Done! Three weeks to go til I come home

Hello dear internet! The go-live is over and done with and I can finally exhale. Here's what my life has been about for the past little while: lots of tasks on whiteboards.


That's not very interesting to anyone outside of the project so here are some interesting things in the sky. Part one: I think this is called a "sundog". It's like a little segment of a rainbow, without the rest of it. Weird. Taken from an SUV doing 75mph down the freeway, so please excuse the lack of focus.


And this is a sunset outside t'mill, on the first day of the four-day cutover. The foreground flag is the Arkansas state flag. Not sure what the background one is, I don't think I've seen it before....


Yeah, that was lame. Sorry.

And in the odd few moments I've been able to snatch, I've been listening to a lot of American podcasts. The radio stations here aren't up to much so I'm getting my fill of NPR and Common Sense (really slow ugly site, but great podcast content) over the internet, same as always. Recommended listening!

I'm coming home on 3 June. If anyone wants me to bring any gadgets such as iPhones, they'd better let me know pretty soon....

State of Play

The Internet is down

Internet down in Pine Bluff; rest of the world cut off.

It's so quiet. I can't work. I've got nothing to do.

Heeeeeeelp!!!!

Sent from my iPhone. Thank goodness for Apple.

Ceiling Cat

Our office is now adorned with a Ceiling Cat,overseeing the food supply. I wonder who will be the first to notice.


Close-up of my somewhat clumsy papercraft skillz. It's been a long time since I got out the scissors and sellotape and made something, so it's a bit scruffy-looking.

Wildlife Weekend

I went to Memphis for the weekend (at a cost of 72kg of CO2 emissions). Without any real intention on my part it ended up being all about the wildlife. Spring is in full flower here (unlike snowy London, as my brother is experiencing), and all the animals and birds are out of hibernation or back from their winter holidays and ready to party.

The parade of wildlife started with American bison, in a farm park in Memphis. Interesting fact: bison like to wallow in ponds. Not many people know that. And boy, do these things have big heads:

Then a basking turtle in another pond in the same park. Rod and I had planned to go for a short walk around the pond but the path had other ideas, and we clocked up more than 16,000 steps according to my pedometer... the turtle hadn't moved when we got back to the pond after 90 minutes. Rod thought it was fake:

I know these ones weren't fake, because just after I took this photo (waaaaayy zoomed in) they took fright at my presence and splashed off the log into the water.


And this one dove for the bottom a microsecond after I got this shot. Turtles are scaredy-cats....


...unlike midges, which are suicidal little sods. Front grille of my car after the 170-mile trip back to Pine Bluff, at speeds in excess of 75 mph for much of the trip. I had to re-fill the windscreen washing liquid.


Just to remind you that it's not all bugs and bison over here, here's another shot of my workplace. Pretty, isn't it? It's a sunrise, by the way, just as I arrive at work.


And, not that I want to bring you down after all those cheery wildlife shots, but here's a pic of our project room. Yes, that's a bucket in the corner below a missing tile in the ceiling. We've had a little trouble with leaks lately and I don't mean the media.


That's all for now. Back to work for me.

Earth Hour 2008: turning my lights off

Since I last updated this blog I've been to NZ and back. Did I take lots of pictures of the wonderful Indian summer weather, my many gorgeous and intelligent friends (hi guys) and their lovely new babies, or my beloved and missed family? Nup. Too busy enjoying myself.

So what did I bring out my camera for? This unassuming little bottle.

I was thirsty when I got to LAX (no fault of Air NZ, they were quite happy to keep pouring any one of a hundred expensive liquids into me for the duration of the flight). So I bought a bottle of water, attracted by the pretty flower on it and the name, FIJI, which reminded me that there are beaches and sunshine in the world. Then I forgot to drink it.

Serendipity struck: on the next flight I read an article in the New Yorker about the owner of the company which bottles the water, and read the fine print on the back. It's not just named after Fiji, it's from there.

Fijian water, flown from Fiji to LAX, bought there and flown to Dallas and then to Little Rock and then driven to Pine Bluff. Water. It's free, it's heavy, and I just bought some and flew it hundreds of miles. No wonder I'm such a carbon-criminal. *Smacks self on wrist*. I'm keeping the full bottle as a reminder to myself.

I've done the maths and I'm now at 8,011 kg of CO2. That's how many trees? Even Google doesn't pretend to know! Searching on "a tree absorbs tons of carbon per year" gives answers like:

A healthy tree stores about 13 pounds of carbon annually

[www.coloradotrees.org/benefits.htm] ......

This is an average of 12.5 kg per tree per year

[www.carbon-info.org/carbonnews_072.htm] ......

a mature tree only absorbs 7.5 kg of CO2 per year, while a young and actively growing tree can absorb 13 kg+ of CO2

[www.carbon-info.org/pressrelease/pressrelease] .....

each tree will absorb 1 ton of CO2

[www.carbonify.com/carbon-calculator.htm] .........

