I still love being in New Zealand, and more so recently since I’ve been able to get my teeth into networking a lot more! However enlightening, forward thinking and ahead of it’s time this place is, it still is laking in many areas…

There’s little telecom competition, which keeps choices limited for net access. As most options are simply white labelled from one of a couple of vendors/incumbants. Perhaps the most notable thing I have noticed in my geeky way since getting here, is the approach of worldwide developers particularly with games and their lack of vision towards NZ….for instance, there are a number of FREE MMORPGS doing the Beta rounds at the moment on the net, and so far I have downloaded three ALL of which don’t or won’t work from within the New Zealand internet cloud…

…I mean I know we’re an island group but still!!! Poor show!

So I have to make do with reverse engineering flash into video and building a fully authored DVD for the band instead….coz I can…

Geek to the end, that’s me!

In other news…? Hmmmm…..I’ll get back to you….

edit - corrected my obvious mistake…

Yup we went, and we did it again, and to be fair it was an extremly CLOSE contest, we only won by 2 points! However, this now means that we can compete in the A Grade next year, which means Wellington once again has an A-Grade band - which hasn’t been the case since around 2001 I believe?

Also - I managed to learn to ice-skate (cringe) …uh… kinda…. fell over like thirty plus times, got extremley sore, but after an hour and a half managed to stay away from the wall, with some semblance of forward movement for about 20 seconds!! Which I think is amazing for my first try, plus the fact I have no sense of balance.

To round of the last week of Brass Banding we competed in the Band of the Year contest which along with our section contests were streamed live over the internet! Alas I think they weren’t stored for retrospective viewing, unless they come later? I’ll keep my eye out, anyways unspurisingly Woolston Brass won; and I am told we came joint Second with Cantebury Brass. Woolston were even kind enough to loan us use of their bandroom whilst we were in Christchurch and this was quite a humbling exprience for me, as the bandroom has a museum dedicated to this bands illustrious history, I’m gutted I didn’t think to take any pictures of the hall, but hey ho….I’ll upload some of my Christchurch piccies when I get the time, as I have work in the morning, and need to grab some sleep….