Show Day Part 1

Here's my attempt at live blogging. It's a holiday in Canterbury today. On tv, on New Zealand's "Today" show, there's a string quartet playing ABBA's greatest hits. I'm heading to the Canterbury A&P Show in a few minutes. I'm going with a vistor to the math department. She's cute, but only speaks hungarian. The omens portend a great day.

Tekapo Whitewater Course

Yesterday I kayaked the Tekapo Whitewater Course. Meridian Energy built the course as a concession to damning the Tekapo River. I paddled the class II part above the course, the course one and a half times, and the play wave at the beginning numerous times. That's one of the better photos of the wave flipping me over. The half time for the course came when we pulled out in the middle. I lost my helmet on the last rapid when I did the whole course. My helmet and myself were stranded in a minor whirlpool. I was able to collect the helmet and throw it to shore. I tried to put it back on but I was going to flip. The first hole on the course would always flip me, but I didn't swim. My right hand paddle roll has become rock solid.

The course is decidedly low-tech. You can see Shaun and Ross shutting the gates to block the water in the second photo. I can't imagine that in the US one would shut the gates by hand. The lawsuits from accidents would be immense.

The river runs from Lake Tekapo that is well known for a historic church on its shores.

Chance News 21

The latest edition of Chance News was posted two days ago. There are some tricky probability questions, even more difficult than the Monte Hall problem, in this edition. One revolves around implicit assumptions about a prior distribution, even though the article doesn’t explicitly say so.

It's time to clear a little of my mental closet. I've added links to three new blogs on the right. They're slightly nontraditional, but I enjoy almost every article. In one of them, I am Facing Foreclosure, the author's losing it. I hope for the best, but it makes for great reading. The problem with most blogs is that there's nothing ongoing. Most people want to talk about something that's better suited in book form. For example, there's very little new each week about how to market a start-up company.

Ray is visiting me for the last two weeks of November. We're scheduled to hike the Milford Track and scuba dive. I've never dived before and hope that I won't be attack by a giant squid. I hoped to visit a friend in Manila in early December, but that trip has fallen through. The trip would've been too short for too much money. I can refocus on traveling to northern Australia and Japan.

G for Guy

I'm back in New Zealand. My trip to California was fun but very tiring. Sleeping on sofas for a week will do that to me.

I scheduled my return for Friday, the 3rd of November, but Matt was recording a show in Wellington that Friday night. Or so I thought, because he was actually recording two shows with another on Saturday. I changed my flight to New Zealand so that I'd be in Wellington on the 3rd and leave early on Sunday, the 5th. Both shows were a lot of fun and I sold merchandise. As you can see, I got a tee shirt. I only sold 2 shirts for both gigs. Since I flew out early Sunday, I stayed up all night after the Saturday show. If I knew about the Saturday show, I'd have taken a later plane to Christchurch.

Wellington had fireworks on Saturday night for Guy Fawkes Day. I can't figure out why this is a holiday. I had a room in backpackers to get away from the craziness of the concert prep and I watched the fireworks from there. Sunday night Margee and I went to the fireworks at the New Brighton pier in Christchurch. The show was well suited for the venue, because they launched fireworks from the side of the pier into the water.