Undergrads, I mean. Filling up the corridors. Clustering excitedly around noticeboards. Flocking to lectures (a habit I gave up years ago). Really.
Still, maybe we can persuade some to become Interface members.
Richard and I spent a reasonable amount of Saturday cabling the flat. Now many rooms have three RJ45 jacks that go back via CAT5e attached to the underside of the house to a twelve port patch panel in the garage.
This has one major advantage: now the access point can go upstairs, which greatly improves reception -- previously it was in the garage, and there's a layer of foil between that and upstairs. Now to get some VoIPish stuff providing us with a Wellington phone number...
Back in Wellington!
Got up at 3.40am to catch the 4.36am train from Newcastle to Sydney Central (which costs about as much as the train from Sydney Central to Sydney Airport). Discovered that the ticket machine in Newcastle didn't give change for AUD50 notes, but thankfully a nearby taxi driver did.
The 9.40am flight out of Sydney was uneventful until we got to Wellington and encountered the fog. First attempt at landing failed spectacularly (according to the helpful voiceover from the flight attendant, this is normal -- bah). Thankfully the second did not, and we were thus spared the horrors of an unanticipated trip to Auckland.
And the airport security people gave me my pocketknife back!
Arrived yesterday -- three hours in the plane to Sydney, then two-and-a-half hours in the train. It's bloody hot here. They have a beach, and a city, and a train station, and iced coffee. The latter is partiularly important.
Spent most of yesterday wandering around the waterfront, and sleeping (having not had any sleep between ~8am friday and late afternoon saturday). Despite the endless suburban railway stations we passed on the way in, Newcastle's CBD feels smaller than Wellington's -- maybe more the size of Napier's.
This is probably the most disorganised I have ever been when going somewhere -- I didn't finish packing until around 2.30am, had to get the shuttle to go past VUW where I'd left my iBook's power supply, and left my pocketknife in my carry-on luggage. This was easily detected by the eagle-eyed airport security people. But they seem to have some facility to store things for you for up to a month, which was useful because the Whitcoulls after customs where they suggested I buy a bubble-bag was shut. So now I have a piece of cardboard with a number written on it which I can redeem for my pocketknife.
The disadvantage of moving is that your computers have to come, and if you're stuck behind an excitingly different NAT firewall, and have a habit of running various services off boxes behind one, then you have to set up all sorts of redirections again.
I am happy to say, however, that web and mail on zaphod should still work. So all two of you who use tepidmail can stop complaining -- it works again. In the process I have learnt something of the new configuration file format used by exim4, and written even more short perl scripts to autogenerate various configuration file snippets for me. So Next Time It Should Be Easier(tm).
8amish this morning. Noticeable enough for me to be sure it wasn't strong wind (which there seems to be an awful lot of in Darkest Karori). Looks like it was reasonably close by.
Things to do when bored: watch hilarious short clips of Canadian television getting Americans to agree to preposterous statements involving Canada.
I spent the afternoon in the Accident and Emergency department of Wellington Hospital, hooked up to an ECG.
The reason for this was that at around 2pm, while heading up the Cable Car, I collapsed onto one of the stairs and ended up with a nasty cut on my forehead. The suspected reason is some combination of running a temperature, the hot weather, low blood sugar (i.e. I was going to eat at VUW) and possibly an arrythmia. After first aid was supplied by the driver (they seem to have first aid kits on the cars) I ended up in the cablecar staff room waiting for an ambulance.
The ambulance trip involved me sitting on a stretcher. They wired me up to the ECG (standard practice, apparently) and noticed something unusual: a wierd cardiac rhythm, later identified as a bigemini rhythm.
Unfortunately, this meant that my hospital trip involved more than stitches (well, superglue). They connected me up to another more sophisticated ECG and gave me a blood test. It seems that I had an arrhythmia -- more specifically a bigemini rhythm, which means that every second heartbeat doesn't really do anything in terms of pushing blood around. Over the course of the next few hours, my heartbeat returned to normal.
Thankfully this bigemini thing is practically always benign. It did rather spoil what little plans I had made for the day, however. Yay for public health systems, etc.
Yay DVD Unlimited! Skeet surfing, a frenchman named Latrine...
I know. It all sounds like some bad movie.
-- Top Secret!
Well, I like it, anyway. Now if it'll just play on something and not complain about read errors at the end of the opening titles...