Found 4 blog posts with tag: matterhorn

Melbourne Bound

I have been insanely busy lately. My current project is six weeks long, and we are currently in week five. Fortunately for me, I'm at Auckland airport, waiting for a plane to Melbourne while the team back in Wellington are pushing towards the final deadline. Still, I did a few nights of overtime last week to get through my huge list of tasks so it was not without my own sweat and tears.

People have been visiting. I caught up with Melburnians Ants, Jo, Ben and Jill when they were here for a wedding. My parents came and visited too, and we enjoyed much delicious food. It was dad's birthday (almost) while they were down so I took them to Matterhorn and Floriditas.

A couple of weeks ago, I was up at 5.30am to see all five classical planets in the sky at the same time. Looking out to the glow of sunrise out east was Mercury, then looking in an arc high in the sky, Venus in its dawn brilliance, Saturn, Mars, the waning quarter moon and finally Jupiter. It was a sight to see. Absolutely stunning. I've never seen all five at once like that before, and I think it speaks volumes of the kind of wonderful city I live in that I was able to walk out onto my balcony and see all of this so clearly.

Last weekend was Waitangi Day and Chinese New Year, which I spent with my parents, my sister and two nephews. I think it's important to observe tradition; it is custom to be with family on Chinese New Year's Eve for a reunion dinner. The next day, my parents were off to Malaysia with 4kgs of cherries, 2kgs of plums, a loaf of bread, wine, chocolates, smoked salmon, crackers....

So the reason I'm in Melbourne is that I am fulfilling an old dream that has been in planning for the past decade: see a Final Fantasy orchestral concert. It's going to be mega. All the nostalgia, emotion, memories and melodies. I will hopefully be stuffing my face full of delicious food too. Looking forward to it!


Winter

Winter is definitely here, with a sharp cold front hitting the country and plummeting the temperatures to 3.1C. Thanks to the wind chill, it currently feels like -4C. It was hailing a few moments ago, but now it seems to have quietened down, however the forecast remains grim for tomorrow and Friday. There is a small chance we could get some snow flurries in the CBD like in 2011, so hopefully that eventuates.

It's been ludicrously busy recently, with my project expected to submit a gold master candidate this Friday. I've felt like freaking out a couple of times because I've simply been overwhelmed by several things happening at once. Sometimes it's difficult to juggle the needs of people as well as the programming tasks assigned to me, but I think that my ability to stay calm and rational (or at least appear calm and rational) has improved over the years. I think the project is in an okay position, and we'll make our deadline, but it wasn't easy getting here.

Last month, there were a few birthday celebrations. We went to Gasworks in Miramar for Phil's birthday, where Mana and I had all you can eat ribs. Dale had his birthday at Matterhorn on Cuba St (which I've written a food blog entry about) and James had his birthday at his new place on Tory St. Lizzie had her birthday with some drinks at Goldings and karaoke at KZone, naturally. Rob had an "old man brunch" out in Elements at Lyall Bay last weekend, and it was so glorious and sunny that I was in shorts, in the middle of winter. I've been sightseeing with the guys too. We've been to the Brooklyn wind turbine, the Miramar gun emplacements at night, and the Wainuiomata Coast during the day. I tried the Flaming Dragon pizza from Hell Pizza, watched four workmates do a 1kg burrito challenge, had a massive pork hock from Grill Meats Beer and got some Moustache cookies delivered from Auckland. I also caught the Venus Jupiter conjunction, though not at their closest. It's amazing seeing the planets come together like that, two of the most prominent night sky features in clear view.

Last weekend was busy too. We went to Mishmosh to try out their food and see if it would be a worthy destination for Wellington on a Plate (not bad, would recommend!), then went to Fringe bar and sang Hakuna Matata at the public karaoke. On Saturday I went to two flatwarmings and watched the Hurricanes/Highlanders game. This weekend is going to be busy too, with the end of project celebration, a lunch at Strawberry Fare, and music at Central.

Phew.


Social Butterfly

I have been doing too many things with my life.

That\'s okay though, I have thoroughly enjoyed the fun times and the awesome people I\'ve been hanging out with over the past two weekends. Now is the time to make the most of the sun before it fades away behind the abysmal weather so typical of Wellington for ten months of the year. Summer has been great and it\'s sad (if not alarming) that it is March very, very soon.

Last weekend, we went out to Harcourt Park in Upper Hutt to watch some jousting after badminton. It\'s not particularly like what you would imagine (or what Hollywood would have you imagine). The tips of the jousting lances are fragile and break easily, and are colour-coded for each person. The idea is to land a hit against your opponent (with rules around where you can and can\'t hit - no hitting the horse!) and points are given based off aforementioned criteria. As the lances break, the resulting fragments are clearly identified by their colour to assist in the judging. There were also longbow displays and sword fighting re-enactments, but none as exciting as the jousting.

