Kerfuffle

The experiment uses www.evoca.com, you can use it to generate your own audio recordings for free (up to a limit then you have to go pro). When you’ve done a recording Evoca provide you with a html code snippet which creates a flash player linked to your recording, you put this in a blog posting (as here on mine) or use on other web pages. Then, when you create a placemark you can put a html link to the relevant blog post, users find the placemark in Google Earth and get your audio by clicking the link and pressing play.

LOTS of applications for this, I think audio is easier to absorb than text as you can look at the Google Earth view while listening. Fantastic for teaching, and students can create their own tour of a place…

should be here:

So the last minutes of my trip tick away. When I left Brunei the first time the hornbill had just sealed herself in her nest to hatch her egg and earlier today I got some footage of the male hornbill on the roof, very showy. Probably he wasn’t showing off, he was checking the garden for mess as his mate has just broken out of the nest and is preening herself in the tree. She must have a crink in her neck like no other….

I’ve also been playing around with another map for viewing my photos, they aren’t all showing up yet but I think its snazzy, follow the link top right to see.

The below are two great examples of New Zealand eccentrics at work, in the 1970s this bloke moved to Corremandel, he set up a kiln and started making pottery. He was also mad on trains, Corromandel is famous for a gold rush in the 19th century and so there were lots of track and bits of trains lying around for him to salvage. With the bits he made a railway to get clay down a very steep slope to his kiln. As Corromandel got more tourists he extended the railway to take passengers, you ride up an incredible slope with switch backs and dead ends, its a wonderful example of how one mans passion over a number of years can build something fantastic. I loved it, see other pictures top right.

The men at work is from the water gardens, a quirky park full of mad water wheels, bizzare rides for children and water squirting toys.

This links to a set of movie clips from the first part of the trip. Its very big so be patient with it downloading, you may want to follow the link, leave the window open and make a cup of coffee….

it may ’stick’ at one point while it downloads the next bit of video. You can right click and use some controls like rewind or play.

Its been difficult getting online so I have got behind with posts.

Xmas in mid summer was deeply wierd, mince pies and heat don’t go. However, I was sharing a cottage with my family in Rotorua on a deer farm, we liked imagining they were (rather warm) reindeers.

Rotorua is tourist trap central, there are a million ways to be fleeced of you tourist dollars (including watching sheep shearing) in the area. I resisted bungee jumping and skydiving but zorbing sounded just my thing. Wrapped in 10 foot high, see through, inflatable, rubber ball you are pushed off a slope and roll down bouncing gently towards your cheering family. Its a lot of fun but pricy. I think they should introduce them for small children, instead of always watching to see if they are putting small, pudgy fingers in electrical sockets you just put them in their zorb ball and leave them to roll gently, and safely, around your house. If you filled pockets of it with helium they wouldn’t even wear out your carpet (though you’d have to be careful opening the patio doors).

Some full on kiwi eccentricity in the next post so keep your ears on

As I remember it Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh was once exploring for his ‘friends and relations’.

Having just spent the last few days in Wellington catching up with Kiwi friends I originally knew from the UK I guess I’ve been doing the same. So far this trip I’ve seen my sister and family in Brunei, Sarah in Brisbane, met a whole new bunch of friends up in Mamaki (Northland, New Zealand) and now I’ve just been staying with Ange and caught up with Rob in Wellington. Its great to catch up with people but its very weird to keep on moving to new places and find old faces there.

I’ve been stuffing my face with kiwi fruit in Mamaki, about 3 a day and, erm, it had an interesting effect on my bowels. I mention this because Rob (dietician) laughed out loud when I told him. He said Kiwi fruit are incredibly nutritious, lots of vitamin C, folic acid but most brilliant when it comes to fixing constipation. So eat them if you can but not more than a couple a day eh? (eh? seems to come up in conversation all the time here, I’m catching on)

So yesterday I was getting very annoyed doing a fiddly bit of painting in the kitchen when Klaus came in: ‘dolphins in the bay! Come now!’.

