More South Island Photos

Daredevil
Originally uploaded by tkw954

I've uploaded the second batch of my photos from our trip to the South Island, including Kea, Kaka, Seals, and Amy doing her "Danger Stick Figure" impression.

Amy's Reading List

I don't have a real "reading list" per se... my reading list generally consists of what I'm reading right now.

Many of my friends say to me, "How can you do that? Reading more than one book at a time? Don't you get confused?" Have you seen my house? My life? You know me... I can't sit still and work on one thing at a time! I've never confused the premise of one book with the other.

So, right now I am reading:

1. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
2. Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance - Noam Chomsky
3. Born to be Good - Dasher Keltner
4. History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day - Bertrand Russell

I think that's all I've got on the go at the moment. Of those, only one is fiction (the first one). Now that I look at it, it's a pretty intense list. After reading the Dexter series over Christmas, I needed some philosophy to balance it out.

This has nothing to do with anything except to watch and enjoy, and perhaps join the "Top Secret Dance Off" Social Network to capture your bedroom dancing for the world to enjoy.


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South Island Pics Posted, Part I

Hokitika
Originally uploaded by tkw954

I've uploaded the first third of my photos from the South Island to Flickr. This takes us from Christchurch to Queenstown, via Greymouth, Franz Josef Glacier, Haast, and Wanaka, including the highest paved road in NZ, the Crown Range Road.

Webstock live Twitter updates

For interested parties, here's the live Twitter feed for Webstock09 (the conference I am currently attending) in Wellington.

I'd just like to say how interested and impressed I am at the fact that there is a team of sign language translators signing through all of the main presentations. At times, the translating has been very humourous.

I don't have my photos off my camera yet, let alone on flickr, but you can check out the conference photos here.

Driving Times in NZ

After our trip around the South Island, I got to thinking about how long it takes to get everywhere in this small country. So I made this map of the driving time from our house in Auckland to everywhere in the country. The driving times come from a Matlab script I wrote that queries Google maps, and the mapping functions are from M_Map for Matlab, using shoreline data from GSHHS. Click it for higher resolution.

Vacation and Webstock09

Hopefully I won't be updating the blog as a summary of my time at Webstock, but just in case I do, this is my apology beforehand.

I'm at a web industry conference in Wellington. It hasn't started yet, but I anticipate it will start in about 5 minutes. The venue is the Wellington Town hall... oh, well, my 5 minutes has ended in about 30 seconds. The conference has started. And I'll keep you posted... even though I said I wouldn't.