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Christmas Update

Entry 1481, on 2012-12-25 at 17:14:57 (Rating 1, Travel)

Over the last few days we have had a leisurely trip from Dunedin to Nelson where we are spending a couple of weeks holiday over Christmas. Generally when we are making this journey (a distance of about 800 kilometers) we try to do it in 1 or maybe 2 days, but this time we decided to take our time. (For those of you from outside of New Zealand, two points: first 800 kilometers is about 500 miles; and second, distances here take longer to travel because our roads tend to be quite windy).

So on the first day we stopped overnight in Geraldine, then took the "scenic" inland route through Methven, Oxford, and Rangiora out to the main road and on to Hanmer Springs. We spent a day at Hanmer just doing the usual causal things: mini-golf, thermal pools, etc. The temperature started getting up to what you would expect for a real New Zealand summer (almost 30 degrees C, 90 degrees Fahrenheit) while we were there and we got the same driving through to Nelson the next day.

I'm writing this Christmas Day (as all true bloggers do) and it looks like it will be warm again today. I love Southern Hemisphere summers!

So it's all pretty relaxing so far but a computer geek's work is never done and I am currently in the middle of upgrading an old original iMac running Mac OS 9 to a much newer (but still kind of outdated) G5 iMac running OS X. Should be a fairly significant improvement for the user!

It did remind me of how far computers have come though: the flash drives I used had 10 times the capacity of the old iMac's hard disk! And the general reliability of Mac OS 9 could have been better. I've had more crashes this morning than I would have in a year running OS X!

My friends and family seem to know me quite well: for Christmas this year I have received a whole pile or chocolate, some wine, and a variety of chilli sauces. Of course there was also the most useful gift I received: cash! Yes, that will be very useful to help out with home renovation projects.

As expected it has turned out to be hot again today but according to the weather app on my iPad we might be about to get some rain and thunderstorms for the next week or two! Yeah, New Zealand gets some great warm weather on occasions but it can change fairly quickly too!

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