No further invite was necessary, I dropped everything (making an interesting painty splodge on the floor I had to clear up later) we tore down to the bay, and jumped in to swim out to them. It was a pod (see, I know the lingo) of about 10 and one came within about 10 ft of me, a dark shape underwater about the size of a cow (or so it looked with a bit of imagination). Ahhhh, it made my week (as if I’m not having a good time already) and then there was some fantastic surf going on so I had fun surfing back in. No photo’s I’m afraid, a tiny dorsal fin on a grey day would have been v boring.

Later we had the most enormous tropical storm with about 50mm of rain, I sat in the bath watching it pour down on the leaves and flashes of lightning……

as said Calvin and Hobbes, boy, I know what they mean:

see link top right for more images.

My home over the last 10 days has been a little purple caravan called Stella, she’s aptly named as I can see millions of stars from her when I turn out the light. I’ve got to New Zealand and I’m wwoofing (willing workers on organic farms) for a family here to earn my board and lodging. I farm with Klaus for 4 hours a day, that usually gets me to early afternoon and after a swim (the most azure sea is only 10 minutes drive down the road) I do some work on my laptop in Stella before crashing for the night at 10.30pm.

We’ve been building beds for avacado trees, I tried to help milking the goats but I failed that exam, I had a fit of giggles when the goat turned around and licked my ear. The house here is a lot like a ship, its wooden and built high and it looks out over 3 tree covered valleys which in the wind make you feel like you’re looking at a very green sea.

The farm is part of a wider community of 7 families who jointly own the land in trust, they want to keep it as native bush and even have very rare kiwis that screech at night. We all had a party on the beach at the weekend which you can see in the photos.

I am thriving on hard work, sun, swimming and lots of home grown organic food.

By now you’re all probably sick of my stories of sunshine and adventure so I thought I’d tell you something more mundane which I explained to Sarah in Brisbane recently. It comes from a group of friends in Birmingham, who do like their cake. The usual English thing at a meal when dessert is served is to give a modest slice to everyone, after the first slice everyone feels a number of urges/questions:

1. I want more cake
2. I don’t want to appear greedy
3. will I get a second piece before its all eaten?
4. Didn’t Al/Dani/Craig/Juliet already have seconds and are having 3rds???
5. there’s only one piece left, I really would seem greedy if I took it

The result is stress for everyone concerned, mistrust, intrigue and a sore hand for the person doing all that cutting. The rule of cake is a solution: On serving pudding (it can be ice cream or pie too) cut the cake into a number of slices equal to exactly the number of people present and give one piece to everyone. It will all get eaten, try it out sometime.

Don’t say I never tell you anything useful.

Am just in the process of uploading more photos, link top right

So I hung out in Brisbane, checking out a lot of touristicky stuff such as museums art galleries etc. Everyone is remarkably friendly compared with the UK, however, there have been 2 exceptions: A hard hat wearing construction worker (barging into someone on a bridge) and the bloke who cut my hair. A pom. In fact, a grade ‘A’, full on, winging pom. Here are some of his choice quotes:
“How is Birmingham these days with all the Indians and blacks?”
“Aussies may appear to be friendly but they’ll pretend not to know you, southerners in England are actually more friendly”
“I never want to go back to Britain” closely followed by: “I’ve got a house in Surrey, I might go back and live there some day, its a lovely bit of Britain”.

After Brisbane Sarah and I went out West to a place called Mt Mee (maybe it’s a Microsoft project, a shortening of ‘My Mountain’). Its coffee growing country and we were virtually mobbed by Aussie wildlife in the national park: Wallabies (they need to work on the hopping thing, it isn’t very elegant when they’re trying to get through a bush), Echidna (Marsupial version of a hedgehog), a Big Lizard and a mystery bird that makes a sound like a monkey.

From there we struck South to the area around Byron Bay to stay with Karina, Sarah’s friend who has a beautiful house in the bush. Its wonderfully green all around with steep hills, trees and with a private creek for swimming in. The noise made by the crickets and other insects at dusk was incredible. Imagine a tonne of rice being continually emptied on a tin roof and you’re half way there, fortunately they shut up at night so you can get some shut eye. I slept out on the veranda which was just incredible, unfortunately we couldn’t see the stars because of the cloud cover but it was very cosy to watch the rain coming down 6 feet away wrapped up in your duvet. One of the days we went kayaking down the river and as I came around the corner I was face to face with a really big wallaby having a drink. I tried to take a photo but I rustled a plastic bag getting my camera out and he was bouncing away before I knew it. Magic moment though.

