Auckland

I have just arrived in Auckland and made my way to Matt's house. Tomorrow, Matt and I will drive to Gisbourne which is about a 7 hour drive I think. For the past week I have been in Invercargil visiting my Grandparents and helping them shift houses. So 2 10 hour bus rides, a 1 hour flight and a 7 our drive in the space of a week...

Christmas Day

Guess what date it is today? I'll give you a clue, its December and it's Xmas day? Give up? Oh well you will just have to live in suspense.

Just ate lots of food and dessert and did the presents thing and all that.

Went to Castly hill a couple days ago and I'm still sore now. Back and shoulders are nicely worked.

I think it's high time I paid a visit to Nicholas Hanafin so off I go.

Touchdown

Home on christchurch soil. Being driven home by mumsy and daddy as we speak...

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Sent from my mobile device

Auckland

Currently I am chilling and geeking out at Matt's place in Auckland. I leave here on Tuesday for Christchurch.

And so here ends my 6 months from Canada to New Zealand.
I love travelling and it has been great to visit people I haven't seen for a while and hang some more with others I have.

Airport

<observations>Here i am about to leave thailand after a bit over 2
months here. The airport seems to be running normally and a british
guy is cackling to someone on the phone next to me. Ive uploaded a
couple pictures of the part of the airport im currently in to flickr.
It really is quite cool. Ranjene is in a taxi on her way home from
seeing me off at the moment. The queue of people getting on the plane
is huge so in sitting here waiting for it to get a lot shorter before
i stand up. </observations>

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Sent from my mobile device

Youtube uploading is a piece of shit

Excuse my language but I felt the need for an offensive title due to high levels of frustration.

Uploading videos to youtube, the number 1 video sharing site in the world is far from adequate. Ranjene and I wasted half a day yesterday trying to upload videos with very limited success.

I am a big user of flickr and the difference between it and youtube in terms of uploading content is night and day. Flickr has great 3rd party uploading tools and also tools made by flickr to bulk upload your images and video to their site. Even uploading images using a browser right on their website is a pretty painless experience with lots of nice feedback.

On the other hand I can't find a reliable uploading program for youtube, I tried a handful of programs I did find and they either didn't work or didn't work reliably. Why hasn't youtube made such an app?

Furthermore the uploading experience in a browser at youtube.com is pretty horrible. Even the newer bulk file uploader didn't want to work reliably for us and there was no way to delete a clip once added to the cue (and this is before you tell it to start uploading) The bulk uploader uses google gears and I suspect this may have been part of our problem on Ranjene's computer. But why'd they use this whole plugin business anyway? Can't we just have a desktop app to bulk upload with? I want to be able to tag and label all my uploads, resume if something fails, save my session for later etc. Google please just copy the flickr uploader it's pretty much perfect.

Next we come to single file uploads in a webbrowser, they don't provide you any progress feedback so you have no idea how much has been uploaded and in our case you don't know that the file upload has actually failed or got stuck which brings me to the most annoying part of the whole experience.

We have a less than stellar connection here and it does weird things at times, (I can't for example download my latest ipod update from apple as it always fails somewhere along the way) but youtube was unable to give me any feedback about the status of my uploads or the fact that they had actually failed, nor was I able to go back and edit information about a clip once it had got to this stuck state nor even to restart the upload or pause for the matter or anything, it's just a crap web uploading interface. I mean come on? it's youtube! Most of the services I use on the web now have good responsive feedback providing user interfaces and/or desktop tools associated with them that I can use instead.

Arrrrgggggg

Still Here

The protesters have not been evicted from the airports and I'm still in Bangkok.
Quite exciting to be stuck in the middle of it all.

Around Bangkok all seems normal, the news keep publishing information on whats happening but we haven't personally noticed anything ourselves in our day to day lives here. I shall keep my fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Extended stay

I have rebooked my flights for the 9th December. Assuming the airports are all go again by then I will fly home, until then I get another week and a half in Bangkok!

Bangkok Heat

Things are heating up here in Bangkok, with the situation at the airports very close to exploding. I think tomorrow will be key in revealing what will happen next. If I was to guess today I would have said coup for sure but now I'm on the fence. It could be that the Police/army steps in to try to remove the PAD from the airports and if that happens who knows how it will go or whether it will get bloody. Another factor is that pro government forces are threatening to take up arms if the military steps in to oust the current govt. This seems to be a major difference from the last coup which ousted former prime minister Thaksin who is now in exile having fled from corruption charges and potential jail time. Basically the way it looks to me is that either the army steps in risking major civil uprising or it does not and the stalemate continues and I am stuck here indefinitely. We shall see.

Bangkok Airport Closed

I'm supposed to leave Thailand tomorrow and fly to Auckland via Sydney but as of 2 hours ago the airport has been closed because anti government protesters stormed the airport. No mention when it will open again but I suspect I wont be flying home tomorrow.

In other news I had 2 suits made and tonight we ate at a buffet restaurant on the 82nd floor of the Baiyoke sky tower. Needless to say the view was kick ass.