I'm currently enroute to Christchurch from Rotorua, writing this entry with a crystal clear view of Mt Ruapehu from my window seat ;-) Nothing too techo here, just writing on my pda to copy/paste later. I spent yesterday at a conference promoting our Te Reo Maori version of Plone, which we've called Tuku. It means 'website' in Maori, which loosely defines what it can do & implies it supports Maori (feel free to say what you think of the name). Did some networking @ the conference, notably meeting Vaemu Fidow (who actually was responsible for me being there via a blog entry on his site), a work colleague of his, Hemi Waerea, Ateremu, Kingi Gilbert & some others. Here's hoping there's some interest in Tuku (I might post my presentation notes for folk to look at if anyone's interested).

Update: Here is a link to the Tuku presentation slides and notes. Enjoy.

4 of our windows on one side of the house were smashed, and a pane of glass on our front door has a couple of sizable cracks in it. Fortunately 2 of the smashed windows are in the kitchen, which isn't a room we generally spend a lot of time in during the day. Also the other 2 windows that were smashed were on double-glazed windows so this wasn't a major either. I took a small video of the lightning storm and will post this up later.

Update: As promised here is a movie I took of the storm.

Some good friends of Miho's and now of mine have come to stay for a few days. They moved to Malaysia to teach the Bible to people there. Malaysia is an interesting place, though, as it's a moderate Islamic state with about 60% of the population professing to be Muslims. The statistics also bear this out. Therefore they need to be disreet when engaging in their Bible education work. They're having a great time over there, though, and it has been great having them stay.

I've got an Irish friend who passed this ditty on to me:

The Scots are famous for keeping the Sabbath and everything else they can lay their hands on.
The Welsh pray on their knees on Sunday and on everyone else all through the week.
The Irish do not know what they want but they are willing to die for it.
The English are a race of self-made men thereby relieving the Almighty of a dreadful responsibility.

It's true that when you're looking for the bad in something you will find it but these admissions came from Drupal users! I did read about the whole Drupal vs Plone argument via a post on Sidnei da Silva's website. and basically it came down to Plone is more of an enterprise CMS whereas Drupal is more suited to smaller scale implementations (I stand to be corrected on this - I really should turn on Anonymous commenting ;-)
The thing that started me comparing the 2 systems was an email from a client that pointed me towards a new Pasifika community website in Christchurch. We're starting to get heavily into internationalising Plone and coming across this website that's specifically targeted at the Pacific Island people in Canterbury was a project that screamed "Plone". I discovered after a bit of digging that the website is based on Drupal and thought I'd do some further digging to see what Drupal's i18n-support was like. I discovered that Drupal has around 28 translations in progress, whereas Plone has 43. The real distinguishing factor, though, is Plone's multilingual content support, which means you can have content available simultaneously in multiple languages. Imagine being able to simply view the same document in the language of your choice, whether that's Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Maori, English or whatever other language you like - that's the kind've functionality Plone provides! I hope I can convince others about this amazing feature that Plone has..