This is coming to you live from QF155 (well, if by “live”, you mean “at the time it was written”, anyway :-). The flight’s been rather nonplussed: we had a pleasant 2-hour journey or so from Sydney to Auckland, and stopped over in Auckland for around 30 minutes or so before jumping back on the plane. Of course, I decided that since Auckland was quite possibly the last place I was going to get a decent coffee for most likely the next entire month, I just had to grab my last mocha at Auckland airport. Executive summary of coffee experience: (1) mocha in New Zealand is good, (2) New Zealand accents are giggly funny, and (3) New Zealand currency is the same as Australian, but different. Hey, I’d never seen New Zealand currency before, so I thought it would be worthwhile to withdraw $20 from the nearby ATM. Pretty colourful notes! Oh, and I also bought an Ecuadorian banana. All good.

The only unpleasant part of the trip was getting back on the plane. It looks like the Auckland Airport security staff don’t trust the Sydneysiders to give their passengers a good cavity search, so they made us go through the whole security checkpoint rigmarole garbage again. (Mind you, I don’t blame them: the only good cavity search is one done yourself.) So, that added a rather unnecessary 30 minute delay or so.

Back on the plane, I had a fairly reasonable choice of movies. Being the hardcore action flick guy that I am, I of course had to watch Suddenly 30, starring Jennifer Garner. Nah, actually, that was a joke (sorry if you brought out some Johnny Walker at that statement, Foo.) I really watched “The Girl Next Door”, with one tasty Elisha Cuthbert, a.k.a. Kim “I am the most pretty-looking trouble magnet ever” Bauer in 24. It was rather average: I didn’t quite expect such a teeny flick, though. I guess it’s not particularly mainstream Hollywood to produce movies like the Opposite of Sex (Christina Ricci), which I was more expecting than an American teenage romantic comedy. Note to the girls though: the main guy in the movie is pretty hot, in an American innocent-boy-with-possible-use-of-brille-cream kind of way. Your Mileage May Vary.

Don and I geeked out a bit after our respective movies (I am informed that Don watched Tom Smith, which “was pretty good”), and proceeded to pull out our laptops to hack on Haskell code. For the Haskellers reading this, I tidied up a nice swishy GUI example so that it works with his latest version of hs-plugins, which I’m hoping to present in his talk, because nice swishy GUI examples are great for talks. For the non-Haskellers amongst you, just let it be said that there was a CAT6 network cable running between our two laptops (that I’m sure attracted some stares from the poor passenger sitting next to us), and it was fun. I also managed to catch up on personal emails, though I’m still 200-300 messages behind on mailing lists, and played one of the Qantas in-flight games named “Professional Gold Digger”, which is totally unashamed clone of Lode Runner, except that it has a more crappy name. Really, c’mon: Lode Runner vs Professional Gold Digger? What were they thinking?

Anyway, off to read more email now, then either chill out to the iPod or sleep for a while. (I should probably mention at this point that I did catch some powernaps between movies and coding, so don’t worry about the lack of sleep, mum and dad :-).