eResearch NZ Part II, Bungy Jumping and More

Second and third days of eResearchNZ 2015 saw me become increasingly grumpy with vendors and IT managers promoting the virtues of cloud technologies without consideration. I have been ambivalent in the past, but following a panel of several of NZ senior IT managers in the academic world who were flummoxed by my question on the relative inefficiency of cloud versus physical HPC lead me to pen a few words under the title The Cloud : An Inferior Implementation of HPC. It follows a previous post a couple of weeks back on Adopting Microservices at Netflix, which included far too many universal claims from a context-bound situation. My own paper to the conference, Skill Improvements versus Interface Designs for eResarchers seemed to be well-received by the people who are actually directly involved in skill development among researchers with the potential of future trans-Tasman collaborative work as a result.

With around a day spare following the conference closure, caseopaya took the opportunity to take a Queenstown lake cruise. The captain was slightly loopy, but gave many charming tales of the history and geography of the region, and allowed me to be a big kid and pilot the ship for a short time ("steady she goes"). The following day took the Skyline Gondola to a high point overlooking the town and - despite my uneasiness with heights - took a bungy jump which can be politely described as "very exciting". It is apparently safe, but it is a little difficult to convince one's mind of this. Afterwards ate a buffet lunch at the Stratosfare which had fair food, but superb views. After all that, made the extensive journey to Oamaru, including a stop at the charmingly art deco and rail history town of Ranfurly.