We had a nice time at the Canterbury Wine and Food Festival yesterday. It will be the one and only time I go, though, because it wasn't cheap. I naively thought that the ticket price would include some complimentary wine/food but that was a negatory. The festival currency was 'crowns' which equated to $1.10 a crown, and most items averaged about 4 crowns (or $4.40). Even small items like a donut or a belgium waffle were this price! The only real consolation was that I found 6 crowns lying on the ground in one of the toilets ;-) The entertainment was great, though, with some really talented musicians/vocalists. Based on the kind of clientele that was there, I think the event is aimed towards those who are a little more monetarily endowed. If you've got a bit of dosh to splash around, might be your kind've scene.

A week ago, we were at the tail-end of the worst 2 weeks of Chocolat's life. She had been having really bad seizures, a couple of which lasted for over 7 hours! Last Tuesday we had to take her to the vet after she had been seizuring all day and he had to give her a shot of valium to calm her down (this wasn't the first time she had had a shot of this). The following day, on Wednesday, she had an ultrasound scan of her brain to confirm whether or not she had hydrocephalus. When her scan was compared with a typical text book hydrocephalus scan it was identical. This was good and bad, because now we knew for sure that she had hydrocephalus but this also meant that it was incurable. The vet said to us that we needed to consider seriously whether or not we would put her down if her condition continued to worsen. At the same time, though, we decided to double her dose of steroids that she was taking to help her brain drain out the excess cerebrospinal fluid. And to our surprise, after doing this her condition improved a hundredfold. From last Thursday until today she hasn't had a seizure and she is healthier than we've ever seen her. Chocolat is back!!

I love singing and hence I love musicals. We went to ASB Bank Starry Nights for the 1st time tonight and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It wasn't as big an affair (say around 100,000 people) as something like the SKYCITY Starlight Symphony in Auckland (maybe around 300,000) but the talent on display was great. I'd recommend it to anyone who is a fan of live shows.

Yesterday I was implementing a solution for a customer based on a howto at plone.org, and I was struggling to get the thing to work. In the end the problem was related to the fact that I had created the CMFPhoto content through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) rather than through the Plone Management Interface (PMI) - bad mistake. I was told this lesson long ago but had to learn it again the 'hard way'. When you add stuff through the PMI it does a whole lot of other workflow-type stuff/etc in the background.
Also I learned a cool command in google today - allinurl:my_url. For e.g. type allinurl:weblog_view in the google search box and it will find all urls that contain 'weblog_view' - which just happens to be all Quills weblogs. Cool ay.

I had my bro come down and stay with us over the weekend - he went back to Auckland yesterday. He's come all the way from London to NZ for a few weeks and it was great to see him again. We spent most of the weekend relaxing with one highlight being my public talk at the Samoan congregation and a toonai (Sunday meal) afterwards with some of the bros. The toonai consisted of taro, cooked bananas, corned beef, raw fish in coconut milk and 'lots and lots' of other yummy stuff - it had been a while since I'd had a good Samoan feed. Yesterday we went to the Canterbury Museum, which was very interesting, especially the information about the early English settlers in Canterbury, the displays showing Maori life of times past and a full Samurai suit. We also spent about an hour wandering around Willowbank, and I got to see 'close-up' my first Kiwi!