Lev Lafayette's journal

With the conference over I had a bit of an opportunity to explore Dunedin, not that I haven't done that before. I took a long walk down to the magnificent St Clair/St Kilda beach, visited the charming Long Dog cafe, and then to the rocky environs of Second Beach, with its fine collection of Cthulhu-esque seaweed and sudden drops. There was also a trip to every second-hand bookstore and opportunity shop I could find, from one end of the town to the other. Even as it is far beyond a matter of necessity at this stage of my life and whilst I usually only buy a trinket or memento, I do enjoy visiting second-hand stores. They're like museums of common people, a step into the lives once lived, and either discarded or donated. One such find was a boxed collector's edition of Wild Animus, a thoroughly strange book, along with the musical accompaniment, which apparently is better than the novel.

The following day, the flight to Wellington was without incident. Was collected at the airport by the Barker/Elliot clan who took me to The Botanist on Lyall Bay. Lovely seaside location, excellent vegetarian and vegan food. They then dropped me off at the Waterloo Hotel, my preferred residence in Wellington. It's by no means a five-star hotel or anything like that, but it is superb value for money, with a solid old-deco feel to it. Some of the rooms are dorms for backpackers, others (as I prefer) are individual rooms with a shared bathroom between two. For tomorrow I have prepared myself for all the requirements for Bramble Cay Melomys Day - I'll kick off the Australian memorials with what will certainly be a solo memorial in Cuba St, Dunedin. But many good things in Australia start in New Zealand, as the locals will surely mention. The day has ended with a light dinner and drinks with speakers for the Multicore World conference.

An arrival to the South Island was met by fires in Christchurch. As if that poor city has not suffered enough from the terrible earthquakes of 2011 which still scar the city. The famed central Cathedral is now but a shell of what it once was, and like all great ruins is gradually being taken by nature. The official part of my visit was to the University HPC team who have shfted most of their facilities to their national infrastructure. Still, I managed to have enough spare time to vist the impressive Canterbury Museaum and take a walk around the botanical gardens before spending a night in a former prison cell, which is certainly an imaginative use of such facilities.

The following morning caught an early flight to Dunedin and chatted with a final year engineering student who had also apparently had been on the flight with me to Christchurch. Her home was Dunedin and her trip to Melbourne was her first overseas jaunt. Arrival at Dunedin was faced with the announcement that their famous chocolate factory, would be closing down. For many this is heartbreaking; it is one of Dunedin's prize businesses, even the home of Dunedin's first computer. For the three hundred and fifty workers there it is absolutely devastating; and capital does what it always does, moving to the cheapest location. For advanced economies, I often point to the example of Germany who still have a powerful manufacturing industry.

My first day was spent with David Eyers and Jim Cheetham who cover HPC and security respectively, and their insights on such subjects will be taken home and again, as is my want, visited the Otago Museum. I've also been contacting many people I know in NZ about whether they would be interested in taking the recently retired Avoca system across The Ditch. I rather like the idea of NZ having a Top500 system on its shores. The following day was free time and the opportunity was taken to visit our South Pacific base are looking after it. The musicians who live there are doing a great job and apparently a new LP, "Lodge Music" will be released in the near future. I'm quite looking forward to it.

Having reach Oamaru, we stayed at the Eden Gardens Motel, the former maternity ward of the historic Oamaru Hospital. Much of the old hospital site is currently in an abandoned state (very tempting for urban explorers), but the hotel itself is in beautiful condition and location, in a late deco style surrounded by parkland and at a high point overlooking the main part of town and ocean. Much of the town is a collection of beautiful buildings, many made with the iconic Oamaru sandstone, known for being supple when quarried and hardening with exposure.

After visiting the impressive art-noveau Opera House, we went to the Victorian precinct, starting with the Steampunk HQ which has improved a great deal since last visit, with more interactive elements; the lights and mirrors in "The Portal Room" being notable. Unexpectedly found an impressive alternative record and genre-fiction book store; of all places in the world I did not expect to find a copy of Crass's Christ The Album here. After this had a late lunch with Nicolas Erdody of OpenParallel and we had a wide-ranging discussion concentrating on amusing and tragic stories of business processes. I am hoping to contribute at some stage to OpenParallel's work on signal and data processing for the Square Kilometre Array.

In the late afternoon we journeyed to Dunedin, which also has much more than its fair share of great buildings. The hotel where we're staying, the Park Regis, is certainly one of these, although it is surprisingly lacking in core services (parking, free Internet). With Saturday free, we engaged in some clothes shopping, had breakfast in the seaside suburb of St Clair, and then travelled to Taiaroa Head to the impressive Natures Wonders tour; travelling over rough land by argo, we had the opportunity for extraordinary views of the peninsula and harbour, getting up close with fur seals, and viewings of the rare yellow-eyed penguins, and the somewhat less rare blue penguins. Returning to the city on a 'big kid' whim, we went to see Shaun the Sheep at the Reading Cinema at the Octagon (cute and amusing) followed by dinner at the superb Etrusco.