Thank you for the lovely plump and juicy rat you brought me overnight. I took it with me on that strange daylight prowl I seem to do every day, and made sure to play with it and eat it during my lunch break.

From time to time I sit down to blog about my recent activities, for the delight of my family and friends, and so that they may be reassured of my continuing existence. When I do so, I am generally tempted to begin with a paragraph apologising for my generally tardiness and lack of commitment to the blogging enterprise. Sometimes I get as far as actually writing the paragraph. Then I delete it because it is Bad Writing. Nobody wants to read a blog full of apologies. They want to read about me writing about apologies I’ve elected not to actually make. And then writing about writing about writing about apologies. That’s the good stuff all right. Nothing’s too meta for my loyal readers, assuming I still have any what with all the tardiness.

I am currently ensconced in the University of Auckland’s HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) lab. It is a small room with three desks, a nice big window with a view of the city, and a pile of telephone directories. Notably absent from the standard equipment are computers with which humans may interact. I have brought my own computer to interact with, in order that the whole enterprise not become a sort of existential mockery.

My purpose here in the HCI lab is to undertake a summer scholarship related in some way to prototyping user interfaces using tablet PCs. Further detail is expected to develop as soon as I have access to a functional tablet PC. One was allotted to me last week, but it ceased to function almost immediately and is currently being nursed back to health by highly-skilled technicians. So, after a week of work I am approximately seven days behind schedule.

My two exams seemed to go fairly well, and during my various chats with people around the Computer Science Department I have been informed that the marking for one of them is finished and that I will likely be pleased with the result.

Keith the technician has just visited to say that the tablet PC is almost ready – it just needs Visual Studio to be reinstalled. This sounds like good news, but I have developed over the last week a skepticism towards signs of progress with the tablet PC, which I feel is conducive to good mental health. Keith is a friendly chap, who apparently approves of my really being a Mac user.

In other news, I shall be undertaking a visit to Christchurch in December. If you’re in Christchurch and would like to catch up, I shall be arriving on 16 December and leaving on 30 December.

Among the great ineffable mysteries of life that have exercised the minds of theologians and philosophers over the centuries, few have been so perplexing as the question of why, when Mac users buy new Macs, they feel compelled to post box-opening pictures. It’s not that the boxes aren’t nice, as boxes go. Apple make good boxes. Well-designed boxes to put their well-designed computers in. And certainly Mac users are disproportionately interested in good design, otherwise we wouldn’t be paying that extra bit for our computers or taking all those HCI courses at university. But this doesn’t go the full distance to providing a full explanation for why we feel compelled to post those box-opening pictures.

All I can say is that the compulsion is strong.

This is the box my new PowerBook came in. It is a fine, sturdy box with a helpful carrying-handle. I picked it up from the Campus IT shop on Monday, having specifically taken a train ride into the city that morning so that I wouldn’t have to carry it home on my bike, because while it is a lovely box, it wouldn’t be completely convenient for…

… you know what? I’m just going to get on with the rest of the pictures. The compulsion doesn’t say anything about having to write a lot of explanatory text.

When you open a PowerBook box, you get nice little sections with cables and such, and manuals in the middle, like this.

As if the cables weren’t enough, there’s a second layer with a laptop in it. It’s like a box of chocolates, in that just when you think you’ve seen it all, there turns out to be another tray underneath. Granted, the presence of a laptop in the box is rendered somewhat less surprising by the fact that the box has several pictures of the laptop on the outside. But otherwise, I think the tray of chocolates analogy is a good one.

When you remove the PowerBook from its protective wrapper, it looks like this.

With the lid open, it looks like this. It has a special piece of plasticy stuff to go between the keyboard and the screen.

The plasticy thing is removable.

After a short period, a cat will come and sit beside it. Even before it is turned on. That’s how good it is.

Here it is on my desk, with the power plugged in so that the battery can charge.

Here I am about to turn it on for the first time. Exciting!

That’s enough photos. The compulsion is satisfied, and I get to send away for another Mac-user merit badge.

I’m very pleased with the PowerBook. It’s a modest step up from my desktop iMac in most areas of performance and capacity, but I can take it with me. I was particularly impressed by the Migration Assistant, which copied my whole user environment directly from the iMac via a FireWire cable, with no noticeable fuss and very little in the way of detectable muss.

Funtime Comics: we’re big in Macedonia.

New Zealand comics have a wiki.

For your viewing pleasure, I present a selection of photographs taken during Armageddon ’05, a great big geek convention.

Setting up

The process of setting up our booth began with a frank public statement of our attitude towards Tim. We do not like Tim, and we are not afraid to say so.

Our hastily-assembled sign. Next year we make a real one, with a proper dinosaur on it. We here at Funtime Comics are firm proponents of dinosaurs.

Our stock. Shiny new colour comics at the front, back catalogue of black-and-whites at the back. This is our idea of marketing. Behind us on the next desk is Mike Loder, a very naughty man who threatens small children with a gun. The small children ask him questions about the gun, like whether it is real and whether it is for sale. Having got their attention, he changes the subject to his own comics and comedy CDs. Mike’s idea of marketing is more sophisticated than ours.

The Gibson Awards

Loyal fans of New Zealand Comics, huddled together for warmth and security at the Gibson Awards Ceremony.

Steve won many prizes, on account of the the high quality of his comics and because he submitted them several times over in every possible category. Go Steve!

Richard manages to scoop up an award, preventing Steve from making a clean sweep of all categories and being declared Emperor of New Zealand Comics. Maybe next year, Steve. Richard was clearly delighted.

Some people were not present to receive their prizes. This man held them up anyway, and we clapped.

On the Desk

Andrew and Steve serve Funtime on the desk, and model the two kinds of t-shirts worn by Comics People. Passers-by were entertained by their friendly banter.

Saul popped by, and we let him sit behind the desk because he has comics published somewhere amidst the plethora of anthologies we have on sale. Therefore he is one of us. In this picture, Saul has just said something extremely rude, which has left Andrew deeply shocked.

Around the Show

These people are playing video games on vibrating deckchairs. I do not really get video games.

Should you have wished to do so, it would have been possible to purchase a Wonder Woman Cake Pan Set. It will likely be possible again next year.

There were some moderately famous people in the Big Room talking about stuff. I didn’t go to many of these, as I have heard enough anecdotes about obscure Star Trek characters. But I did go to see the people from Weta talking about King Kong.

Generally, things looked like this.

Storm troopers. The one in the middle was much shinier than the one on the right. If I were making a storm trooper costume, I’d want it as shiny as is humanly possible, but it takes all sorts to live in this crazy world of ours. The man on the left is blurred because he was travelling through time.