Thursday 29 March 2007

School camp and stuff

Wayne has bet that this blogging won't last a month, and he's probably right, but I'll try to prove him wrong anyway.

I'm on camp at the moment, with 32 girls and 4 staff. It has been fun, although the weather hasn't been great. The girls have mountain biked, abseiled, surf-kayaked, shot, crafted, squealed, giggled and gorged. I've supervised them. Oh, and read my book. (More below.) Generally they're a good bunch but some have no regard for others, or for their environment. Picking up their mess seems to be an entirely alien idea! (No sniggers please.) There've been no dramas other than from bitchiness, except for a small mountain biking accident. Of course, everything is very much controlled these days anyway, so there's little scope for the untoward.

I've revised my opinion of Ellis upward. He has been particualrly good on the French at Cassino, and I'm just starting on the Kiwi contribution now.

Home tomorrow to J and a comfortable bed. Maybe even a beer...

Monday 26 March 2007

A visit to the Vet

I spent most of the day with R going over his memoirs. I discovered that the work I did last time had not been saved (by me) so we had to go over it all again, so that was annoying. Anyway, we got about 20 photos captioned. His memory is very good and he was able to name 23 of 25 men in his platoon photograph. On the way back (if you can call Mosgiel on the way back from Ravensbourne) I picked up a big box of Coleslaw for camp tomorrow. Should be fun if the weather holds out. I was hoping to interview a vet I had been told lives out near the camp, but when I rang him he was not at all interested. Shame.

TV and reading for the rest of the day. It's a tough life.

Sunday 25 March 2007

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

Well, the hockey was tough. As I suspected, my fitness wasn't up to it so I ran out of breath about 3/4 of the way through. Nevertheless we had a win, 1-0. It was nice to see the guys again and a few new faces as well. My mouthguard and shin-pads are somewhere in storage but no injuries were received thank goodness. I'll get another two games in before I leave.

I've finished Final Impact which was quite good. It is open to another sequel or two, but has probably been long enough. Strange that the author chose to end things much the same as happened in the real history. Still a recommended read for those with that kind of interest. Now I can continue with the Cassino book.

I'm trying to map key points from the campaign using Google Earth. If you haven't played with this yet you must. It's really fun, particularly if you have broadband (which I don't). Turn on Buildings and fly around New York or Los Angeles. Yee ha! You must also give Google's Picasa 2 a go if you have any number of digital photographs. It's a wonderful application. Incidentally, both of these are free, and no, I don't work for Google.

C and O came up for Judi's birthday. We were suppposed to have fruit in a chocolate fondue (how 70s!) but it was a comedy of errors from the start. First Judi got kerosene instead of Meths and after returning it to the shop came back with Turps. I overfilled the burner and the whole lot went up in flames so now the wooden base on the borrowed fondue set is burnt. Judi had the common sense to smother it under a big pot, but we're lucky we did the whole thing outside! Then the chocolate wouldn't melt so we had finished most of the fruit before we decided to take the chocolate as it was. It was all somewhat messy...

The forecast isn't so good for tomorrow or for camp this week, but we can't do anything about that can we. "Everyone complains about the weather but no-one does anything about it." (Another supposed Twainism that actually isn't.)

Ciao

Saturday 24 March 2007

The Library comes through

C, G and B came up for dinner and a pleasant evening yesterday. C was grateful for a decent meal as apparently the hostel food isn't great. She doesn't have many more opportunities left! Uni is going well and she had a 10% test today that went OK. She had been studying pretty hard for it and for a lab report, but she has such good work habits that neither should be too much of a worry.

She described some of the assessment policies there at Varsity. Perhaps those who slag NCEA so strongly should turn their spotlights on these! The problems with NCEA seem like nothing compared to the apparently uneven and unmoderated marking done there. And yet there are many critics of NCEA who presumably got degrees under that very system!

