Lunchtime walking in the sun; Wellington is offering Kiwicon visitors the full experience. Yesterday would have left a large number of visitors wondering “Why would anyone live in this hell-hole?”, while today is posing the question “Why would you live anywhere else?” metl promises a mind-expanding afternoon. Let’s do the Timewarp Again Karit @nzkarit Starts with the Crue and friends performing the Timewarp on stage. The theme is GPS spoofing on the cheap, and the correspondance thereof.

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A friendly reminder New Zealand is part of the Five Eyes team. And a montage of the ridiculousness of, well, everything about the Five Eyes nations. Trump. Colin Craig. Farage. Gumboot throwing.

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A delayed start - apparently the AV started acting wonky once a bunch of radiation sources were unpacked next to it. More time for lunch to digest.

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Kiwicon X has an X Filesish theme this year that leaves me feeling like I should be wearing a suit, Agency-style. But I probably won’t.

Anyhoo, Kiwicon continues to grow and grow apace. This year north of 2000 souls will shuffle, slumps, and/or glide their way into a Wellington which has been hit by natural disasters (“Welcome to Wellington. Here are your complimentary earthquakes and floods; if you look to the left, you’ll see a flock of trampolines passing us by”). Which is a pretty remarkable accomplishment; I hope we all remember that one of the things that makes Kiwicon so awesome is how stupendously nice everyone is, as a rule.

Also: if your conference doesn’t have a warning sign above the door saying “Pyro and lasers in use”, your conference needs to lift its game. Just remember not to point your fancy imaging device at the last show unless you enjoy losing pixels.

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Another glorious day in the Cyber Corps! A day in the Cyber Corps is like a day on the server farm. Every meal’s a banquet! Every paycheck a fortune! Every formation a parade! I LOVE the Cyber Corps!

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So my notes got a bit sparse here, partly because of a really nice lunch with maaaaaybe one too many espressotinis, but also because apparently taking notes upset someone behind me with a laser pointer. Which, you know, too bad, but it didn’t help. Also, I’m publishing these less than a week before Kiwicon X, which says a lot about how bad I was at editing the second day’s material.

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My second week of the festival was all about movies I could see with Ada.

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It’s another year, so it must be time to roll through another New Zealand International Film Festival. Unfortunately I can’t justify taking weeks off work to catch them all (or the bill that would generate, for that matter), so as with every film festival, it’s a balancing act around family, cost, work, and the sometimes infuriating scheduling choices of the organisers as to which I get to see.

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Tigers. Hand-fooding them is not ok. But we can throw them food, like ducks. But different food from ducks. Tigers eat meat. We have meat, so tigers eat us. One of the best bits of parenting is watching small people reason about the world from first principles.

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Red Hat Summit was in San Francisco this year; it was my first time in San Francisco; my first impression? BART mocks any airport to CBD run in New Zealand. I cannot imagine what someone used to the BART would make of the shambles that is transit from the Auckland airport to the city, but the thought gives me shame. And while the Pride parade was the day I flew in, by the time I worked through customs and whatnot, it was all over, alas.

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