A single mature tree can absorb up to 50 pounds of carbon dioxide per year

[www.greatermemphisgreenline.org/treevalue.htm] ..........

roughly one metric ton of carbon per acre per year

[greenmyplanet.blogspot.com/2007/12/how-much-is-tree-worth.html] .....

in the lower Mississippi River Valley, on a per planted tree basis, each tree absorbs an average of approximately 1.33 tons of carbon dioxide

[www.institutoterra.us/learn] .............

How is it measured? I need to see some peer reviewed scientific research. But I'm sleepy now, because it's late, which is because every detailed scientific page I read leads to ten random minutes browsing wikipedia/slashdot/xkcd/arts&lettersdaily/other people's blogs/etc....

So I'm going to turn out the lights and go to bed.

Oh, speaking of turning out the lights: turn them out at 8pm Saturday to participate in Earth Hour. If you missed it, turn them out NOW! After the mandatory ten minute random browse , of course.

Home on Good Friday!

Yes, that's right! We've rejigged the project plan a bit, and it now makes more sense for me to come home this week rather than the first week of April, so I leave here on Wednesday afternoon and arrive in lovely lovely Auckland early on Good Friday morning. Yay! I get to see all of my lovely lovely friends and my lovely lovely family and eat good food and sleep in my own bed!

See you all soon!

(PS: No offense, Pine Bluff).

Three weeks and counting

Three weeks from this moment I'll be arriving at the airport to come
home. I'm counting the hours...

Sent from my iPhone as a test of blogging via email.

Something to think about

Heard on the BBC: The average life contains less than a thousand months.

And I'm spending six of them in small town Arkansas.

Snow Pics

So the first car said to the second car, "I guess we're not going anywhere today".


Snow coats every twig.


My footsteps... the footpath had been trodden down into ice, so I walked on the grass (which was under 3 inches of snow)...


... and collected it in the turnups on my jeans.



It's nearly 9am and the sun is melting the snow so fast it's falling off the trees like rain.

A short video of a tree steaming. (3MB; I need to work out how to compress video).




It's -5 degrees out but it's crisp and dry and doesn't feel cold until you get wet. Now I'm going to watch one of my neighbours manoeuvre his 4WD out of the carpark....

Testing video posting, with a song I love on YouTube.... These guys are called The Cat Empire, they're Australian, and they deserve more fame than they have. Let's see if this works.





Well. That was easy.

Even more snow! And this time it stuck around!

As I write there is snow falling softly outside. It's formed little hats on the lamp posts and duvets on the parked cars, and lined the top of every twig with white. One of my neighbours is frolicking with his dog in the three or four inches of fresh powder snow on the ground. It's so PRETTY!

Pretty damn hard to drive in. It took 40 minutes to get home from t'mill; it usually takes 10.

Pics as soon as my camera battery recharges.

Snow at last!

After that lovely summery hot weekend, it snowed today! See this news article for proof. We only got a few flurries here but I got to drive through it to work, which was very pretty. No pics, sorry.

Apparently it might do it again on Friday - yay for winter's last gasp. Punxsutawney Phil was right.

Spot sponsorship on CNN

Just watching CNN Morning. They brought up a flu map showing every state except Florida had widespread flu outbreaks (yes, including Hawaii and California). Then the sponsorship for that spot played their ad: Florida Orange Juice ("stay healthy, drink orange juice"). And now I trust the map, and by extension CNN, a little less.

Golf on the first warm weekend of spring

At Pine Bluff Country Club, with Deb and Gabb. We didn't quite play all 18 holes because it got dark, but it was a lovely lovely day. This is me sinking about a dozen balls in a row into the water hazard, which Gabb renamed Lake Carolyn. (yeah, there are two of me in the photo - Gabb did something nifty with Photoshop).


This is the second hole, with me and Debbie in the left foreground. What you can't see is the many squirrels bouncing around all over the greens. I'm sure they stole at least one of my a-bit-off-the-fairway balls...



Rented clubs: woods made of actual wood! I've never seen that before. They felt quite similar to my cheap half-set in NZ though. And of course I could blame all my duff shots on having old clubs ...

Hey Carolyn, have you forgotten about the environment?

Yeah, pretty much. It's amazing how easy it is to forget it, here. But at latest count I've produced 3652 kg of carbon dioxide. (that includes daily living, flying NZ to USA, flying Little Rock to Houston return, and all the driving I'm doing here).

Extrapolating out, that's over 21,000 kg of CO2 for the year. That's more than most people, according to this calculator here:

http://www.carbonneutral.com//shop/results.asp?cat1=Citizen

Haven't done anything to offset it yet. I did buy a bunch of CFLs for my rented apartment in Pine Bluff, but I won't be able to judge the impact of that until I get a power bill.

