West Coast Again, May 21-25 2021: Days 2 & 3, Canterbury Open, Otira Café, Truman Track, Punakaiki Pancake Rocks, and Westland Petrel Colony
19 Jun 2021
Fought in the Canterbury Open, and then an action-packed day north of Greymouth.
West Coast Again, May 21-25 2021: Day 1, WLG-CHC
12 Jun 2021
Last year Elliott and I went to the West Coast for the Queen’s Birthday weekend. Victoria Day is a bit earlier but the Canterbury Open was basically on the Victoria Day long weekend (not a holiday in NZ!) and I figured it would be a good chance to get out to the West Coast again, though coming from Christchurch rather than Wellington, and a bit further south than last time.
May: non-teaching term month 1
1 Jun 2021
Incremental progress throughout May; as usual, non-teaching terms are much less of a grind.
Holidays: Canada vs NZ
15 May 2021
I know what’s when in Canada, but things are completely different here. Let’s try to figure it out.
Review: Ice Walker: A Polar Bear's Journey through the Fragile Arctic by James Raffan
9 May 2021
Canadian content! This short work of creative nonfiction follows a bear, Nanu, as she raises her cubs near Churchill Falls (Manitoba) in contemporary times.
That Antipodal Life
5 May 2021
We’ve been in Wellington for the past year and a half (!). It’s never really cold or hot here. How does that compare to Canada?
April: end-of-term slog
3 May 2021
April has overall been a real grind, with an attempted paper submission and now grading. We had one trip to Christchurch, where our planned objective got rained out, but we still did a bunch of elevation gain (though not much distance, which means steep ascents).
Queenstown, Makarora, Wanaka, and not Gillespie
2 Apr 2021
The planned logistics for the Gillespie trip were simple: rent a car, stay at the Wonderland Lodge in Makarora the night before, take a jetboat across the river, walk, and take a jetboat back from Kerin Forks. The jetboat avoids the biggest river crossings. Ironically, the day before we were to go, we got a call saying that there wasn’t enough water to run the jetboat. That’s fine, it should be easy to cross the river in that case.
March: finishing the Tongariro Circuit, climbing trip to Pohara, and hiking Wanaka
1 Apr 2021
Usually by this point we’d be getting close to the end of Winter term (was April 3 in Winter 2020), but we’ve stretched lectures out because of the pandemic (later start, additional scheduled pause, shorter exam period), so we still have 1.5 weeks of class left. I feel like the wheels are starting to fall off at this point, with all sorts of random life things happening to the students in my graduate course. Three trips: back from Tongariro; climbing at Pohara; and hiking around Wanaka.
Book review: The Ethical Algorithm by Kearns and Roth
19 Mar 2021
Again wandering through a Wellington City Library branch, this time I picked up The Ethical Algorithm by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, from January 2020. It was an easy read for someone with a PhD in Computer Science and a BSc in Math/CS, and I finished it in about two hours. I didn’t pick up that much that was new to me, but I follow developments in this domain as an interested but technically-educated reader.