The Brisbane house I’m staying in is the original colonial style house: wood construction raised off the ground on wood pillars to let the cooling wind flow around with a tin roof. It’s a lovely building style, the whole thing creaks like a boat through the night and Sarah’s house has a great view over Brisbane petering out to bush in the distance.

The day after getting here Alice arrived, she’s on tour of Oz, NZ and Japan and is a friend of Sarah’s from Brighton. We saw her gig at a club, and ended up all sitting outside in a yard after the set, most English clubs don’t even have windows let alone a garden so that was quite weird. At this point lots of people came up to tell Alice how much they liked the gig, ‘nice job she’s got’ I thought to myself, until Mr Beaver (not his real name, just what we called him) latched onto Alice. Despite heavy hints he’d over stayed his welcome (Alice had to walk off to ‘take a call’) he wouldn’t leave her alone and we only got rid of him in the end by dodging inside the stage door. Fame sucks according to Alice, I see her point.

After that we headed back to the bands luxury apartment and drank tequila from the only available containers like shot glasses: Egg cups. It all gets a bit hazy for me after this but I do remember the morning was breaking when we made it up to Alice’s separate flat upstairs. The birds were going mad, the Brisbane river looked gorgeous in front of us and huge fruit bats were flapping their way back along the river home to roost. My first proper rock and roll party was over, no rollers had been driven into the pool and no TVs had been thrown out of the window – perhaps for the best, it wouldn’t have been very impressive out of a first floor window.

So I got to Oz OK, funny to be back, I spent part of my gap year here back in ‘88 and it brings back a lot of memories about being very young and not knowing a great deal. Quick photo, more soon

Trip to Miah (not sure of the spelling now) caves at the weekend was very cool. We firstly had to drive over the border to Malaysia. I always get some geeky fun out of funny words abroad, while we were waiting in the queue for customs I spied a pimped up drive (bad taste sporty car with spoilers and wheel trims for those of you not in regular contact with a teenager) making its way noisily through which was marked SAGA on the back in big letters*

Next day onto the caves, you cross a very muddy river via boat and then walk through the jungle to the caves on an elevated wooden walkway (there’s a photo of this just posted). All that hardwood seemed a bit excessive given the path was 2.5 km long, until we came across a very large spotted leech at one point in the walk. Ughh. The wooden planks were also very slippy and we all skidded about merrily. There’s a very useful handrail to keep your balance, however, it’s the favourite haunt of red millipedes with a really nasty bite so you can imagine the flailing of arms, grabbing and then immediately releasing of the handrail that went on.

The caves stank. Bat guano smells like old men’s breath mixed with rotten eggs. So they get to be breath taking for 2 reasons as the walkways led into a series of huge caves and tunnels, you could get a 747 in some of them (with a bit of clever parking). Bats like them (obviously) as do cave swifts, these make nests that are made into birds nest soup in China (no twigs, all solidified saliva). Only you have to get them off the big cave walls and roof first and no one has handily left a 747 so you can walk up, no, you have to climb up some incredibly precarious looking poles and then poke them off with a very big stick. Oh, and its dark, hot and it smells. Some little figures were up there fixing some poles when we went through, you could hardly see the man, just his torch.

Next day we went to the related museum which has some archaeological remains found in the cave including a head dated to 40,000 years ago, the earliest human remains in island S.E. Asia and widely derided when it was first dated in the 50s as it didn’t fit with the prevailing view of human colonisation. Amazing to think the caves have been inhabited by people for that long, we think Winchester Cathedral is old but its been in use less than a tenth of the time.

*for anyone not from the UK, Saga holidays are specialist holidays for old people.

I’ve had a comment added by my Mum pointing out the location of a hill in Shropshire I used as a test for the map/photo thing was wrong, I’ve also had an email from my friend Kyle, just finishing up a PhD in GIS (geographic information systems) saying he’s keeping an eye on me so I don’t put a picture of trees in the desert. Can’t get stuff past anyone these days….

Thanks for all those who’ve emailed and added comments, good to hear from you all. I’m writing this from Brunei airport on wireless which is helping while away the time spent waiting for the flight.

I haven’t got time to write up the weekend yet but there are new pictures here