The weather today is quite beautiful. Tomorrow is not so much. So I’ve decided to both stay an extra night in Queenstown to avoid a huge storm coming through, and to try to do any outdoor activities I might want to do today, and leave the errands and indoor stuff for tomorrow.

With that in mind, I scheduled a skydiving trip for 1pm, with a meander out to Queenstown Gardens before, and a trip up the gondola for after, and fill in whatever.

Welp. I went to the gardens. They were lovely. And the view from the point was spectacular.

Afterward I wandered back over to the skydiving shop, sat down and waited for my group to be called. Shortly after the scheduled time, the staff came over and informed us that they’d cancelled the rest of the jumps for the day due to wind. Sad face. Major sad face. Thy had options for us like rescheduling or booking something else, but given the poor weather in the forecast for tomorrow I knew that was out, and Friday I’d be leaving town, so I opted to cancel entirely. There’s a possibility I can make it a day trip from Wanaka but I’ll worry about that when I get to Wanaka.

After I finish my lunch I may meet back up with some folks I’ve been walking with and hanging out at the huts with for the past several days, and take a trip up the gondola for some nice, if much lower than skydiving, views of Lake Wakatipu, which even from the ground is incredible.

Fast forward to late in the evening.

I ended up totally forgetting about the tram. I met up with some friends near the lake, we ventured out in search of food, split apart a bit, I ended up getting some curry at a Japanese place and then we all kinda met again down by the beach and just hung out, relaxed, and talked for a bit.

At some point a guy comes over and wants to join our conversation because he’d heard us talking about radio stuff. Eventually the topic shifted to cryptocurrency of course.

Eventually the guy, after chatting with us for a while, asks us what we think about iPads and Apple products in general. Most of us are using iPhones so clearly we like Apple. He starts in on this rant about how Apple makes it really hard to recover an iPad or iPhone if the previous owner hadn’t released it from their Apple account. It turns out, the context is that he thinks companies should want people using their products no matter how they were acquired. And that Apple “locking people out” is not in Apple’s best interests. I counter that the reason they do it is a theft prevention measure. If someone steals my phone it’s basically useless to them. Sure they can do a hard factory reset with iTunes, but the phone is still registered to me and you can’t undo that without my or Apple’s intervention. He says he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to buy something that’s useless to a thief because it can’t benefit the thief or something. I explain again it’s a theft prevention feature. I like it because it makes it less of a theft target. He says not all thieves know they’re useless. I counter that good thieves will. Clearly this guy isn’t a good thief. All this while he has this iPad he doesn’t have a charger for, and wants to sell it but wants to be able to turn it on to show people that it works. Keeps mentioning things like “finding” iPads or iPhones. Yea. Found. Sure. Meanwhile all of us are quietly putting all our valuables away. I even told the guy it’s just a lightning charger, can get that anywhere. Anywho, I got a kick out of it. Wish I had a better memory of the whole conversation because it was just fascinating how much this guy was pissed that Apple was making it harder for thieves and why would they do that. At some point also he asked about sql injection. “Could you do that and just update the record?” I laughed. If you could, Apple would probably pay you a lot of money to tell them that. Such a funny situation this guy.

Later we were going to all get together for dinner and cook a meal over at Frank’s hostel because it has a huge cooking facility. So we ventured out for groceries and beverages and reconvened around 6. Stir fry was the meal. Rice. Broccoli. Huge pile of mushrooms. Some other random stuff. We all pitched in, put it together and made it happen. The meal was great, but the best part was the conversation and general hanging out.

In fact, one of the most awesome parts was just before we started we had a bit of a saying grace sort of moment. Keaton suggested we share something we’re thankful of. Each of us shared something and it was a really great reflective moment. For me it was that I was thankful for the company and new friends of course but also that despite being very angry with 2 of the people at the table (see profile post later) for several days I’m actually in retrospect one very thankful for knowing them because they’re very cool people, but also, in hindsight, thankful for the push they gave me, even if they weren’t intending to, or if my anger was misdirected or whatever, that in the end, the motivation was actually valuable and that I was thankful. It was kind of a touching moment. Very cool idea.

We broke up shortly after 10 and I realized I’d forgotten about the gondola. Oops.

Since we were all guests at Frank’s hostel the 3 of us left walked back into town. Then Keaton and I ended up having a really deep philosophical conversation for about an hour on a street corner before finally heading our separate ways.

Now I’m in my hostel finishing this post. I’ve had requests to talk about the people I’ve been hiking with so I’m going to try to do like a mall profile post to capture some of the folks I’ve met recently. Also I’ve heard images are all sorts of broken so one of the things on the agenda for tomorrow is to fix that.