• Location: NZ
• Mood: wired

Here in the Southern Hemisphere

My flight landed without any particular incident. I can't say a huge amount about it - 12 to 13 hour flights are never exactly fun. At least I couldn't complain about the fact that I had a center seat. Not only did we follow the night, but even if we hadn't, the only thing to see was water.

From there it was a reasonably scenic taxi ride to Stuart&turn2nz's place, where I'm not catching up - and feeling awfully wired. Between the excitement and the amount of tea I've been fed in the last half-day, I don't necessarily feel like sleeping.

Of course, it's also part of even my diurnal cycle. Which brings me to time. I normally would change the laptop to local time, except that this time it freaks me out. On the face of it, Auckland is a mere 3 hours before California time. But given the position of the date line, it's actually 21 hours ahead. It may only be 11:15am here, but it's 11:15am on Friday the 10th.

My flight here left Wednesday night and arrived Friday morning. My flight back leaves on a Sunday night, and arrives late the same morning.

In any case, I arrived at the door, rang the bell, and was pounced on by Frida - followed shortly by a pounce from Sabrina. Given I got here at about 6am, that was a much more enthusiastic reception than I expected.

I wasn't really together enough to take pictures at the airport, or during the ride. In fact, I was kept too busy catering to both of the girls to even think of taking one until they took off for the day. But here's an idea of their house - I haven't done any interiors, because for some reason I feel that's a little creepy without permission.

But here's what their house looks like from the front:


As you walk on the left side to the entrance, this is what you see:


Here's the view from my room:


And the similar view from Stuart's quite comfortable office downstairs:


Their back porch - which is directly over the back patio next to Stuart's office:


And far from least, a detail of the skyline across the lake. The needle-thing faintly visible in the center is the tip of the Sky Tower in downtown Auckland.


And that's what I've got for today.

Otherwise, getting my laptop online was a slight comedy of errors. I proudly brought along a complete set of international adapters. Unfortunately, they're two-prong adapters, and my three-prong laptop power cord doesn't fit. I had a solution for that, except it was left behind with a thought of "why do I need an extension cord?"

So I'm using Stuart's only adapter, which is used for his Toughbook. I've gotta take it back downstairs shortly before that runs out of juice.

Then, since Stuart isn't home yet, I can't use his wireless network - he always sets it up to only accept particular hardware addresses, and not surprisingly, I'm not on the list. I'd just hook into one of the hardware router ports on his wireless adapter, except I didn't pack an effin' ethernet cable. I've got two USB cables and a phone cable, but no ethernet.

So right now his Toughbook is doubly disconnected, since I'm directly hooked into his DSL modem with the cable that's supposed to go to his wireless router...

Anyway. I'm going to shortly rehook his system up, then go take a shower in their sybaritically huge bathroom. Trust Frida to get herself a shower that's big enough for four in a pinch...