s part of some assistance we’re giving to a research project in another department, a colleague and I have spent the past few days building a bibliography of earthquake research. After scraping all the usual academic databases, we turned to Google Scholar, which often picks up papers that the other databases don’t, particularly newly-published material…
Super-windy this afternoon (though not as bad as it was in Wellington), with a classic Christchurch nor’wester. So yay, nice warm day, but not so yay having to battle the wind walking home – I felt like I’d run a marathon by the time I got home. At least my difficulties weren’t as bad as…
I’m in the Wellington library using their free wifi, and attempting to write this on my tablet, so this won’t be a long post, but I had to at least let you all know that CEISMIC won the award for Open Source in Social Service, and I gave the acceptance speech with no more than…
I’m off to Wellington in an hour or so, to the NZ Open Source Awards. I’ve got an acceptance speech memorised and well-rehearsed, just in case we’re lucky enough to win, and I’m only mildly terrified at the thought of having to actually use it. My bag is packed with books for the meetup with…
We had the boss’s 15 year old son in the office today for work experience. He actually did some really good work for us (after a bit of a false start when the computer he was using (which runs Linux – all the Windows machines in the office need you to log in with a…
The two main programming languages we use at work to build helpful little tools to speed up the tedious jobs are Javascript and Python. I’ve been making reasonably good progress at learning Javascript, but the Python stuff I’ve been leaving to Lucy-Jane, who is a much more skilled programmer than me. On Friday afternoon, she…
ery tiring day today. It got off to a bad start when I was woken up at 3.30 am – I’m not sure what by, but I suspect boy racers. And of course, having been woken up at that horrible hour, it took me forever to get back to sleep again, so I felt like…
As promised, a few photos from yesterday:
uite apart from the whole winning an award thing, yesterday was really interesting. For a start, I got to go and visit (and even better, take some photographs of) the Canterbury Cultural Collections Recovery Centre. The CCCRC is an amazing place – it’s a giant climate-controlled hangar that stores all the material from the various…
ast night my Toastmasters group had a quiz night. My team maintained a respectable second place up until the second last round. When the quiz leader announced that the theme of the round was flags, there was a loud exclamation of glee from the teenage member of our team, the child of one of the…