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8th August – Waitomo, New Zealand – Sunny

Woke early this morning to go and book our Cave Tubing activity with the Black Water Rafting Company.  Shortly afterwards we were introduced to our guide and shown to our wet suits.  Damn those things are damp & cold first thing in the morning!

As we were making our way down towards the cave entrance, we were given the chance to practice a backwards jump onto our tubes from height into the river outside.  The river water was freezing cold, but it gave the wet suits enough water to start warming up on our trek down to the cave.

The trek through the cave itself was pretty cool with a couple of backwards jumps off waterfalls on the way.  Half way through the system we were instructed to turn off our head lamps – All of a sudden the roof of the cave lit up with thousands of tiny bright specks of blue/green light from the glowworms.

An amazing day out!

9th August – “Hobbiton”/Matamata, New Zealand – Sunny

Set off this morning later than we intended but luckily we arrived just in time to take the Hobbiton Movie Set tour.  Was pretty cool to be able to walk around and touch the stuff that was in the LOTR movies.  Our tour guide way very enthusiastic and a proper LOTR geek!

After walking around the Party Tree and looking over the lake we walked up to and explored the hobbit holes and Bag End – Lots of photo opportunities!

After a nice lunch in the farm cafe we drove down towards Lake Taupo, our next stop for the night.

10th August – Wai-o-tapu, New Zealand – Cloudy

We had yet another rushed journey this morning to get to Wai-o-tapu Thermal Wonderland in time for the Geyser eruption.  Yet again, we made it with just minutes to spare.  The eruption was pretty cool, something we’ve never seen before except on TV.  The only downside was the horrid sulphur smell when the steam cloud passed over you.

After the eruption, we made our way back down the hill to the main Thermal Park and spent a few hours walking around lots of strange thermal pools/craters.

After we finally escaped the eggy smell of the sulphur clouds, we made our way to Tongariro National Park to camp in a site below “Mount Doom”.

The site wasn’t quite what we were expecting so decided to only stay the one night.  We spent the evening in the cafe with beer, wine, chips, lemon meringue and chocolate fondant.  Leela managed to blitz her way through another 20 thank-you cards for our guests – Must have been a sugar rush

11th August – Tongariro National Park, New Zealand – Cold & Cloudy

This morning we went to check out information on booking a flight over and around the mountains.  The pilot was very vague about the conditions and appeared to still give us hope about a decent flight.

Once up in the air things turned out different – We only managed a short 20 minute flight around the park near one of the mountains due to the bad weather.  Leela also discovered she doesn’t travel well in small light aircraft that get bumped about a bit by bad weather

After the flight we headed off towards Wellington, a 5 hour drive with stunning views of Mount Rhapehu en route.

12th August – Wellington – Cloudy

Spent the morning sorting out the motorhome and getting things organised properly.  In the afternoon we took a bus into Wellington City Centre.  Had a look around the shops but couldn’t find anything that took our fancy then walked down towards the Embassy Theatre where Return of the Kind had its world premiere.

Found a fantastic restaurant called Zibibbo where I had a gorgeous duck and gnocchi with spinach and mushroom meal.  This was followed by an impressive Tapas dessert with 2 raspberry sorbet cones, chocolate & mandarin mousse, mango crème in an egg, cinnamon donuts, vanilla ice cream and finally a coffee crème brule.

13th August – Wellington – Sunny

We spent the morning at the Weta Cave, home of the LOTR and Narnia (amongst tons of others) special effects.

Watched a 20 minute behind-the-scenes film of what they’ve done for various films, then explored the mini-museum of weapons, armour, models and clothing used in the LOTR films.

Spent a good few hours on the ferry from Wellington, through the Cook Straights and finally onto the South Island!  The journey was pretty uneventful – We spent the majority of it freezing outside on the front deck hoping in vain to see some dolphins or whales.  However, the views of the hills and mountains on the way into the Picton terminal were fantastic.

Drove down to Blenheim to stop for the night – The weather was pretty miserable during the journey.  Once there we had a great meal in Roccos Restaurant and found a fantastic local wine – “Drylands Sauvignon Blanc 07”.  We’ll definitely have to visit the winery tomorrow and pick up some more!

14th August – North East/Kiakoura Coast, New Zealand – Sunny

Had an amazing day today.  We left Blenheim early and headed up the coast – Leela drove the motorhome for the first time too!  Our first stop was only 6km up the road at the Drylands winery, the vineyard that produced last nights bottle of wine.  We spent about an hour there, sampling the different wines and came away with a few bottles for the trip.

We continued on up the coast road and found hundreds of seals all along the coast.  Leela found a great spot to stop where we spent a few hours walking around them taking plenty of photos.

We then crossed over the main road an took a quick 10 min walk up a small track which eventually led to a waterfall.  In the pool at the bottom we found a couple of baby seals playing around and their mother asleep on a ledge above.  An amazing experience that could have been so easily missed.

Spending the night camping in Kaikoura after a not-so-great chippy tea…

4th August – Singapore

Hi there!

We’ve spent approx 12 hours in the air so far flying from Heathrow to Singapore.  The staff, service & food from Singapore Airlines are great – Pity about our sleeping arrangements.

We spent the majority of the “night” trying to get comfortable and getting occasional small amounts of sleep.  I’ve also discovered I suffer from “Barometric Pressure Headaches” when the plane comes in to land.  Not nice in the slightest!

