Oy vey

I have finally got an internet connection in my bedroom in my flat. Unfortunately, it crawls at best and right now I am unable to log in to my ftp server to upload the photos I intended to put up.

If I am still unable to connect to my ftp server tomorrow I will speak with the IT staff here and figure out what to do. Until then, there will be two broken images in the left hand sidebar where two new photo galleries should be. These are the first of six; I will put the other four up within a few days, just don't want them all to go up at once.

Now that I have a (somewhat) reliable connection, I will do my best to update this site more often and with more photos, not only in the galleries sidebar but also some snapshots of life embedded in some posts.

Finally the comments are also working fine, so let me know what you think, what you want to see more of, and what your favourite colour is while you're at it.

Cheers.

Bike trip

I'm leaving in the morning on a 3 day bike trip with my buddy Elliott. We're really winging this one, so hopefully it turns out well as we're fairly unprepared. We've got food, a tent, renting bikes, and some really undetailed maps.

We're going to a place called the Catlins, where there is some really impressive scenery, forests, beaches, and crazy wildlife such as Hooker sea lions, elephant seals, fur seals, yellow-eyed penguins, and others.

If the conditions are good I'll get some great photos, but it does rain an awful lot around here and in the Catlins, so that will reduce the number of times I get the camera out of it's waterproof case.

Hopefully we return Sunday night in one piece.

Oh dear

Well, I still don't have the net in my room. My laptop shows a connection is present but there's some problem and I can't actually use the internet. I really dislike the way this university has organized the internet connections on campus, as we have to set up a proxy connection and do everything through the LAN which is slow and does not permit use of programs like MSN Messenger and Soulseek. If these weren't allowed I'd use them anyways, but they've set it up so that they simply won't work. And Web Messenger is horrible... can't use that.

This is why my blog entries have been so few and far between - I write better in my room, whereas here I am in a public lounge and I really am not as relaxed as I'd like to be. Granted, I wrote a month's worth of entries in various internet cafes in SE Asia, but being travel updates they were simpler.

I had my first French Oral practise class today - this is the second week of classes here at the U of Otago. The TA is a French grad student and quite nice, and the other students in our section are also very chill and easy to talk to. They've pretty much all known each other for 2-3 years now, either from residence halls or previous French courses, so for the past couple of weeks in our regular lectures I've felt like a bit of an outsider. Nice to see that it won't take as much effort as I thought to break into the groups they cemented eons ago.

I'm at the southernmost university in the world. Crazy huh? You can't study at a university any closer to the south pole than here.