It was a beautiful day, in the mid-20s, so we sat and read. Well I did. Judi walked into town with A to buy some fruit, then they did some gardening and then they read. Personally I think mine was the better choice, but some people feel they have to be doing something. I'm with Mark Twain on this one: "Whenever I get the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away." [I just looked this up to find that it is apocryphal. How disappointing. One can't even rely on Twain these days.]

At last the third volume of John Birmingham's alternative history of WW2 has come on hold. It's not a bad read for those with a military history bent. Not too ra-ra American and quite believeable on the whole. It's a little hard to accept a cease-fire between Germany and Russia in 1942 under any circumstances, but I can suspend belief long enough to get past it.

Another good recent read is Richard Morgan, a Sci-Fi writer who writes a kind of cyber-punk fiction. The world is familiar but also believeably different. In fact some of the kinds of things he writes about have been in the news recently - nanotechnology, virtual worlds, corporatisation, neuro-science and so on. The area that has resonated most deeply with me is that of virtual reality. There have been a few articles recently on a massive multi-user environment called Second Life where real life users are complaining about the commercialisation and criminalisation of the virtual world. Someone even claimed to have exploded a nuke outside the virtual offices of a real world company! (Why nukes were written into the world remains to be answered.) Anyway, you can buy virtual goods and services with real world money, and since this then enables an exchange rate to be calculated, the size of the virtual economy can be tracked. Apparently it compares to some of the real world's largest countries. Will it be long before some people come to spend most of their lives in such a world? Already gamers are dying of dehydration after marathon on-line games sessions. How long until we have virtual helmets and feedback clothing for a fully emersive experience? And then how long until some people hook themselves to life support and never log out?

After a quick Google I find that there is a lot of marketing hype about Second Life. Here's a well written article that popped up near the top of the search.

Ah well, that other virtual world is calling - the book, Final Impact. Funny how it is easily as emersive as a computer game for me.

Friday 23 March 2007

Another day, another $250...

Another school week over and we finish on a hot day for our long weekend. A beer seldom tasted as good as this first one.

Exactly a month to go. Judi and I had lunch in the sun, hoping for many more of the same. But where will it be? Tuscany? Santorini? Enfidaville? Hyde Park?

I've got a parting game of hockey on Sunday but my fitness level is very low. I'll be exhausted by the end of it that's for sure. Reminds me of the manner in which I joined the team. Uh Oh! Watch this space.

Judi's folks are up for dinner tonight, and we might also get to see that most elusive of animals, the university student daughter. Last night was the Y12 Formal and it was this event that seemed to see C blossom two years ago. Now she's got such self-confidence that we feel honoured to get a text! Still she needs to be self-sufficient since we are abandoning her. She didn't so much leave the nest as have the nest moved away from under her.

My research is in one of those hiatuses (sp?). I'm reading John Ellis' Cassino, A Hollow Victory which is OK so far, though perhaps not the rave it was made out to be. So far I prefer Hapgood & Richardson, but there is still a lot of reading to do. I did, however, get a letter from a veteran of the 22nd Battalion who has given some contacts to follow up for my article. I haven't been up to Ray's this week but will try to get there to do more on his memoirs. Spare time is running out...

Jeff is busy writing the text for our book on Cassino. He sent some drafts of a few chapters which look good. There's still a hell of a lot of writing to go though, and we have identified gaps in our photographic coverage of attacks other than Kiwi ones. Hopefully I can fill some of these in London.

Anyway, it's time for another beer.

Ciao

Thursday 22 March 2007

Well folks, this is my first posting to my first blog. I'm hoping that you'll be able to follow our travels and travails here, as well as see how my research is going.

For now though, there are 30 sleeps until we leave and it is starting to get frighteningly real. We have no accommodation and Bristol seems to be fully booked, at least in the low end of the market. We have no jobs, though we've signed up with some agencies, and we have no transport, other than (the more than adequate) public.

On the other hand, we have a little money, visas for up to 5 years, a couple of couches to sleep on if we're desperate and each other. What else do we need?