Brendan and Jess arranged to catch up with us at Galbraith’s on New Year’s Day on their visit back to New Zealand. And they introduced us to their new baby Amelia. She’s as destructive with beer mats as me.

I spend today drinking beer! Well first we caught up with Ralph for breakfast at Felix Cafe and then drove up to his place to see it and his FPGA radio. Then wandered down the hill to the Westpac Stadium to join the hundreds of other beer tasters. It was all extremely well organised with a festival catalogue, tokens, food, seminars, cleaners and of course beer. Between us we tried 12-20 different beers. Favourite beers were McCashin’s Brewery Stoke Bomber – Stout, Feral Brewing Boris, Invercargill Brewery Smokin Bishop, Mussell Inn Captain Cooker Manuka Beer, and Sprig and Fern Doppelbock. Tim said hello to Ian from Galbraiths. Dinner was Cambodian at Siem Reap.

Gathered at Galbraiths on this chilly night to quaff some ale and consider the state of the software testing job market.

Flew down to Christchurch, where I will be attending the Kiwi Python Conference. Fantastic day and beautiful scenery on the way down. Ended up at the Twisted Hop which was also hosting the pre-Conference drinks, but with Dave and Andi. Andi was hassling me about there being a “whole conference just for a scripting language”, but then both he and Dave admitted they both do a bit of Python and had been thinking of attending some of the sessions, but it is now sold out.

I said this repeatedly at the Quiz Master at the pub tonight –> We should have only got 3 points in the sports round, but for some unknown reason they gave us 5, propelling us into a tie-break for second place –> Guess of the number of Instant Kiwi players, which we won. My team mates were not very keen to point out the mistake, and honestly I was happy to win too. After all it’s been a while since we made a placing at pub-quiz.