New Zealand honeymoon planning 2.0

17 October 2007 » Travel

Cat and I have been finalizing our agenda for the post-wedding trip to New Zealand. We’ll be spending two weeks there in late November through early December - early summer in the southern hemisphere.

Update: We’re back from the trip. This was an ambitious agenda for two weeks, and we did change up some things before we left… like leaving out about half of what we planned on doing below…

Here are the pictures from what we did get to see. What a great trip. Highly recommended. :)

We’re not thrill seekers (Cat still gives me grief about bungee jumping 5 years before we met), so we intend to spend most of our time on the North Island relaxing on the beach or hitting the wineries and chowing on local seafood.

Most of the recommendations we’ve gotten from friends and colleagues have been for the more adventurous lower South Island, unfortunately.

So I’m looking to tap the wisdom of crowds (well the 4 of you that regularly read this blog anyway) for North Island and/or northern South Island tips. That’s where the 2.0 comes in (no, neither of us has been married before, thank you very much).

Here’s our the preliminary agenda. Plus ones? Vote downs? Things we’ve overlooked completely?

Day 1: Thursday

  • Arrive in Auckland early morning
  • Sky Tower
  • Auckland Domain
  • Parnell Village
  • Dinner options:
    • Dine by Peter Gordon (in Sky City)
    • White
    • The French Cafe
  • Stay in Auckland

Day 2: Friday

Day 3: Saturday

Day 4: Sunday

Day 5: Monday

  • Kiwi 360
  • Lunch in Bay of Plenty
  • Stay in Rotorua

Day 6: Tuesday

Day 7: Wednesday

Day 8: Thursday

Day 9: Friday

  • Shopping in Wellington morning
  • Take Ferry to Picton
  • Dinner at: ?
  • Stay in Blenheim

Day 10: Saturday

  • Wine tour day
  • Dinner options:
    • Herzog
    • Hunter’s Vineyard
  • Stay in Blenheim

Day 11: Sunday

  • Drive south
  • Lunch in Kaikoura
    • White Morph Restaurant
  • Dinner options:
    • Indochine
    • 50 on Park
  • Stay in Christchurch

Day 12: Monday

Day 13: Tuesday

Day 14: Wednesday

Day 15: Thursday

  • Drive to Auckland
  • Dinner at: ?
  • Depart from Auckland in the evening

Thanks in advance for any tips. Folks with great pointers get a nice postcard. :)

4 comments

Native XML Databases at NYPHP next week

17 October 2007 » DB2, Java, MySQL, PHP, XML

Elliotte Rusty Harold will offer his take on Native XML Databases at New York PHP next Tuesday night in Manhattan.

The presentation follows a mailing list thread and resulting blog post that generated a lot of interest and discussion on the topic. It should be a great talk for database administrators, application developers and content producers alike:

While much data and many applications fit very neatly into tables, even more data doesn’t. Books, encyclopedias, web pages, legal briefs, poetry, and more is not practically normalizable. SQL will continue to rule supreme for accounting, human resources, taxes, inventory management, banking, and other traditional systems where it’s done well for the last twenty years.

However, many other applications in fields like publishing have not even had a database backend. It’s not that they didn’t need one. It’s just that the databases of the day couldn’t handle their needs, so content was simply stored in Word files in a file system. These applications are going to be revolutionized by XQuery and XML.

If you’re working in publishing, including web publishing, you owe it to yourself to take a serious look at the available XML databases. This high-level talk explains what XML databases are good for and when you might choose one over a more traditional solution. You’ll learn about the different options in both open and closed source XML databases including pure XML, hybrid relational-XML, and other models.

As always, the meeting at IBM is free and open to the public, but you must submit your RSVP by 6PM EDT Monday, October 22nd.

2 comments