Back in November, I interviewed for a project manager position with a company called Eagle Technology. They are a small family owned company that resells and installs various software. On Thursday, I was offered a 3 month contract position with them to start on Monday. After 3 months, this may be extended to permanent. In the meantime, I will continue to look at other employment options. I will be working specifically with the ArcGIS software. This is geographic information system software---- which is something totally new to me. From my limited understanding, this software is used for things such as transportation planning and routing, disaster recovery (was used to find the pieces of Challenger), customer mapping and target marketing, etc. GIS integrates hardware, software and data to do geographic modeling. My role as a project manager will be to manage implementations of the software for customers of Eagle.
Over the weekend, John and I went north to the Kauri Coast. If you remember from previous posting, the Kauri is a native NZ tree that was about forested out in the early 1900's. The gum of the tree was used for varnish and wax and many other things. The gum looks very similar to amber. There are some marvelous trees still standing. We visited the #1 largest Kauri tree over the weekend. It is estimated at 2,000 years old. We also made this a camping trip. Friday night we stayed in a Top 10 campground. Top 10's are private campgrounds that usually have very good accommodation's (tents, cabins, motor homes) and are all over NZ. One Saturday night, we camped in the national park which was a bit more rustic.
Friday night, we had dinner with two brothers from Holland. They were biking self contained and had just arrived in NZ for 3 months. Saturday night, we had dinner with a couple from Germany that had been in NZ for just about 3 months. They were actually leaving in a few days for Australia where they were going to spend another 3 months (and after that potentially another 3 months in Thialand). After all their traveling, they hope to decide which country to move to. These people were in there early 30's, had quit their jobs and were seeing the world. The attitude was that work would be there when they went back home. I find it interesting that we run into people all the time that have quit work--- they are always from Europe though, never from the US.
We also stopped at the Sand Highway along the way. There is about a 100 km sand highway that runs from north of Auckland up to about the north tip of NZ. This is literally a sand highway-- it runs right along the ocean and is passable up to 2 hours before high tide and once again 2 hours after high tide. You need to have a 4 wheel drive to go on the highway so we just had a look.
John also has something to say about the weekend--- he was quite disappointed the possum wasn't dead. Friday night on the way home from dinner he accidentally hit a possum with the car. Possums are considered a pest and it is considered patriotic to take out a few. Note that a possum is different then an opossum in Iowa. Possums kill the trees and the kiwi birds. When we went back by the spot Saturday morning, the possum was gone. So, John was disappointed to not have done his patriotic duty.
Here is a link to some more pictures from this weekend. The blog photo is at Tane Mahuta, the largest living Kauri, around 2,000 years old. Total height, 51.5 meters, girth 13.8 meters.