The next day, we were out at Adrenaline Forest in Porirua for part one of Ben\'s birthday celebration. Swinging, climbing, gliding and shuffling (often struggling) our way through the treetops proved quite the physical challenge at times; not so much the mental challenge I was expecting since I was so focused on the obstacles, I barely had time to look down at the ground. Unlike previous ropes courses I\'d been on, this one is more individually managed so you clip yourself onto safety ropes to traverse the trees instead of being belayed by a group of people on the ground. Additionally, you\'re equipped with your own pulley and hook system so you can clip yourself onto the wire and ride the gradient to the other side with some gravitational help. There\'s some great Indiana Jones-type swings, including one into a large spider web of ropes on course six!

Part two was competitive go-karting - teams of two doing 30 laps each. Jordan and I paired up to deliver a relatively unrisky and consistent display that landed us fourth place out of eight (not last, yay!). The karts supposedly reach 50kph and handle pretty well, though my skidding and sliding were not as masterful as I would have liked. I kept feeling like I was going to topple the kart over. There were fortunately no coloured turtle shells on the track.

I went for an improv show at the Gryphon Theatre on Ghuznee St, then to dinner at the Matterhorn on Friday night. I was last at the Matterhorn in 2009 and they have changed the menu and the style of eating since. The intention is that you order a selection of plates to share instead of having individual meals. Essentially it is like yum cha, except ten times the price. We found the concept complicated and were a bit nervous when the waitress asked us if she could have the authority to place food on our tab without our explicit permission. We shared some oysters with champagne sorbet, crispy pig tails, deer fillet with blackberry, potatoes with roast almonds and various other plates that I can\'t recall off the top of my head. The company was great and the food was good, but the messy logistics put me off and wouldn\'t recommend it - would have been much better if we had just had individual meals and maybe some sides to share.

Yesterday after badminton, we had the PikPok Barbeque at the Mt Victoria Lawn Bowls club. It was a family-friendly event, with a kids-only bouncy castle (much to the disappointment of many of my workmates), face painting and board games available. There was of course the lawn bowls outside, and in defiance of the Wellington wind, beer pong on a table decked out with some fantastic Flick Kick Football artwork. Time passed quickly and it got a bit chilly around 6pm so I left for another barbeque out in Island Bay with my church\'s family group. Though it was a brief event, it was good to catch up with various people and I was absolutely smitten with the two guinea pigs called Pip and Squeak. I ended the day over at Andrew\'s flat in Roseneath, taking one hour to set up a new board game called CO2 and three hours to play. Would not recommend.

Finally, to finish it off, I celebrated Chap Goh Mei, the last day of Chinese New Year, at Big Thumb in style, with plates of chicken, pork and seafood in dumplings, buns, rice noodles and deep fried!

Though we don\'t have the fireworks and fantastic lion and dragon dance displays that the Auckland Lantern Festival provides, I\'ve had fun celebrating Chinese New Year in my own way. This will be memorable for years to come.

<<edit>> Okay we just got fireworks. Yay!


I'm Not Dead Yet

I've been incredibly busy with lots and lots of things.

Firstly, my Pokemon website Psypoke got a huge overhaul with a completely new template and a new backend that hopefully futureproofs the site for Generation 5, if that exists. The Great Refactor was an idea I had in November that actually carried through, so the code is nice and tidy, and the template has been sitting there for six years or so, so it was nice to have a fresh new look for Pokemon Platinum's release.

Secondly, I've been doing a bit of overtime at work - two weeks ago, I did four days of overtime with both good and bad meals to compensate. Microwaved food is seriously disgusting. The meal I had was named "Delicious Chicken Breast" and it should have been called "It's A Trap". There's been a huge amount of indecisiveness over the way that the menus and the UI are designed, and the UI coders suffer as a result. We're getting so much work piled on us, we'll be doing three days of overtime next week and three more the week after.

Thirdly, last weekend, I went with some friends to the 'Naki where we stayed at someone's grandparents place, only to get up at 7am the next day and scale the steep heights of Mt Taranaki. And omg, it was one hell of a climb. I was so incredibly unfit, I was struggling each step of the way. What made it really bad was a section of the mountain was just scree (loose rocks) so you'd take a step and slide down. I kept complaining about negative progress and whatnot, but four and a half hours later I was standing on top of the mountain, over 2.5km above sea level. The view was shrouded by clouds but in the gaps there was the splendour of the New Zealand landscape, seeing as far east as Central Plateau itself. My annual exercise for the year can now be checked off and I can mark this as an achievement to be proud of.

We had some spare money in our flat account, so we hit the town and went to a classy restaurant on Cuba St called the Matterhorn, where I had an awesome steak and shared some Bordeaux wine with my flatmates. Steak is my hero, it makes me calm.

A few weeks ago, we also had the annual Newtown Fair, where I bought some delicious ginger fudge, that I still haven't touched because I feel bad for eating so much bad food :(

And finally, I am officially a New Zealand citizen. Take that Winston Peters!