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In 2002 the department bought a SUN machine and 1TB of disk for an eye-popping amount for use as our main – and in later years secondary – file-server. It was finally switched off last week after spinning its little disks for us morning and night for eight years. As is befitting such a workhorse, we had a wake for it. Blair gave a clever and funny eulogy, ending with an ode:

“Ode to Oma”, a Geek’s Lament …

A wake, sleeping Oma,
To thank your devices,
Saving us from vices
Of grievous file destructions
And heinous interruptions.
Though made to RAID,
Spin down in shade.
Your life is run,
Your race is won.
Now time is right,
In dead, dark night,
For you to slumber,
Devoid of number.

!UNEXPECTED CAKE!

Gentlemen Broncos is a very strange movie about an awkward young man  (Benjamin) and his dream to get his Science Fiction epic The Yeast Lords published. Benjamin goes to a writing camp where he meets his hero, established SF author Dr Chevalier. He also makes a couple of friends among the other aspirants. (Well, as close to friends as the poor schmuck ever gets anyway.) His desire to be published is mirrored by his mother’s desire to sell her line of truly awful night attire, and, to a smaller extent, by his friends’ desire to establish themselves as serious film makers.

Much of the film is hilarious, such as Chevalier’s smug pomposity, and the runway show of Benjamin’s mother’s designs. But much of it falls flat too.

What spoiled it for me were the sequences which should have been the crowning glory of the movie: scenes from The Yeast Lords. The film shows two different versions of the story, but in none of these sequences could I see Science Fiction as it is written today – not even in caricature. If these scenes had been much, much, much closer to how bad Science Fiction is actually written, then the movie would have been much funnier and much cleverer. What’s the point of spoofing something when devotees of what is being spoofed can’t even recognize what is supposed to be being spoofed in the spoof?

So, did I like it? I’m… not sure.

Why do giant black spiders dig my bathroom so?

This is just what you want to see when you get up in the middle of the night:

It really exists!

So, how does it taste? Meh. Light on the vegemite and heavy on the cream cheese, with none of the tangy bite I was expecting. Not for me. Clearly I’m a 1.0 kinda guy…

When I was a young fella, Kiwis suffered under a great feeling of inferiority. New Zealand was dull and backward, and nothing good ever happened here. “Overseas” was a bright glittering shiny place of amazing marvels. “Overseas” was were all the good stuff was happening, where all the good stuff came from, where everybody who was anybody went to.

The feeling was so pervasive that I still feel it to a certain degree even today, even though I’ve traveled widely and know that it’s not so. The feeling is, unfortunately, constantly reinforced by a media that seems determined to tell us that we’re the worst of the lot: we are forever hearing that we have the worst youth suicide rate or the slowest broadband speeds or the smelliest yak herders or whatever in the developed world.

So it was with great delight and a slight sense of amazement that I listened to Kon’s stories today. Kon lived in NZ for a couple of years while getting his MSc, then he went off to Leeds in the UK for his PhD. He talked about the inefficient banks and post offices and libraries, all riddled with paperwork and saddled with delays and lousy with bureaucracy. He even thought that the tech support in our department was far better than what he got at Leeds, which was nice to hear.

My favourite story of his concerned his attempts to get a copy of a paper from Leeds university. By way of contrast, in NZ he had access to a web-based document server, and all he had to do was type some details in, click a button, and there was a nice crisp PDF for him to read. Trying to do the same thing in the UK necessitated filling in a (paper!) form and a long delay before being handed a photocopy many generations old, of such poor quality that it was barely readable. So he had another go, sure that there must be a PDF server like he was used to in NZ. And sure enough there was, and after filling in another form and enduring another long delay and installing some custom software he finally got his paper delivered to him as a PDF – and it turned out to be a scan of the illegible photocopy he had originally been given!

Maybe NZ aint so bad after all.

My friend Lou owns a lovely strip of land on Banks Peninsula which some wag labeled Loulandia at some point. It is rather steep, especially in the upper reaches, and so Lou herself has only been to the top of the land a couple of times. So she decreed that the Inaugural Annual Attempt on the Summit of Loulandia would take place today.

Four of us made the attempt: Lou, Helen, Andrew and Joff.

The walk falls naturally into three sections. The first haul from the carpark up to the picnic flat is quite steep, but it’s a vehicle track so it’s pretty easy going. Then there is a winding path through a vast sea of gorse, a track that Lou keeps open via Herculean efforts. This section isn’t very steep, but quite treacherous underfoot as there are lots of rocks and roots and holes to contend with.

Then  suddenly the gorse gives out to a rocky, grassy slope, with occasional very cool mini-cliffs of volcanic rock. This section is very, very steep and very, very hard work. I was having to stop every few steps to alleviate the fire in my calves.

In one of my many stops, I looked out across the valley and noticed a very cool rocky plateau that reminded me greatly of Weathertop:

After much huffing and puffing, the party made it to the top, and the Inaugural Annual Attempt on the Summit of Lulandia was declared a success.

After a short break at the top, we made a rather rapid descent down to the picnic flat, with each of us slipping over in the grass in the upper reaches multiple times. At the picnic flat we joined Fitz, Annette, Clare, and Janine for a very fine picnic.

(Several more photographs are available in the gallery.)