The month was bookended by coming back from Sydney and leaving for Canada. Between that, we also walked the Travers-Sabine Circuit, which had its moments (especially above treeline), but also a lot of below-treeline forest slogging. Apart from that, there was WLU consulting, plus more scholarly reviewing, including PLDI discussions. But, much of February was in Wellington, so here are some Wellington pictures.

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We tried to go to the Paniyiri Greek Food Festival in Wellington, but so did everyone else, so we gave up on that.

COVID

February felt quieter than January. March, when I’m writing this, seems to have a New Zealand wave but not as much in North America.

In Not COVID news, measles has been pretty popular recently. Get your vaccinations. Measles is actually bad, though many people have forgotten that.

• One possible mechanism for Long COVID: viral protein fragments
• Long COVID and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome
• Long COVID review in Science
• February 2024 next generation vaccine update: better than BNT/Pfizer!

Professional

OK, I’m going to complain about peer review. Our PLDI submission was rejected, despite receiving 2 accept reviews, 1 weak reject, and 1 reject. Apparently the reject reviewer was influential, despite not really having (in our opinion) very strong arguments for rejection in the review. We’ll resubmit to OOPSLA. I figured that a software engineering venue would not get the attention that we want.

I’m also grumpy about a special issue submission to the Journal of Systems and Software where there were instructions for the special issue asking for a description of our artifact, and reviewers who didn’t seem to evaluate according to the instructions. C’mon. (Yes, I complained.)

In total, I’d say that I worked on 13 days; February has 20 work days, which is a lot for a short month! There was less PLDI reviewing and so most of my work was pushing collaborations/student work forward. Most of my students are still early in their programs so there is some booting up going on there.

Grad students/mentees/collaborators

I guess I blew off meetings while I was on the Travers-Sabine and also when I was at the conference. Still, I had meetings with people on 8 days, which is a majority of my work days.

Collegiality

Most of the PLDI work was in January but there was still a bit of discussion this month. There was also a review of a grant proposal for Hong Kong. And a PhD defense which I participated in from SFU after an overnight flight from Sydney.

Minor: Advisory Panel for the Iron Ring Ceremony, and talked to a CS faculty candidate.

Consulting

Did the bulk of my work for the upcoming deliverable in February, including course calendar descriptions.

Trips

There was one trip that was squarely in February: Travers-Sabine Circuit in Nelson Lakes National Park. The month was also bookended with two travel days (from Sydney after the ASESS conference, and then to Vancouver for refereeing.)

Sydney

I’d mostly described my Sydney trip last month, but the trip actually continued to the first day of February. Then I had a 7:55am flight back to Wellington (early morning transit trip to the airport) and took the bus back to my place.

Some weeks after getting back to NZ I got a bill from the Australian mobile provider iinet. It turns out that cancelling one’s service with them is super annoying. 0/10 do not recommend. amaysim is a better bet all around. It’s slow to activate, but apparently they all are.

When I got back to my place, I packed for our Travers-Sabine tramp, and checked that we had sufficient food.

Travers-Sabine

The day after flying in from Sydney, it was off to Nelson Lakes. We took an afternoon flight to Blenheim and then got a shuttle to our airbnb 4km out of St. Arnaud.

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Hamish on the Mountaineer took us out to Lakehead Hut to start the Travers-Sabine. There was a bunch of terrain that I’d been on previously on my Mount Hopeless attempt, though I think that it was muddier this time. In any case, this time we walked past John Tait Hut, to Upper Travers (beyond the turnoff for Cupola Hut) on the first day. That was a lot of forest walking.

The next two days were the highlights: over Travers Saddle, with good weather, to West Sabine Hut. Then, a 3 hour walk up to Blue Lake Hut and then up to the Lake Constance view of Blue Lake, one hour beyond and well worth it.

The last two days were more forest walking—some hard—from Blue Lake Hut to Sabine Hut (great view, wasps a minus). And, out on the last day, which is fairly easy, in time for the shuttle to Nelson. We hitchhiked with some Dutch hikers who had rented a car for their hike. We would have been just in time for the shuttle without the ride, but we were 90 minutes ahead with the ride, and avoided a bunch of annoying road walking.