According to Wikipedia (which of course is always absolutely correct), a tree in the tropics absorbs about 22kg of CO2 per year, and a tree in the temperate zones about a third as much. So after some Excel wizardry, my impact so far this year could be offset if I planted 1162 trees in New Zealand. That's quite a few trees. I might have to buy some land.

Weekend in Houston

Flew down to Houston last weekend to see Pete (and Ben and Adrienne and their two boys - they're all working for Macquarie there).

Random points:

* the TSA staff at Little Rock airport are friendly and chatty. The staff at Houston airport, not so much. In both places it takes an hour to get through security.

* Houston is a damn nice place. Good restaurants with deliciously fresh sushi and NZ wines (as well as many good American wines of course), suburbs with footpaths and flowering trees and friendly neighbours. I really wasn't expecting that; my mental image was of cowboy boots and oil-men. This is Pete, under a cherry tree in a park.

* the Johnson Space Centre is like a super-Motat. (That's a good thing). Highlight of the visit: touching an actual Moon rock! Whee!

* shooting a Glock 9mm at the Top Gun Range. It's VERY LOUD. And it kicks up rather than back. I feel like a real American now. (I'm not a very good shot).

* sculpture in concrete: someone gave the Texas highway engineers a lot of money a few decades ago and they paved most of the state. When they ran out of ground they went up into the sky, layer upon layer upon layer....

iHave an iPhone

And yes, I like it as much as I thought I would. Favourite features:

* inbuilt speakers for use as a speakerphone or a tiny tiny stereo for playing podcasts of In Our Time as I fall asleep at night.

* just beautiful user interaction and graphics. I don't think any other gadget makes me say "oh, cool!" quite so often.

* using Safari to Google for tourist locations in Houston and then find them on the map, while actually en route to said locations. (note for the safety-worried: I wasn't driving)

* "visual voicemail" - it's just a list of my voicemail messages that lets me listen to them in the order I want, but that's actually very useful.

* unlike my Treo, the call quality is not at all bad.

Things I wish it could do that it can't, yet:

* recognise addresses on web pages and turn them into links to open Maps.

* stay un-smudged for more than five seconds. I guess that's the price we pay for a multitouch interface.

* really know where it is, on Maps. It's usually out by about half a mile. (Mind you, that's often close enough to be useful).

Best bit: I managed to get a prepay account from AT&T, and avoided having to sign up to their 2-year contract. When I come home for good, I'll be free of AT&T entirely - yay!

Limerick

From my new favourite site for random browsing, LimerickDB:

int factorial(int sum) {
if (sum == 1) return 1;
if (sum != 1)
return product(sum,
factorial(sum - 1)); }

(I just love this, especially since it works, but they're not all this geekily mathematical: click the Latest Submissions link and away you go). Caveat: not necessarily safe for work or those offended by the odd naughty word.

The best part is that all these limericks have been submitted in the past SEVENTEEN DAYS solely by readers of my all-time favourite webcomic, xkcd.com. The forumites here are the most civilised I've ever found. Actual conversations! Politeness! Profundity, even! It gives me hope for the future of the interwebs. Especially since most of them are still in their teens.... the kids are all right.

Well, that was exciting

Hello internet! Bit of stream-of-consciousness, it's-late-and-I-can't-be-bothered-editing, for you tonight. No photos cos it's not an easy thing to photograph.

Tornadoes don't usually come until the summer but a whole bunch of them just swept across Arkansas and wreaked havoc (more in this NY Times article ). We'd been seeing the wind warnings online all day and I had an interesting drive home. Bear in mind I had been in a windowless office since 7:30am*

As I left the mill, lightning was turning night into day a couple of times a second. I've never seen so much lightning (it beats out Sydney thunderstorms!) but it was still dry, so I got in the car (telling myself I was safe from lightning in the car... if this isn't true I don't want to know) and started the 10 mile trip home. Every time the lightning re-lit the clouds they had changed. At this point I started thinking about that tornado movie with Helen Hunt and that guy. Remember the lightning? Just like that.

And before I'd gone the mile to the freeway onramp it had gone from dry to torrential, sideways, rain. Pushing my car all over the road.

This project's not going to kill me in any way shape or form so I wasn't getting on that freeway - it's elevated most of the way and I didn't want to be the highest point around. Fortunately some of the project team are staying at a Holiday Inn near the freeway entrance so I aquaplaned through the last block and pulled in there. Spent about two hours holed up in the bar inside the mall attached to the Holiday Inn, eating oily calamari and watching the weather on tv. Several people are dead. Very surreal. By the time we'd all paid and tipped it was dry again outside. What is UP with this place?

(And it was nearly 25 degrees today. Celsius.).

*Off-topic: I've discovered the secret of getting to work early. Travel across many timezones, get utterly jetlagged, then you can reset your internal clock to whatever you like. Not sure it's worth it though.