New Ubuntu version

Another of the six monthly releases of Ubuntu is almost out. It is my preferred operating system, in spite of the recent changes to the Unity desktop. I have tried Unity, and tried Gnome shell and am not particularly keen on either of them. I would definitely prefer to still be using Gnome 2 as it strikes me as being more flexible, easier to customize. I find that with Gnome 2 and Gnome-Do it does pretty much everything I want. It can be run with all the bells and whistles, with the compiz goodies, or without if speed is your thing.

I am currently doing Red Hat training, so I am using Red Hat and also running a CentOS VM on my laptop for practice. I have enjoyed using an OS still running Gnome 2.

India

I arrived in Delhi at about 3.a.m. and will be starting the Linux training course in a couple of days. I was met by not one, but two people who work for Koenig-Solutions, the training company. I did feel vaguely guilty about depriving two people of their sleep, but I was very glad to be met.

There are a couple of things I need to do here in town, such as a bit more medical testing for the NZ immigration people. I shall then head up to Dehradun to begin the training. The course I am doing is what they call the Linux “Career Enabler”. This includes the Red Hat Certified System Administrator and the Red Hat Certified Engineer course as well as Cisco Certified Network Associate.

The apartment I am staying in is very comfortable. We are very well looked after, and meals are all prepared, and very good. There is one other guy here who is also on the Linux track, but he is well into the course. Koenig seems very busy with people from all over the world. So far I have met people from Mexico, Germany, Afghanistan, New Zealand and the United States. I am kind of hoping that Dehradun will have a similar number of people, and ideally a bunch on the Linux track as well.

The roads in India are still as crazy as I remember. It makes Taiwan look amazingly safe. I am definitely not keen on the idea of driving anything here. Haven’t seen much yet, apart from the short road between apartment and training centre.

A little bit pear shaped

Unfortunately I have failed to find myself employment in the time I have been in New Zealand. I seem to be in a slightly catch 22 situation, in which you need to find a job in order to get a work permit, but nobody wants to offer you a job if you don’t have a work permit. I think maybe my skills aren’t up to date enough, after some time as a self employed IT Technician, followed by a year teaching English in Taiwan.

I am now frantically trying to get my application for residency in, getting all of the relevant bits of paper in before having to leave the country next Friday, as that is when my tourist visa runs out.

I think my next stop is probably going to be Brisbane, followed by India in order to go and do Red Hat certification in Dehradun. I am not 100% sure yet, but that is my preferred plan to date.

Te Araroa

After 17 years in the making, the Te Araroa walking track from one end of New Zealand to the other is now complete. It has been an enormous effort from a lot of people. There is one person, though, without whom it would never have happened. That man is Geoff Chapple. Last weekend was the opening of the track. The main event was held in Island bay in Wellington.

Thank you Geoff, what a magnificent achievement.

I walked from Cape Reinga to Bluff in 2005/6, and a lot of my walk was on the tracks that Geoff has been responsible for marking and working on, with his army of volunteers. I would love to do it again at some point now that the track is finished. I think it will always be a work in progress, though, as they will always be looking for better routes, and the maintenance will be never ending.

On a personal note, after spending some time job hunting in Wellington, I am now down in Nelson with family. Some friends are over from the UK, so we are planning walks etc.

I am guessing that a lot of companies will be winding down towards Christmas, so although there are still a number of positions being advertised on trademe jobs, I am guessing that in a lot of cases the applications will not be looked at until the New Year.

NZ Python User Group

I went to my first Python user group meeting in Wellington. It is hosted in the offices of Catalyst, a Software company who specialize in Open Source Software.

I enjoyed the meeting. It was good to get some idea as to what people use python for here. It seems that a lot of people use Python as the glue to hold other technologies together. It was even mentioned last night that some companies build games in Python. All of the fast stuff will be written in C, but these bits will be held together with Python code. I have been slightly battling with WXPython, which gives you access to things such as windows, buttons, etc., but it looks like most people who turned up last night do not use Python for desktop applications.

There are a number of projects that I would now like to have a look at, including Sphinx, Puppet, Bottle, Beautiful Soup and a bunch of others whose names seem to bear even less relevance to what they do.

So that I do not spend all of my time staring at computer screens I have recently bought books on the subject. When asking people here where they get their books from, a number of people said www.bookdepository.co.uk.

I can understand that as books here are very expensive. So I am now waiting for three books to turn up from the UK.

NZ

Well after Taiwan and a brief visit to Australia, I am now in New Zealand. This country never ceases to amaze me. Even when the weather is a bit poor, it is still dramatically beautiful.

