there's a glitch.

so we arrived back in akl on saturday after a couple extra days in taupo. friday we powered through the tongariro crossing, a pretty sweet day hike up a volcanic mountain located just by mt. ngauruhoe aka mt. doom. photos are still tk. unforunately brendan's powerbook is on the fritz. the hard drive was making fairly loud clicking sounds and eventually it just started locking up. now it won't boot. we haven't tried booting from a system disk yet, though. the good news is that we know we can boot it as an external hard drive. so hopefully we can hook it up to one of the bruell's computers along with brendan's actual external drive,back everything up on the external, and then operate on its fragile innards.

today was spent at the armageddon expo, a kind of miniature san diego comic con. i found a pretty decent run of grant morrison penned new x-men comics, some other pulpy stuff, and an issue of negative burn. a $1 a piece, which is like US$0.67. a bargain! there was also a q&a panel with everyone's favorite bat-actor kevin conroy (the voice of batman from the animated series). 3 cans of a&w root beer were also found there that will later be turned into sugary oceans for ice cream to sail across and then consumed... or something.

looks like the cheapest way to the south island is to fly. we'll be doing that sometime in the next week or so.