Posted by jerry on April 2nd, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Travel
Auckland is a harbour city and the architecture reflects several distinct stages of development. There is the late 19th century neo-classical style, such as the Transport Department building
And the outstanding Ferry Building – seen here from Fisherman’s Wharf
There’s the art deco of the 1930s Duckworth Building
And the mix of old and new – neoclassical and in the background a 1970s apartment building and to the right a dramatic sail-like building
And if getting a kinetic sense of height is your kind of sport, then why not jump off the Sky Tower – with a bungie strap attached of course! for the world’s highest bungie jump over dry land. Not for the feint hearted!
The protruding ‘fishing rods’ are the bungie anchor points. But there is a lovely restaurant at the top with a great view over Auckland
And dining is something Auckland is very good at – you can sample Japanese sushi through to delightful Belgian watazooi washed down with a pint of Leffe. You can find the Belgian pub just up this alleyway off Queen Street. The place is well lit and the city is very safe to walk around at night.
Reflecting the nautical theme there is also a good selection of restaurants on Fisherman’s Wharf – a new development to rival wharf conversions around the globe.
It is also home to the Hilton Hotel
My room had a great view of the …er… container handling facility at the wharf. The conference facilities, however, were excellent.
But the architecture is truly diverse, and this one was one of the loveliest buildings in town.
It’s worth walking around the town to get a feel for the place – here is a typical streetscape by night
And who could complain about the public transport when the buses are so expressive!
The weather was perfect and mild for three days – the fourth showed another mood with a decent storm, heavy driving rain and high winds blowing form the south (straight from Antarctica). I watched one person head out at lunchtime with one of teh hotel umbrellas – he re-entered the hotel two minutes later and the umbrella was a mere skeleton! But still the ferries plied their trade – those ferry captains are highly skilled to sail in that weather!
All too soon, the conference was over and it was time to leave. But I think it’s a place I’ll return to before too long.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by jerry on April 1st, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Travel
This is more about the granular details in Auckland New Zealand – thought I’d share a few photos
In Auckland you can visit deserted beaches
There’s a whole wharf on which to go fishing
… just hope your name’s not Bill! The public will be the judge…
This fountain was a real delight, tucked away on Queen Street
And being on the coast – the seagulls keep watch over their land
More on Auckland’s great architecture tomorrow
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by jerry on March 31st, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Technology, Travel
Picture if you will, a badly-designed ironing board. It has a non-removable iron holder at the wide end…
Now, don’t get me wrong – it’s better than trying to iron a shirt on a table with a towel draped over, but it’s like they put the iron stand on the wrong end. So the shirt bunches up and you can’t get the whole shirt back or a whole shoulder on the board without creasing.
But not all was lost – Ironing boards are perfect for improving the ergonomics of the desk when the chair is too low 🙂
And yes, that’s a moleskine pocket cahier – perfect for short trips. It is leaning against the portable printer – canon bjc50 which has an IR connection so I can print direct from the iPaq2750. And that is an iPaq bluetooth keyboard which makes typing sooo much easier!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by jerry on March 30th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Travel
The flight from Sydney was only about 4 hours – a short one by Aussie travel standards. And the first sight of New Zealand was actually just before touchdown – they aren’t kidding when they say this is the land of the long white cloud!
The hotel is on a wharf near the Maritime Museum and offers a great view over Auckland
The ferry berth, Auckland New Zealand
The view the other way is into the Bay of Islands – and you quickly see why this nation has more boats per head of population than anywhere else on earth! The scenery is breathtaking.
Near the Maritime Museum there are several tall ships moored. This one is the Søren Larsen – the boat that starred in The Onedin Line and is a brigantine rigged vessel displacing 300 tonnes. It is 145 feet in length and 25 feet across the beam. And the masts soar to 98 feet providing 6750 feet of sail area. This is an impressive ship that has completed many world tours. And it conducts regular cruises under sail to the heart of the Pacific Islands.
The Søren Larsen
The next few posts are a few days behind, as the wifi provider in the hotel did not support Windows ppc (pocket windows used on my iPaq PDA). This is the first country I’ve found so far that has not been able to provide internet service to my PDA – so on the next visit to NZ it might just be worth taking a laptop – there was cable internet to the room, and I was assured that I was the very first person unable to connect a wifi device to their service. To their credit, the hotel did refund the price of the card, despite my having scratched open the access code. Moreover, they allowed access to their business centre to enable me to check email. However their machines did not have card readers. Now if only I had brought the portable CD burner, I might have been able to achieve a workaround, and maintained the blog while I was away.
And so to dinner on the evening of the first day – there’s a great Japanese sushi bar on Queens Street in Auckland New Zealand.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by jerry on March 24th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Technology, Travel
Looking online for info about digital video cameras was frustrating. Whether Canon, Sony, JVC or Hitachi no-one seemed to be able to tell us whether these would connect easily to a mac. So this post is going to give you the info you don’t get on the web.
In the end we had to take a gamble – none of the shops would fire up the cameras – even on external power supply so there was no way to verify manufacturers claims about close focus, image stabilisation – let alone compatibility with a mac G5 running Mac OS X (10.4.2). That put me off buying one duty-free as it would be difficult to return a camera if it proved autistic and refused to talk to the mac.
As luck would have it, despite their no-power-up policy and despite them having macs in the store we still bought from Dick Smith, because of all the shops we went to, theirs was the only one with a ‘change-of-mind returns policy – we could test it for two weeks and if it didn’t do what we hoped, then we could return it for a full refund.
The on we gambled on was a SONY DCRHC38E MiniDV Handycam AU$548. This camera has a Zeiss lens, 40x optical zoom, and up to 2000x digital zoom. So the optical zoom is about twice that of other cameras in its class.
Connecting up
The manual says this is a USB camera, but we bought a firewire cable and found that it fitted the DV OUT port on the camera. After shooting a short piece of video, I fired up the mac, connected the firewire cable and launched iMovie. The camera was recognised straight away and withing minutes the video was downloaded and ready to edit in iMovie. No extra software installation. Just plug and play. So ignore the USB stuff – use the firewire cable straight to the mac.
Now if they had just said so on the various camera websites we could have saved a lot of angst about whether it would connect or not.
The image quality is good, and the camera will focus close enough to show stitching in some detail. The “sport” mode provides image stabilisation, and there is a low-light night setting that uses infra-red to enhance the picture quality. There’s a heap of other settings to capture good colour for sunsets and sunrises, touch screen spot focus, deep shadow settings, and so on. Here’s a short sample showing my complete ignorance, both of video camera operation and editing in iMovie 🙂
I haven’t found any still camera settings yet – but then I bought it for its qualities as a video camera.
It’ll get a good workout in Auckland New Zealand next week, and I’ll blog a bit more about my travels as time and internet connections permit.
Anyhow, so far I’m a happy customer 🙂
Cheers
Jerry
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