Short Saint Heliers Walking loop

21st December 2016 – Photos from a nice and easy short little walk around St Heliers with the Auckland Hiking Meetup Group Wednesday walks series. Hosted and led by Ruth Donde whom gave excellent commentary on the history of the area throughout.  Walk concluded with an excellent public performance by the Auckland City Brass

Short Saint Heliers Walking loop

Nice Views of Solid Gray Scenery Ahoy

Update 4th January 2017 – Happy to announce that the “mega rage face” status can now be retracted. The weather on the trip turned out to be kind enough to open up a few hours after arriving at Okaka hut, rewarding our climb with views including a spectacular sunset on top of Humpridge Track.  Thankfully the Computer modeled weather forecasts did not eventuate in their entirety!

—–

Yargh… Earlier in the week, saw the Tuesday 27th forecast appear around the corner and thought hopefully that it will go away.  Looking again today and much to my chagrin, I get presented with this…

It would be perhaps fair to remark “It probably doesn’t get much worse than this”.  (if weather conditions got worse, the operator would likely cancel the trip, refund us the monies and we go on our merry way to do something else)

Will pack my blue raincoat (the Swazi one) which seems to have an interesting ability to repel Rainy weather /s (as well as the regular poncho)

Rain itself I don’t mind (being rain falling on me), but simply going down there and climbing up 900m to simply see solid white / grey will likely drive me silently bonkers as it did when I did Waikaremoana and walked up the bluff only to see Stark White.

Yeah, If weather turns out to be shite and all I get is solid gray to see, I fully intend to go back down again at some later date (i.e before Christmas next year) and take up the chopper option up to the top, walk down and and do the River to Lake Jet boat (if they offer that activity combination as an option).

I’ve already forfeited my Farm Stay / Hunting Trip invite (from another circle of good friends) to attend the Humpty walk and it would be extremely disrespectful to fellow group companions to pull out. Here’s hoping that the computer modeled forecasts are wrong.

Nice Views of Solid Gray Scenery Ahoy

Site Photobox

Finally bit the bullet and replaced the Jetpack Photo Carousel on both peak.nz and nui.nz with the one from dFactory.  The dFactory one after a little bit of testing offers a number of advantages …

  • More Mobile Friendly.  Pictures can be made to display at Maximum Screen extents, better utilizing the real estate of a small screen.  The older carousel had some challenges where by the picture would appear very small.
  • Support for zooming in on both Mobile Devices and Desktop.  Users Can now pinch zoom natively. (Using one of their pay plugins)
  • Browser Back Button behaviour is more intuitive.  In the old Carousel, once you finished sliding through all the pictures, closed the carousel light box, and hit the back button (to go back to the front page / album listing), it would instead relaunch the carousel and show you the last picture.  Continue hitting the back button, it would go back through the photos you had just viewed (in reverse).  The dFactory lightbox eliminates this (at least on most browsers I’ve tested this plugin with)

So far, everything appears to be working pretty well. Will probably deactivate and remove jetpack in due course. Jetpack (as a whole) is good for certain sites, though probably too fully featured and some components of it too heavy for personal homepages like this one, I feel.

Site Photobox

Tarawera Terrace St Heliers

Tarawera Terrace, St Heliers, joint (clan) acquisition. Pictures before it gets lived in. Much of my liquidity is now gone. Undoubtedly we’ve bought at the top of the market.

Semi related posts…

 

Tarawera Terrace St Heliers

Generalizations

Tony Alexander, while a well respected and highly regarded Auckland housing market commentator (and perhaps champion of) in his 1st December 2016 Weekly Overview does not speak for me individually in this regard…

Young people probably don’t want space for three chainsaws. They have grown up amusing themselves indoors with technology and its progression rather than seeking open spaces and adventures outdoors which physically and spatially challenge them. They have looked down their noses at outside work and hut building and seem to want an adult life quite different from what earlier generations aspired to. Older people bemoan the lack of new houses with big sections. Young people and probably most immigrants instead want something low maintenance and handy to transport routes. If that means small then so be it. Creation of lots of tightly packed small houses/townhouses does not imply the societal dystopia many older people fear. Get with the times.

I regularly get cheek for my rather slow adoption of new consumer technology, despite working as a computer geek as a day job. Will admit, that I now finally have a Faceborg account (going on 1½ months)… After much shirt tail tugging and escalating annoyance at me from friends at my lack there of.

As an aside. Noticed that the Weekly Overview it self seems has perhaps gone from reasonable and broad economic commentary to predominantly commentary focusing on Auckland’s housing market and dare I say, Bubble denial (I sense a possibly dangerous level of over confidence based on how his columns are worded), with economics merely becoming a side snippet. Not really my cup of tea I have to admit (have decided to unsubscribe). If he gets back to a more broad based economic commentary, will decide to resubscribe then and there.

Generalizations