My bicycle arrived safely from Taiwan, so my first plan was to pedal from Auckland down to Wellington. Unfortunately this was not my most successful expedition. I ended up getting as far as Taupo and then catching a bus. Walking down was a much nicer experience. A lot of people here don’t give you much room on a bicycle. The logging trucks were a particularly bad experience. I came far too close to getting squashed to make it any fun.

Leaving Taiwan

Well I have enjoyed being an English teacher, although in all honesty I think I am a terrible teacher and would have to do a lot of training before continuing in that line. I think I should probably go back to being an IT bod.

The time has come, the Walrus said,…..

Taiwan has been interesting, and the people are lovely, although I still think they all drive like nutters. It is definitely not for me, as my only job option here is to be an English teacher, and I am so much more of a computer person, so am still definitely considering finishing postgraduate teacher training and being an IT teacher. I am heading on to NZ, hopefully with a bit of a stopover with friends in Brisbane direction. It would be nice to get an opportunity to ride my bicycle from Auckland down to Wellington, but I am not sure yet. Also, slightly broke as I have not had many teaching hours here of late, because subbing opportunities fell through left, right and centre.

I am definitely going to miss Monkey Mountain, which has been my regular exercise. I am also going to miss buying the most amazing fresh fruit in the local markets, particularly pineapples and mangoes. I am still going to be here for the best part of a month, so who knows, I may add to my blog, but based on my history of blogging slackness, the chances are not great.

Jade Mountain Trip

After leaving Kaohsiung on Friday evening after work, we drove up to a hostel a short distance from the park. It took a little over four hours to get there, followed by about four hours sleep. A little too early and not so bright and breezy we set off up the trail.

The path is fairly easy and well marked.

At the beginning the weather was fine and the trail was easy going. The views were spectacular.

As we ascended, the weather began to turn, and the visibility became quite bad. One poor girl slipped on the path and fell over the edge, but luckily suffered only minor injuries and was back on the path fairly swiftly.

Most people stay in a hut about an hour or two from the summit, but unfortunately for us the hut was being rebuilt, so we had to complete the journey in a day.

During the last section the weather turned wet and cold. Because it is such a well travelled track, there are chains fixed in place to provide hand holds, and in one section a covered roofed passage. All of this section is very prone to landslides, and it was cold and wet with bad visibility. Finally we made it to the summit, where we stayed long enough to take a few photos, before heading back down.

I had to take a photo of the plaque at the top in order to remember the height of the mountain.

All in all I definitely felt I had achieved something, but the lack of visibility was disappointing. I prefer to do these walks by myself, or with one other person. I am definitely not keen on the tour thing, but not having a car I am not really able to get around that easily. It is also a requirement to get passes sorted out for these trails, which is something I have not discovered how to do yet. My Chinese language is far too limited.

Well I guess that is all for now.

Been confirmed to climb Jade Mountain

Hi All,

Well I now have confirmation that I am booked in to climb Jade Mountain next month.

Although I am a lot fitter than I was when I first arrived here, this is a bit of a monster, and I have some concerns about reaching the summit. We have been given a limited time frame in which to do it. The trip is normally over three days, but we have only been given two. We are getting warnings about what to do if you start feeling the effect of altitude sickness. So all in all, I have a few concerns as I do not want to make the trip if I am not going to make the summit, as that would be a frustrating waste of time. Mark, the guy who organises these trips has had quite a few hoops to jump through to get us on this one. He needed photographs of all of us at altitude on other trips to prove we had mountain experience.

In the meantime, this weekend is my first escape from Kaohsiung since Chinese New Year. I am finally going down to the beach at Kending. There are a bunch of us going down there, and it should be fun. I shall take a camera, so watch this space for pictures.

Chinese New Year

I had to get out of Kaohsiung for Chinese New Year, it does drive me a little stir crazy. Luckily there is a guy named Mark Roche who organises trips to interesting places around Taiwan. He has a dog named Vodka, who also appreciates trips to interesting places.

Mark and Vodka the dog

The trip was to Bei Da Wu Shan, which is a mountain overlooking Kaohsiung. I have been up a few mountains before, but at 3010 metres this was definitely my highest to date. The weird thing of course is that previous trips have taken me a few days to walk to the mountains, and they tend to be in the middle of nowhere, but being Taiwan, you can still get a phone signal at the top of this one.

The Summit

I am terribly unfit, but getting fitter. The mountain was rather hard work, and at one point I was fairly sure I was not going to get to the top. Luckily I am a fairly persistent plodder and got there in the end. The views are fairly spectacular.

Above the clouds

All in all it was well worth a visit, but it left me with knackered knees and a crappy cold. The rest of the crew that went up the hill were all good fun, the majority of them being a lot younger and fitter than myself (b******s).

Bei Da Wu Shan Crew

Matt Nash

blogging my experiences in travel, teaching and technology