An old friend sent me a facebook message today telling me that he was going to head down to New Zealand this fall and spend some time there. He was wondering if I had any advice. I feel like anyone planning on doing any traveling this Spring could find this useful:
“Hey Nate nice to hear from you.
Boy are you really in for something now. Although you will find you’re own way, I can give you a few tips.
First of all, pack LIGHT. I ended up ditching a ton of stuff after a few weeks in NZ. One pair of pants and 1 pair of shorts will do fine. Seriously, don’t take anything extra. A light pack is the most important commodity.
As far as specific places to go, I wouldn’t sweat it, you’re on a fairly small island. You will most likely visit the same places more than once, which reminds me of the main point. The greatest discovery in New Zealand is in the people, not the places. Traveling light also means your means of travel should also be light. I would stay away from cars or tourist buses, enclosing yourself in a metal cage will subtract from your experience in New Zealand. You have to be willing to let the wind blow you around. That is when you will truly discover the land and come away with the most. Sorry if I sound preachy, but its true. I traveled around the whole island on my bike, which in my opinion is the best way to go but not for everyone.
Be as frugal as possible. Spending less money means less time until you have to start working again. Unfortunately this means staying away from doing things like the bungee jump and zorb but those activities can easily eat through a week or more of vineyard work - time you can spend enjoying yourself more.
You WILL learn to cook. I know everything I know now about cooking because of New Zealand. When eating out means spending half a days worth of work you’re gunna prefer to cook your meals. If you don’t already learn some recipes now.
You are amazing with people so you are going to have a great time. Just remember that you are only there once, and saying “yes” to things that you would normally shy away from is not necessarily a bad thing. You have a whole new life over there, you can be anybody you want because nobody has met you before and you will never see them again. Most of all, its the best place to really learn to be yourself.
As far as practical things - Vineyard work is the way to go. Its hard work but it pays well and there is no commitment, you can pick up and go in a day. The best place for work by far in Blenhiem - right at the northern tip of the south island. Work aplenty and cheap accommodation to match. The towns surrounding Christchurch (I saw Wiz there!) are also really good.
I could really go on forever, you have no idea what New Zealand means to me. Please keep in touch while you are there, I can’t wait to live through you. If you have any questions I’d be happy to answer.
Happy for you,
Austin.”
I’ve been thinking of writing a memoir of my travels in New Zealand, maybe in weekly or bi-weekly installments, but it will be a lot of work and I don’t know if I’m up to it at the moment with school and all. Maybe during the summer when I’m in Nicaragua? Who knows.
Getting sick of listening to the same songs from you library over and over? Try listening to on-line radio from your favourite music player. It can turn you onto new music as well as freeing you from your old boring mp3s. There are hundreds of radio stations on the net, and the majority of them are commercial free! And because there are no commercials, the stations are free to play whatever they want! You will find some great non-mainstream music on some of these stations as well as the hits.
The best places to find radio stations would be NullSoft’s Shoutcast: www.shoutcast.com
There you will find tons of unique radio stations from all around the world
My favourites are:
Groove Salad
Awesome ambient radio station based out of San Francisco. Good coding music.
Radio Paradise
A super relaxing eclectic rock station. Some good stuff that I’ve never heard before as well as some good classics.
The BuzzFM
If you are into alternative rock, you will LOVE this station. The play list is straight hits, but it does get repetitive sometimes.
Once you start listening to online radio, you will never go back. I swear.
We’ve all seen those pharmaceutical ads on tv that are smiles, laughter and sunny skies. But what can be unsettling are those words the narrator spits out usually in the last few seconds of the commercial.
The prescription drug industry is one of the most profitable in the world. It seems like drug companies come out with a new cure for a disease every month, and people rush in like crack addicts for rocks. What is surprising is that everyone seems to ignore the warning about how dangerous they are, even though we are bombarded with warning nearly every night while we watch TV. Some of these warnings are straight ridiculous, making you wonder why anyone would take the drug in the first place. Others, have the ability to make you laugh out loud, which is a better cure than any they are selling.
Here are three of the craziest drug ads on tv.
Mirapex.
This one is by far the most ridiculous drug commercial I have ever seen. First of all, the disease its supposed to cure, RLS or Restless Leg Syndrome, seems like something a guy in the PR department of Pfizer made up. The ad states that if “you have an uncontrollable urge to move” maybe Mirapex is right for you. Uncontrollable urge to move? Damn that pesky biped body that was built to walk! Maybe those uncontrollable urges have something to do with not using your legs and whoever gets them should, lets think, go for a walk? But wait, the ad keeps getting better. It tells you that using Mirapex may cause serious side effects like falling asleep during normal activities, such as driving. Right. If you thought that was bad, the narrator goes on to tell you to “call your doctor if you experience increased gambling, sexual or other intense urges.” What the hell? Increased gambling urges? Actually, on a second thought this drug sounds like it might be kinda fun…
Youtube link to TV ad.
Celebrex.
This 2 minute ad is made up entirely of a blue background, relaxing music and scrolling text that takes the form of people, dogs and bushes. And you expect that with an ad made entirely from text, the words should be convincing you to buy the drug. Apparently not. Instead, we find words like “abdominal pain” “serious skin reactions” and “internal bleeding.” No, these are not the ailments celebrex is curing, but instead nasty side effects that may occur from taking the drug. In fact, the narrator goes on a long rant about how the risk of heart attack is the same for most pain medications, including celebrex. Hmm, that makes me feel a lot better.
Youtube link to TV ad
Cialis.
For men who can’t get it up. But is it really worth the risk of a permanent erection? Or vision loss? Considering how much spam I get in my inbox for
it someone must be buying it.
Youtune link to TV ad
Here is the final update on the video I’ve been working on. Hope you like it.
I recently pulled all my journal entries I wrote while in New Zealand off of Facebook and put them in PDF form. They are complete with pictures, stories of adventure, danger, love and heartbreak. Be warned the file size is fairly large. Soon I will try to convert everything to HTML and make a page out of it.
You can find the journal here
My installation of Ubuntu went pretty smoothly besides the Nvidia drivers and one other problem: my TSSTcorp TS L632d ATA dvdr + rw drive was not recognized by linux. In fact it was straight invisible. Hwinfo showed nothing. Dmesg | grep cdrom showed even less. I started to think that I might have a serious bug to work out. However, the fix was simple.
I was doing some searches through google and linuxquestions.org when I cam across a post about the live cd not booting. It was for people who have SATA harddrives, which I thought had nothing to do with the dvd drive but the described effects were the same. The fix is to simply run “modprobe piix” in order to install the correct module. When I did, the audio cd popped up on my desktop immediately. Who would have thought? In order to make the fix permanent, I edited the “/etc/initramfs-tools/modules” file to include piix at the end. Then I ran “update-initramfs -u” to update the config, restarted and everything is working perfectly. I hope anyone who is having this same problem runs accross this post.
Cheers.
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