North Island New Zealand

I'm trying to plan my trip to North Island New Zealand in January.  We've already go air tickets in and out of Auckland.  But that's it.  Now have to think about what to do.
I was told once not to miss the Bay of Islands.  I'd love to charter a yacht or just stay by the shore.  Also have always wanted to hire a caravan and just drive to nice places and stay.
We have some friends who will be in NZ because they're kiwis going home for Christmas.  So, we'll have to drop in on them.  But even so, it would be nice to have the caravan so we don't impose all 6 of us on them.
While planning, I found a really cool sight on Yahoo. Quite cool.  So, I'm going to try it out and see how it goes.

Thoughts - Rotorua has a luge that I bet the big kids (and I) will love.

Planning a Trip North

For a long time I've wanted to take a trip northwest of Sydney. North past Hunter, West past the Blue Mountains. We have some dear friends named Lynn and Jim Watt. Lynn's brother works the family farm out by Coonabarraban which is out there. It just happens to be the closest town to the Warrumbungles which are famous for an observatory and their remoteness.
This coming school holidays I have a week off and so nows the time. I think the quickest way to get there is drive north up the Pacific Hwy and then turn west past New Castle. But I'd rather drive out west of the blue mountains and drive north from there.

We've been out to Orange and Dubbo before, but I want to see the country on the other side of the mountains and north.

So we can swing out west through the Blue Mountains and maybe stop off in Mudgee. Mudgee is a country town famous for wine and like most Aussie country towns, a good time. I think the right way to experience the place would be to stay in a local Hotel. I found this place - Oriental Hotel - so perhaps we can book in advance. I bet it will be noisy because there is a pub downstairs. But that's really part of the charm.

From Mudgee it's a long drive north to Coonabarraban and the Warrumbungle National Park. Hopefully we can get a spot to camp out in the park. Here is the link to camping - Warrumbungle NP Camping. They don't require booking in advance, but I think that means you have to get there really early in the day. Better have a backup plan for accomodation. Maybe something in town.


seaside port macquarie resort - Google Search. That might be fun to stay at a pub style place

China Blindly Follows America's Failures

While I watch the amazing economic growth and development of China I can't help but feel sorry for them. I wish they could look at the west with a bit more healthy skepticism rather than simple envy and lust for luxury and advanced technology like automobiles.

I wish China would take this great opportunity to do something better than simply follow in the footsteps of the west. Why not learn from the mistakes of the west. Why not look at America's congested highways and failing cities and strive to avoid the mistakes.

Please China, be creative. Do something better and different. Don't just try to catch up.

Thought on Priority

Getting back on my latest theme, I want to talk about prioritising. I am currently working on enhancing our team's task management (and project management). The crux of task management is getting the most important or highest priority tasks done first. The problem comes in when all tasks are high priority.

But where does the high priority come from? Most would solve this by asking their customer, "is this high or low priority?" And we all know the answer, don't we.

Instead of asking our customer for the result of a complicated function, why don't we help them out and just ask for something they do know that will help us determine the answer. This is important because priority of one task is relative to all other oustanding tasks at the time you are evaluating it not at the time of requesting work be done.

This is important because we really only need to know relative priority at a moment when there is contention for a resource. If we have no contention, then tasks get worked on immediately, don't they?

This is me.

How High?

If you run a software development team, you are probably faced with the fact that the backlog of work is greater than your team will ever get through. So, you have to prioritise. In most cases, people will want to use Low, Medium or High. Better yet, they might use a scale of 1 to 10.

What does that mean? And how does it help you?

Low, Medium and High are one of my pet pieves. They are relative terms - which is fine. But too often, we are asked to assign a value when we don't know what this is relative to.

I think capturing other relevant information such as what if this doesn't get done on time? would be far mor useful. That way when someone is trying to evaluate priorities, they can re-assess the relative priority of all tasks based on the impact of failure. Or perhaps value derived from success (which is basically the inverse).

I really want some feedback on this as I think this is much more profound and fundamental that most would expect.