esterday was another very busy day (one day I really must have a restful weekend…) It started with a mad dash for the bus (after I completely miscalculated times) to get myself over to Heathcote. It’s a long trip by bus, involving a meandering (and bumpy – I always forget how bad the roads still…
This is what central Christchurch looks like these days – still a mass of cordon fences, road works, half-demolished buildings, and vast open spaces that can feel pretty desolate: On the plus side, there’s cool artwork (official and unofficial), and a lot of the empty demolition sites have been grassed over, which makes some parts…
y potential cold remains at bay, so I decided to use my day off to attend a few writers’ festival events. The first was a talk by psychologist Michael Corballis about his new pop-psychology book The Wandering Mind. It’s based on the idea that letting your mind wander is actually a good thing, because that’s…
ll of a sudden, August is almost over, which means in a couple of days it’ll be officially Spring. And, more importantly, it means I’ve only got a couple of days to finish my second butterfly, because the deadline for challenge entries is on Sunday night. I haven’t really had any time to work on…
‘m feeling pretty proud of myself – I was playing around with some Javascript stuff at work today, and I actually managed to build a wee tool that will be useful for the team! Instead of generating kittens or looking up words in the library, it actually does a useful task that will save us…
olitics has invaded the CEISMIC office – we have a candidate in our midst. Well, sort of. Our team member Lucy-Jane flats with Ben Uffindell, the creator of The Civilian, a satirical website along the lines of The Onion. He recently announced he was running for parliament, founding The Civilian Party, a joke party (though…
oday was almost entirely filled with meetings. One was a very interesting meeting though – we were visited by a researcher from Tokyo, who is studying the experiences of disabled people in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, so has come to Christchurch to compare our situation with Tohoku’s. The Tohoku earthquake was only a…
t’s been a busy weekend. Yesterday afternoon I went to another film festival film, The Tale of The Princess Kaguya. A lovely animation from Studio Ghibli, based on a Japanese fairy tale. As with everything Studio Ghibli, a visually wonderful film, plus it’s always so interesting to see fairy tales from other cultures – they…
art of the rules of the Butterfly Challenge was that you hve to add a link to a photo or blog post about your entry to a “linky” on TartanKiwi’s original post, so that everyone can see each other’s entries. As a result, I’ve been getting a lot of comments on my Catterfly post, all…
went to a Toastmasters speech competition last night – not as a competitor (I’m not quite experienced enough for that yet!), but I did end up having a role: they needed someone to be the timer, keeping a note of how long each speaker spoke for, and operating the warning lights. Toastmasters puts a lot…