a heated handrail, so you still want to use it even if you feel safe without.

- The luge on the hill above Queenstown was a ball. It was almost better than the skiing. One of the highlights of the trip!

- Anna jumped off a mountain. Fortunately, she was attached to a person skilled in such matters, who was in turn attached to a paraglider, so that was OK then. She loved it.

- We toured many wineries, drank some very nice wine, and ate extraordinary quantities of really supurb food. Needless to say, I am now back on my “no sweet things” thing.

- We recorded a bunch of “Spit” songs based mostly around the theme “Sometimes Girl”. Many of them are good, and some are excellent, though most of them are unsuitable for children.

Some more pics from the SVG Open

From Jan-Klaas, who looks remarkably like Martin Donovan:

100 Hours

Faces Of SVG

And from carto.net:

SVG Open Report, with piccies

Holidays +

Now for some *real* holidays. The trip to the Netherlands and France was lovely, but not exactly relaxing – we did a lot of work there, much more so than a normal day of work. So Anna and I are going to NZ for two weeks with Dave & Fiona & Ev & Simon for some skiing. Should be fantastic. The snow is looking OK, which is a bit of a relief, since I put the ski trip off for three weeks due to my overseas work trip. And apparently the snow wouldn’t have been particularly good if we *had* gone three weeks ago, which is a bit of a relief, too.

Magic

We started another magic tournament this week at lunchtimes: the “Awesome card” draft. We each selected 75 cards we thought would be awesome to draft, mixed them up, and did a draft, and yes, it was pretty awesomely difficult to pick amongst the incredible cards.

I initially thought I had drafted fairly poorly, because I’d drafted a red-white deck, and red-white is not a very synergistic combination. However, I’ve done pretty well so far. I’ve won two matches, and had an absolute thriller of a first game against David K. My deck is mostly removal (multiple lightning bolts, swords to ploughshares, spirit links, maze of iths, and lots of other removal including wrath of god and earthquake) in anticipation of the awesome creatures that will come up. And David’s deck was mostly awesome creatures. So we fought each other to a standstill, and ended up drawing the game when I caused us to simultanously draw seven cards, decking both of us.

Very exciting so far. I’m really enjoying MTG at the moment.

Some pics of Enschede and Rennes

So, here are some of those pics, courtesy of Craig N.:

The hotel in Enschede. Each floor was done according to some overall theme, and our floor was “art”. The carpet was horribly reminiscent of “The Shining”, however.

Yup, pretty amazing. Note the alarm clock on the wall.

The Dutch are pretty keen on cycling. There were separate bike lanes on almost every road, separate traffic lights – and in this case, a completely separate lane on the roundabout. Cars had to give way to bikes at pretty much every point, here.

We had a half free-day on Friday, and went cycling to view a windmill. Note that the bike path here is solid and smooth, while the road for cars (and horses, it must be admitted) is rutted and primitive.

We cycled through some forest. Purty.

Blackberries. You may note that the berries are, in fact, red. This is because they are not ripe. There were some ripe ones, but they were covered in cobwebs. We abstained.

As requested, some pictures of cows. Hooray for cows! I think the things on their necks are bells, though they were very oddly shaped and didn’t make much sound.

Craig has an excellent sense of direction, which was lucky, because the way to the windmill had been very twisty and turny. Much to our surprise, the windmill was on an actual hill, and not a manmade little mound either. Not that it was a tiring ride up or a perilous zoom down, though.

The windmill was quite interesting. I had never noticed before that the bodies of dutch windmills are often thatched, or that the sails on the windmill can be furled back, leaving the wooden slats, or that there was a complicated counterweight/locking mechanism that let the windmill head swivel to catch the wind but not be pushed sideways. It looked clever.

On to Rennes (there are lots more photos, but it’s a bit of work converting them all). The centre of the city burned down a couple of hundred years ago, so examples of these tudor-style wooden buildings only exist in the outskirts of the old city. But they’re pretty cool, and very leany.

Some of the locals managed to get us to sit down and drink with them at 10:00am. They had been going since the previous night, and were very, very rowdy. They were helping people to park, and then rating them on their parking prowess, as evidenced in this photo.