We stayed at the Nelson City TOP 10 Holiday Park which is not close to central Nelson. Then we went out to the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary, a community-run sanctuary which has super rare orange-fronted kākāriki. We did not see any kākāriki. There aren’t a lot of cheap ways to get to Brook Waimārama, but the taxi works. (Uber does not work for leaving the sanctuary; in Nelson it seems cheaper for getting to the sanctuary). The plane got us back to Wellington.

Flying to Canada: Pacific and Edmonton International

• Full trip report

I flew to Canada on the Thursday before the Pacific International judo tournament in Abbotsford, with an early-morning departure, and, yet again, a stop in Sydney. Due to the magic of the International Date Line, I also arrived in Vancouver on Thursday, at 6am. Then I napped in a conference room, served on a PhD defense committee, and attended a talk at SFU. Then I got a bunch of sleep in Vancouver and drove to Abbotsford.

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On Friday, I checked out what was in the area, and found the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary in Delta. The sanctuary had Anna’s hummingbirds at a feeder, as well as sandhill cranes, and lots of waterfowl. (First time I’d seen a hummingbird!)

At the tournament itself, I appear to have dodged getting COVID, unlike last year. I also managed to get them to open doors to mitigate ventilation to some extent, though that only dropped CO₂ from 3300s to 2200s near where I was. It was interesting to see that the curtain really impedes airflow and keeps the CO₂ level up, despite CO₂ being a gas. My experience is that most people are amenable to improving the ventilation in these venues.

After the tournament, I flew to Toronto, went bouldering at the Rock Oasis with Marco and Blake (saying hi to some OAC folk), and made my way to Waterloo on Tuesday morning. I had a full schedule of meetings for my two days in Waterloo and a bit of a kerfuffle getting the keys to my place. There was a whole chain of annoying occurrences keeping me out, including my garage door opener being unreliable. Many thanks to Rux for putting me up in a spare room!

The Edmonton International is a super big tournament (though still substantially smaller than the Quebec Open). We did the ne waza (groundwork) tournament on Friday, and then 14 hours of fights on Saturday and 10 hours on Sunday. Fortunately, they had the junior referees start the U10s and U12s on Saturday, so I only started at 10:30. Still, I was on for 12 hours on Saturday. At least they provided pizza for dinner. Not as good as the excellent lunch they provided, but better than nothing!

Turns out that our former neighbours Dirk and Martha were on the same flight from Vancouver to Auckland, heading to their NZ trip.

Travel planning

• Abbotsford/Toronto/Waterloo/Edmonton at the start of March.
• Cascade-Dart tramp, at the end of March (variation of Rees-Dart).
• Whanganui River Journey, even later in March.

Movement statistics

Lots of walking and trains in Sydney. Pleasingly little driving.

• 🚶 Walking: 171km on 24 days (similar to January)
• 🚲 Biking: 61km on 8 days
• 🚗 Driving: 19km on 3 days (Nelson Lakes, and ride to YVR)
• 🚗 Taxi: 28km (in Nelson, and to WLG)
• 🚌 Bus: 227km on 6 days (Sydney, Nelson Lakes, Vancouver)
• ✈ Plane: 17,177km (SYD-WLG, WLG-BHE, NSN-WLG, WLG-SYD-YVR)
• 🚆 Train: 40km on 2 days (Sydney and for a hike in Wellington)
• 🚆 LRT: 43km (Sydney and Vancouver)

Walks

One long walk and one short walk.

• Travers-Sabine Circuit.
• Colonial Knob: started late, thought about going through to Mount Kaukau but did not. Test drive of magic Aarn pack which keeps all weight off shoulders.

Pictures

In April 2022, between terms, I went to New Zealand and we walked the Te Paki Coastal Track which includes Cape Reinga/Te Rerenga Wairua. The Cape separates the Tasman Sea from the Pacific Ocean, and it is a significant place in Māori mythology—it is the “leaping-off place of spirits”. It’s almost the most northerly point of New Zealand, but isn’t quite.

• Complete Northland, April 2022 album

Here are pictures from day 1 of the track, through to Tapotupotu.