Our hotel, the “Marina Mandarin”, is lovely.  Our room has a nice view over part of the city across towards the marina.

Whilst Leela took a nap to recover from the flight & jet lag, I spent some time on my laptop browsing through the amazing photos that our wedding guests uploaded to our website.  Thanks to everyone that took the time to upload these, they are great!

5th August – Singapore – Hot, cloudy

Today the weather was very hot but overcast, so we decided to venture out to the Chinese and Japanese Gardens.  After working out the MRT system we enjoyed a scenic (and thankfully air-conditioned!) journey out to Jurong.

The Chinese Garden is amazing, we walked up 7 flights of stairs to get to the top of the Pagoda and were rewarded with fantastic views and a nice cool breeze.

Within the gardens we found what is meant to be the worlds largest collection of turtles at the Live Turtle and Tortoise Museum.  We spent an hour or so here, feeding a massive collection of frenzied turtles which seemed desperate to get a bite of cucumber!

In the evening we decided to go visit the Singapore Night Safari.  On our way to the bus stop, we found some people selling tickets to the Night Safari along with a free bus ride.  Once we accepted the offer and took the bus, we realised this wasn’t an “official” operation and was obviously run by someone re-selling bulk-bought tickets.  We did get there though, and in one piece!

The safari itself was strange – You’re basically taken around on a bus trip through a zoo, in the dark.  You can’t really see very much while on the bus and the tour guides sound like they’re reading from a very cheesy script.  It seemed lots of emphasis was put on animals we might consider “normal” such as goats and cattle.  Once we left the bus and decided to go walking around on our own we finally got to see some impressive animals close-up including elephants, leopards and lions.

6th August – Singapore – Hot & Sunny

We slept in today and were woken by massive gun salutes being carried out by the Singapore Military practising for National Day.  After applying lots of sun cream we took a walk to the Singapore Flyer, similar to the London Eye but bigger!

We saw some amazing views across Singapore and the harbour, but the most fascinating view was of the grand prix circuit being prepared for the Formula 1 race the following month.

We spent the afternoon in the Hotel Lobby/Atrium eating lunch (mine was a plate of the smallest burgers I’ve ever seen!) and writing thank-you cards while waiting to leave for the Airport and our flight to New Zealand.

7th August – Auckland, New Zealand – Sunny

We’re in New Zealand at last!  We arrived early this morning, and after a round of Biosecurity checks on Leela’s hiking boots we were finally allowed to enter!  A driver from Kea Campers arrived to pick us up from the Airport and took us 30 mins north of Auckland to their base and our motor home.

Our Kea Motorhome – Home for the next 3 weeks!

We then drove several hours south of Auckland to Waitomo and our first campsite…

After eleven and a half years, on Saturday 1st August 2009, Leela and I got married at Chillingham Castle, Northumberland!

The day started out looking pretty bleak, with heavy downpours over the entire North East.  However as noon arrived, the clouds parted over Chillingham just in time and treated us to a wonderful sunny day.

We had a fantastic day joined by lots of our friends and family and have many wonderful memories to treasure.  Thank you all for helping to make our wedding such a special day.

We’ve had so many photos sent to us it’s going to take me a while to sort through them – Needless to say, I’ll post a blog entry once they’re online!

I finally got off my backside and imported, sorted and uploaded a pile of photos that had been sat on my cameras SD card for months.  Here are the results…

I’ve finally found a new Wordpress theme that I like – So out with the old fixed-width(ish) browns & greens, and in are the new dynamic-width whites & blacks of the Atahualpa Theme.

I’ve also replaced the default banner images of fruit & trees with some banners snipped from my photo collection.  They’ve turned out much better than I thought they would – Not bad for 5 mins work with Paint.NET

Some nice people over at Echoing The Sound have ripped the audio from the 400GB of HD concert video that Trent recently made available.  Here’s a local copy if anyone’s interested…

Nine Inch Nails – Lights In The Sky Over Sacramento 2008

Looks like Google have cocked things up BIG TIME for a lot of people.  Every search result is tagged as “harmful” so you can’t click through to your destination…

Update: Looks like someone at Google noticed.  Everything’s back to normal for me now…

Over the past couple of days I’ve been battling away trying to get the Win32 Bacula agent to back up my Windows Server 2008 System State  and Exchange Server 2007 Information Store Databases.

Bacula currently doesn’t support VSS backups of a 64-Bit version of Windows Server 2008, so there’s a number of hoops you have to jump through to get even a semi-reliable System State & Exchange backup.  For an Exchange backup we use the NTBACKUP binaries from Windows Server 2003 64-bit and for the System State we use the Windows Server 2008 wbadmin tools.

For both jobs we’ll use a couple of “Client Run Before Job” commands to trigger client-side scripts to run the client-side backup jobs…

(continue reading…)

I’ve just made a few back-end changes to my blog:

• Upgraded to WordPress 1.7
• Updated all plugins
• Installed new Facebook integration plugin
• Upgraded to latest version of Windows Live Writer

So this post is just to test all that lot is working correctly

Argh!… We turned on the Xbox 360 earlier, and what happened?…

THIS:

So after approx 30 mins on hold to Xbox support, I finally get put through to a call centre where a helpful man takes down my details and registers a free repair.  Whilst looking at the serial number label I took note of the manufacture date…  3rd December 2005!  Today was my Xbox’s 3rd birthday!

*sniff* :’(

UPDATE 15th Dec: A brand new healthy Xbox landed on my doorstep this afternoon!