I would rather not download an app to use bike share in Toronto.

Spotted at a cafe in Montreal: A man (50s?) wearing Yoda pants waits in line. He is carrying a little black and white kitten in his arms. Occasionally he pets the kitten. @georgepenney

Spotted at a cafe in Montreal: A man (50s?) wearing Yoda pants waits in line. He is carrying a little black and white kitten in his arms. Occasionally he pets the kitten. @georgepenney

#JukeboxFridayNight #PersonalPlaylist Wouldn't exactly say it's a favourite but I suspect I spent enough time listening to this while in the phone queue it warrants an entry! Warning - still not great despite (because of?) being autotuned to within an inch of its life! Immigration New Zealand […]

I wrote a photos post for August and posted it a few days ago, but haven't had time to post a thread yet. Here it is. Once again, I'm travelling, so the thread may be somewhat delayed... https://patricklam.ca/post/20260907-august-photos/ Featuring pictures from […] [Original post on mastodon.nz]

Buongiorno de Napoli. I feel like one could easily get run over by a car here.

“If we want to keep kākāpōmaxxing, we need to fix the kākāpō housing crisis” Update: This was the best kākāpō fuck season ever thespinoff.co.nz/science/08-0...

Update: This was the best kākāpō fuck season ever

The world may be burning but at least the world’s fattest parrot has been boning.

thespinoff.co.nz

This is a quite Canadian message associated with the red warning for severe thunderstorms in Waterloo: "Destructive wind gusts, loonie to ping pong ball size hail and heavy rain are possible."

I was sitting on the bus from the airport the other day and saw this, which inspired a small rabbit hole and new learning about how things work...

Yesterday as I was waiting in the biosecurity line at WLG there was a family of 4 in front of us with all their stuff moving to Aotearoa, maybe from the US? I heard something about a job at Pacific Radiology. Good luck!

Me: "... But we don't really want to get to the ferry terminal two hours early" Random guy next to us on the bus: "sometimes you do!"

I really don't like the "we should have standard time all year" thing even if the scientists say it's allegedly better. Here I am in Bitola (North Macedonia). It's 638am (up early for a hike) and it's 40 minutes past sunrise. Sunset is 722pm. At home usually I […] [Original post on mastodon.nz]

Turns out that we ended up in Bitola for the White Night. I don't think kiwis have the wardrobe to pull this off. More the opposite.

July pictures. This flight has another 30 minutes. Well, I can at least post four pictures in this time. https://patricklam.ca/post/20260804-july-photos/ This includes a lot of pictures from a Whale Watch Kaikōura trip in July (a last minute but highly […] [Original post on mastodon.nz]

Darn! I thought I would run out of flight but I actually ran out of power first.

"But if you zoom out, it becomes clear that almost every “breakthrough” since last summer has concerned the narrow domains of computer code and math, which are defined by highly structured languages and come accompanied by massive amounts of specialized training data. And yet, even in this […]

I received an AI-slop cold email from a prospective PhD student. I wrote a few more words but I think I started my reply with "I hate LLMs". Ugh. (The cold emails from students who are interested in microelectronics aren't much better...)

Went skiing at Whakapapa and Turoa on the weekend, which prompted a couple of thoughts. 1. Lift tickets at NZ$160/day feel expensive, but I did the inflation check, and it's just me being old. The NZ inflation calculator says that it's NZ$80 in 2000 dollars […] [Original post on mastodon.nz]

I finally got irate enough at RNZ's continued climate silence that I sent them some feedback. See below: -- I have noted a disturbing trend in RNZ reporting and commentary over the past couple of years, and it has reached the point where it has assumed the dimensions of an elephant in a […]

Finally a beautiful day in Auckland. I was vaguely thinking of taking the ferry to Rangitoto Island but didn't actually bother to check the time. Oops, the single sailing for the day leaves at 930 and I checked at 926 far from the ferry terminal. #MissedTheBoat

Floss expires?! I've eaten food that has an expiry date further in the future than this.

I guess it was somewhat rainy here. We decided that this was a good time to call it quits on this walk.

I have a paper submission to work on (occupational hazard), but here's my photos post from June anyway. Will post to it as I take breaks from paper editing. https://patricklam.ca/post/20260701-june-photos/ We'll have pictures from the Old Ghost Road, Tour du […] [Original post on mastodon.nz]

And yet another submission, this time on the NZ Conservation Amendment Bill: https://patricklam.ca/post/20260706-submission-conservation-amendment-bill/ > As I write this on 6 July, a rainfall gauge in Dunedin reports 160mm of rain in the last 48 hours. Conservation lands and the Department of […]

Yeah so the weather in Pōneke Wellington is very average. Normally there are 1200 cyclists around 6pm. Yesterday 300. Today 100.

I was walking through the Wellington Central Library and ran into this book on the history of photography in New Zealand. It has a lot of words... https://patricklam.ca/post/20260623-into-the-light-review/

Review: Into the Light: A History of New Zealand Photography, by David Eggleton

Personal website of Patrick Lam

patricklam.ca

Grey Teal interaction at Travis Wetland (1/5) #Birds #BirdsNZ

OH: "that wind, eh?" #Poneke

No thank you. I do not want Gemini in my Google Sheets. #noAI

A few weeks ago I biked to Petone on Te Ara Tapua and visited the Petone Settlers Museum. What are the Mounties doing here and why are they in brown? Is NZ Mounties going to be on the citizenship test?