Giedre tyttö Ozista

Weather, Cars and Networking

This is all very blue and pretty, but all my pictures are one week late. In fact we haven't seen sun for 2 days already! We're having the worst rainfall I've ever seen. There's land slides and mini-tornados tearing the roofs across the country. Luckily we live in a bush, so our hill is secured by entangled roots of the trees. Land slides usually occur in re-landscaped de-forested areas. Its quite amazing to see how much water there's all of a sudden in all the usually tame creeks, there are also tiny waterfalls going down by all the roadsides.

Last Saturday we had our first breakfast on the porch, it was sunny and warm. Today I felt like staying in bed the whole day wrapped in blankets, - its dark, cold and damp... The weather can be extremely unpredictable here.

Unfortunately we spent our Saturday sitting in a car and checking out some cheap "japnese" car sales in industrial outskirts of the town. No luck there, so Saturday was basically wasted. It seems that "our" car was waiting all this time in Trademe auction. We found this Nissan Primera and we're almost buying it (should be finally picking it up on Wednesday, if all goes well, fingers crossed).

We already had one visitor from Finland! Well, not really OUR visitor, we just saw Teemu for couple of hours last Monday before dropping him off to the airport. He was heavily involved in the Future of Learning in the Networked World conference and traveled half of this country visiting different schools and educational institutions, having conversations and workshops.

Besides visiting our Titirangi cafe, we dragged this pour soul to Piha. It meant about 1 hour driving and 5min looking at the beach... Sitting in a car. It more or less sums up the experience of living in Auckland, so I guess Teemu had quite an authentic experience of this city... :)

And then I joined the FLNW people. Maybe its a good chance to actually tell something about my work, because people have been complaining, that I'm not writing anything about it. Well, things are going really well. My job is to work with different schools and lecturers at Unitec, look at how they're using technologies for their teaching (or maybe they're not, but could) and then suggest/show/help with some ways to do some interesting things with technology. Yeah, the usual web 2.0 thing, blogs, flickr, wikis, etc. But this blog is not work related and I'd like to keep it this way, so I'm about to start some more organised way to write/keep track of all my work related things. Stay tuned and, if you're into that sort of things, I'll let you know where to look for me online. :)

FLNW was great. I regretted not being involved in this event much more.

Its quite late now, so I'd better go to sleep now. Last weekend we changed the clock to summer time, so we have to wake up 1 hour earlier. Its dark in the mornings again... :(