Another enjoyable day here in Kerikeri. I have one more day of work and on Tuesday, I’ll start heading south again. But for today, I got to work on a slightly different computer project today:

A digital turntable! This converts your LP into mp3s. Setting it up thankfully wasn’t too difficult, and I converted the first record in about 40 minutes – you have to play the record from start to finish to record it to the computer, and then spend time editing the music into seperate songs (if you so choose), add mp3 tags, and save the files. All in all it was relatively intuitive thankfully, just time consuming.

After my work for the day was complete, I took off to nearby Aroha Island.

Despite what Google said, this actually is an island. It’s just surrounded by mangroves, so from above it doesn’t LOOK like an island at all. But it is, really! It was a pleasant hour or so walking around, though nothing really picture worthy. I did stop in the mangroved area which had an fine little picnic bench for me to relax and read at.

Or at least I would have been reading if I had remembered to charge my Kindle. Whoopsy.

Returned to my car and drove back to my host’s home. When I got there, I decided to do something REALLY adventurous – try to fix a problem with my car.

It’s nothing too bad. My cigarette lighter in the car doesn’t work, which is frustrating. Smoking is a big thing here in New Zealand, so I decided to pick up the habit as well (whoops!). But not being able to smoke while driving is frustrating, hence trying to fix this issue. I didn’t document my work with my camera as I was focused on the task at hand, but have recreated it with paint. First off was checking the fuses. After finding the cover, all of the labels were in Japanese. Time to brush up! Or, since all of the fuses were fine, the problem wasn’t there.

Next, checking the connections to the socket. After prying off the main panel to get at the wiring behind, I was greeted to this:

That’s my depiction of the different wiring, by the way. It was an utter mess. Sure enough, no wires were connected to the socket. I tried to find the correct wires, but naturally, none were labelled. After randomly attaching and trying multiple wires, I admitted defeat for the time being. I plugged everything back in that I had dismantled, and gave things one last try.

Actually, no fire occured, I’m exaggerating. However, something wasn’t quite right – things were much quieter than before. The car was running just fine…but now the radio was dead. ARRRRRRRRGH. Dismantled again, checked everything twice. And the radio remains dead. Considering it only has a single block of wires going into the radio and were not removed by myself, the radio will likely remain dead for some time now. And the lighter remains dead as well. BAH!

Car 1, Me 0.

PS. I have not taken up smoking, I was joking. I want the lighter socket to plug my GPS into. And smoking isn’t part of NZ culture at all – they are very similar to Canada in banning smoking pretty much in every public spot. 🙂