First few days

The first few days in Auckland have been spent mostly indoors. Since I got here on a Monday, I had to get going with work right away. On Monday, I came in with Chu to her department and met a bunch of her friends. We have walked around the university areas to get food and such in the last couple of days. It's awesome, reminds me of 1994... walking around campus, eating street food, working unstructured but long hours.

In the meantime on the work front, I had some trouble connecting to machines back in Austin. It was strange, I was able to make the VPN connection, I was able to connect to our machines with the older 130.164 IP addresses, but not the ones with the new 10.0 addresses. It was baffling. But then it turned out that Chu's router was using the 10.x address range for the internal LAN addresses, so the router was dealing with my requests as though they were local addresses. I finally got that resolved and am back to being productive with work.

On Tuesday night and again today, I practiced some tukong in the corridors here while Chu's been working in her lab. It's interesting to adapt the forms to the layout of the corridors and the desks.


The weather has been quite good here. It's a little chilly. And it rains on a whim. But that's Auckland for you. Today it was up to 60 F. I left my sweatshirt at home. Took the bus in to the Uni. Met up with Chu near the bus stop. We walked around the "city centre" for a bit, window shopping. The city is really pretty at dusk when the sky is clear. The sun turns red, since it is winter. All the bright city lights look good against the evening sky.