Status-Q

I had a great time last night visiting Catalyst, who provide software and services to some pretty high-profile NZ projects, but also seem to have a lot of fun. I liked them immensely, and it's always encouraging to see successful businesses built around Open Source.

Some of them are helping with OLPC on the side, and I was able to play with one of the laptops for the first time. I was quite impressed.

I've long admired Hans Rosling's TED talk; a wonderful demonstration of the importance of being able to visualise data.

Hans is from Sweden, I'm from the UK, but we met tonight in New Zealand. And he's just as nice as you would suppose from the video.

A couple more shots of the boat used as the Venture in Peter Jackson's King Kong. I wasn't a huge fan of the film, but the boat made for interesting arty photographs.

Most of the rust was painted on for the film, by the way.

And now for some lights on the Wellington waterfront:

I think I've lost my UK mobile. It may be in the back of a cab somewhere, or under a plane seat, or lying in a Wellington gutter. Anyway, I can't find it. (So friends and family should note that it is not a good way to contact me at present!)

Normally, you have a good chance of finding mobiles simply by calling them. But this one is switched off, or the battery is dead; I just go straight through to my voicemail.

I want a way to switch it on remotely. Perhaps a phone could wake up every half hour, check for any messages, and if you had sent it a special text it would respond in some way - emailing you what it could deduce about its position, for example, and staying on for a while so you could call it.

The frustrating thing is not knowing whether it's here in my hotel room somewhere, or hundreds of miles away in Auckland airport, or lurking under some Wellington restaurant table... I may never know.

There are some really beautiful woods just outside Wellington.

I was on a tour visiting some of the sites used in filming the Lord of the Rings movies. Fans should picture Frodo yelling "Get off the road!":

or me saying "Ooof! I think I broke something!":

Mmm. One of the good things about being on the far side of the world is that you don't have to endure your friends' pitying looks.

Others won't have a clue what I'm talking about and should just enjoy the views of Wellington scenery:

Or this fine bust of Arthur Wellesley looking out over the city that bears his name:

This is Weta Workshop, where much of the LOTR magic was created:

And the boat used in King Kong:

I'm in Wellington, New Zealand, where I arrived yesterday after about 22 hours of flights and airports. And that was from Seattle - already quite a distance from home.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, Tony Blair is congratulating Nick Sarkozy. In French. Pretty good French, too, in so far as I'm a judge. Certainly better than Margaret Thatcher's.

The fact that I can watch it, comment on it, even rebroadcast it from my hotel room in New Zealand also says a lot about how the world has changed since Maggie's time.

John thinks he's worked out why I'm departing tomorrow!

And now it has a prettier front-end, in the form of MacFusion.