Category: Travel

My 2015 in pictures

2015 was a really busy year for me, I’m sure I’ll forget lots in doing this run down, but I’ll try to do one anyway. The year started pretty shittily, with Laurel being ill, but we soldiered on and enjoyed some cricket anyway

The Catalyst Open Source Academy again went well, with the group working on Koha getting a lot done.

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Photo by Catalyst Media CC-BY-SA

The boys and I went on a trip to the Hawkes Bay at the end of January which was a ton of fun, splash planet is great fun with kids. One of the highlights for Te Pō Atarau was getting to feed a lamb.

 

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In February we went to watch the Jousting at Harcourt park and the kids got to try archery.

 

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In April, Te Pō Atarau invented which might be the most complicated game I have ever tried to play

 

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And I presented at the Open Source Open Society conference.

OSOS conference
WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND – April 17: OSOS conference April 17, 2015 in Wellington, New Zealand. (Photo by Mark Tantrum/ mark tantrum.com)

I turned 42 in May and Te Pō Atarau turned 6. I also went up the coast to participate in the Digital Nati sessions, which was great.

The highlight of June for me was the kid’s disco which I live tweeted.

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July was busy with Matariki, and my favourite Kaumatua kapa haka, as well as Armageddon and Māori language week.

August was about the quietest month of the year, but then in September we went to Fiji and the US.

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We got back in October, and 4 days later I flew out to Kohacon15 in Nigeria, which was a totally amazing trip

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November was the LIANZA conference.

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Kahurangi turned 9.

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And we had Island food O’clock for one of our beer o’clocks at work.

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And December was Kiwicon and of course Christmas

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The ‘great’ pumpkin tasting

Every time I come to the USA I always do some ridiculous thing to do with food/drink. Ive done the chocolate based cold beverage challenge. Where as we drove from Seattle to LA I tried all the chocolate drinks I could.
I’m on a continuing mission to find a cheesesteak as good as I had in Philadelphia.
There are a few more, in 2013 in Reno, it was just to be able to finish a meal in the casino. Never managed it.

This time around it is Autumn or Fall as they call it over here, so everything has fall flavours (basically everything tastes like pumpkin pie). So I’ve been trying to taste as much as I can.

I’ve been drinking coffees

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Drinking smoothies

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Eating bread.
And drinking beer

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I even got given a pumpkin beer T-shirt

The Pittsburgh leg is nearly over, but I have a week in California to go. I’m sure they probably have “soy skinny low fat kale quinoa pumpkin chai latte” or something that I will have to try. FOR SCIENCE.

Cordoba – The food edition

Atlanta .. the food and drink version

So while I was in Atlanta I went on a mission to try as much southern food and local Atlanta beer as I could. Some of the places  I visited were

If you are ever in Atlanta you should totally try them. Publik and Tap for local beer, and good food. The other 2 for some of the best food you will ever taste. Your Doctor won’t thank you, but your taste buds sure will.

Finally, I also ate a cheeseburger from Five guys, so I’ll leave you with this, which is a more eloquent version of my reaction

2013 – WTF Happened?

With still 9 days to go I’ve decided to do a bit of a wrap up for the year.

It was a pretty massive year in a lot of ways starting with

Koha

  • This year we had the highest number of commits ever, as of today 2619 commits
  • 82 different people had code committed into Koha
  • 32 were new developers
  • At least (probably about 4 times this many really) 167 libraries liberated themselves by moving to Koha
  • 3.12 and 3.14 were released on time and with no major issues
  • Kohacon in Reno was a great time.
  • The NZ trademark issue was finally settled with the Community winning it’s challenge to Liblime/PTFS’s application.
  • I wrote 50 patches, signed off 182 patches, did QA on 72 and when doing release maintenance pushed 248.

Personal Stuff

  • Maui came to the 4th birthday party of Te Po Atarau.
  • Kahurangi turned 7 and had a space party.
  • I turned 40
  • Laurel had ankle reconstruction surgery, that resulted in a bunch of complications that meant I did the school run for most of the year.
  • I gave 11 presentations. (It would have been 12 but I bailed on one)
  • I survived 3 Whisky O’Clocks
  • I travelled 36,577 km

ALA 2011 – From Wellington to Nawlins

So this year was my first ALA, which is one hell of an experience. I’m pretty sure there were more Librarians in the exhibition hall in one hour, than live in the whole of NZ.

I flew out to New Orleans via Santa Barbara, which was just as well given the mess the ash cloud made with my flights. Brendan and I arrived in New Orleans just after midnight on Friday morning. We spent the day, along with other ByWaterians working our way through bugs and enhancements, then the exhibition hall opened at 5pm.

It was really busy, as the picture above shows, we always had a lot of people to talk to. So much interest in Koha from libraries and consortia big and small. It was very refreshing that most people understood Free Software, and we didn’t have to spend time explaining that. Also refreshing was the lack of questions on things like scalability, Koha has well and truly proven itself in that regard and people there seemed well aware of it. Most questions were around support, what new features we had in the pipeline and the differences between Koha and the most prominent fork.

For the next 3 days I alternated with time on the stand and time meeting people and doing some hacking. I even managed to attend one session (Open Source ILS in Consortia) which was really good. It was a panel discussion, with 2 Evergreen and 3 Koha consortia represented. Ian and I even got a shout out which was neat.

Saturday morning was the LITA open source Interest group meeting. It was a small affair but very good. On Saturday night we had the Open Source ILS users get together which was great fun, lots of cool people to talk to. Afterwards we did a walk up and down Bourbon Street, which is certainly something to behold.

On Sunday night we ran a small hackfest, the highlight of which was spending time with the guys from IndexData and learning more about the internals of Zebra. Invaluable information was gathered.

Monday, I managed to catch up with Marshall Breeding for a good 1.5 hour chat. We covered a lot of topics, Kotui, Libwebcats, development processes and much more. It was a great chat and one I hope we get the chance to repeat. That evening we went for a cruise on the Mississippi on a paddle steamer, so much fun.

Tuesday morning back to Santa Barbara, for a lovely evening of barbeque elk and spare ribs grilled by Brendan, followed by a movie and a great night of sleep.

Wednesday, the long slow journey back to NZ began and by 12:30am Saturday morning I was back at home. I spent a lot of time in airports, on buses, trains and planes but it was worth it.

A huge thanks to ByWater Solutions for making it all possible for me to attend, and to my work (Catalyst) for letting me go.

Kohacon 2009 next week

I’m busy trying to tidy everything up, and to forget there is a small possibility my wife will give birth while I’m away, before I head off to Kohacon on Tuesday.

Today Kahurangi and I went out to upper hutt to Nan and Koro’s house to bake hot cross buns with Donna and Manaia. Kahu and Manaia rolled the buns and helped to put the crosses on the top, they turned out suprisingly edible.

Tomorrow is Dad’s 65th birthday party at Le Marche Francais which should be fun, then I have to go into work to grab all the things I forgot. Like my cellphone charger, headphones etc, yes I am a goober. Then I have to finish off my presentation, get an adapter for the video out on my netbook, and copy it to a usb stick just in case.

Laurel is writing me a shopping list, and I have a baseball game and numerous lunches and dinners to go to, so I’ll be pretty busy, but I’m sure it will be fun.