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Day 2 included Cape Reinga and Cape Maria van Dieman, before we arrived at Twilight Micro-Camp.

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And on day 3 we walked part of the Ninety Mile Beach before getting a ride back to where we’d parked our cars at Te Hapua.

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• Te Paki Day 1, April 22 (31/99)
• Te Paki Day 2 including Cape Reinga, April 23 (93/325)
• Te Paki Day 3, April 24 (34/84)
• Birds near Te Hapua, April 24 (33/155)

I also managed to post some pictures from our January 2024 trip to Sydney, though the big Botanic Garden at Mount Annan day is still in progress.

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• Sydney Dee Why birds, January 26 (41/284)
• Australian Museum and Parramatta, January 26 (47/196)
• Blue Mountains in the clouds, January 27 (89/411)

The List

February posts

• Book review: On Cold Iron, by Dan Levert

I started writing a 2023 retrospective but there’s still a lot of work to do.

Miscellaneous

February is a short month, though leap year February is a bit longer.

Acquisitions

• Black Diamond Men’s Mission LT approach shoes (for the Nth time, this time at 30% off)
• Aarn Mountain Magic 50 PRO: no weight on shoulders, feels like magic, haven’t tried it on a real hike yet.
• Belkin BoostCharge Power Bank 10k: I discovered that one of our older power banks didn’t actually work anymore. This power bank should give us some extra margin on hikes so that I can record tracks. Though if I had a more power-efficient phone, that would help too.
• Mens Rab Sawtooth Pants: Turns out I do not have any lightweight hiking pants in NZ. Maybe I have some in Canada, but that’s not clear. All of my pants were far too heavy for Travers-Sabine and I was melting.

I sent my poofy jacket for re-repair. Hope it sticks this time.

Sports

There was that 5 day hike where I got back under 66kg, and then judo practice 4×, and bouldering at Fergs once. (Turns out Faultline wasn’t quite open yet).

Books

• David Hallett. Native Birds of New Zealand: Oops, I already own this book, but presumably my copy is in Canada. Anyway, it still has excellent bird pictures of almost all of the New Zealand birds.

• Sarah Ell. Lost Wonders: Vanished Creatures of Aotearoa

This is a fairly recent book (2020) about animals and plants that are extinct or in danger of extinction in Aotearoa New Zealand, starting with dinosaurs and including the well-known stories (in NZ) of the kakapo and black robin (hence including Chatham Island). Birds are of course the most charismatic of the NZ wildlife, but the book also discusses trees, lizards, fish, and whales. Because it was settled so recently, NZ has more than its share of extinct yet documented creatures, unfortunately. People didn’t even really consider it to be a problem until recently, and even now, conservation often takes second place to economic development. That’s especially true in Australia (see: swift parrot) but not absent from NZ (see: cameras on fishing boats under the current government). Although we haven’t documented any losses of birds recently (the South Island kokako being perhaps or perhaps not extinct), some birds are really barely hanging on, like the fairy tern. NZ does deploy significant resources to save the famous species like kakapo, but the Department of Conservation isn’t really well funded, and it’s always a struggle.

Restaurants

Not too many this month.

Vancouver:

• Hapa Izakaya Yaletown (also in Toronto): izakaya with really good ahi tuna avocado salsa dip.
• Trees Organic Coffee: huge scone.
• Steveston Harbour Cafe: legit; the banh mi is with chunks, not slices, but good pork!

Wellington:

• Top Kitchen: would go back.

Nelson:

• Lombardi’s Restaurant: Italian food in Nelson.
• Devon Bakery: mmm, pies. On the way to the Brook Waimārama Sanctuary.

Sydney:

• Char Kway Teow at Spice Alley, probably at [Ginger & Spice]. Not outstanding.
• Banh mi co ba: OK banh mi, but Hong Ha in Mascot better.

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Volunteering

I looked into the OAC CiviCRM issue but didn’t actually file a report or fix it. Should get around to that. Normal amount of OAC volunteering.

Also contributed my thoughts to the rewrite of the constitution for the Wellington Judo Academy (and went to the Quarterly General meeting).

Conclusion

Good sabbatical month. Got some research done and some trips. Certainly less reviewing!

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