Way cool. @RotoruaNZ Tweeted me the other day after I posted some photos of Mountain Biking up here.

Asked if they could use one of my photos on their Mountain Biking page. Check out Phil Ross on the dipper with the *loud* strobe action going on.

http://rotoruanz.com/ 

If you’re one of my overseas readers I can’t comment the City of Rotorua to you enough. I’ve dreamed of living there since I was at highschool and it’s still 100% on my 5 year roadmap. It’s close to the ski fields, has phenomenal mountain biking (the Redwoods), great kayaking (Kaituna and Wairoa) and great air links for frequent business travellers like me (Can go direct to AKL, WLG, CHC and ZQN).

The only query/quibble I have with the Destination Rotorua site is why on earth is it hosted on the other side of the world!?! See the trace-route below. Looks like it’s in Orlando!
Looks like their site uses PHP so they’ll probably be a good candidate for the Apache version of the Runtime Page Optimizer http://www.getrpo.com/Product/Apache. Running the RPO site tester it reckons it should knock a couple of seconds off the New Zealand load times.

C:\Users\Chris>tracert www.rotoruanz.com

Tracing route to rotoruanz.com [66.7.213.144]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    13 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  …
  2    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  …
  3     1 ms     2 ms     1 ms  wlgrtr1-65.intergen.org.nz [202.126.87.65]
  4     4 ms     1 ms     2 ms  ihwrtr1-129.intergen.net.nz [202.126.87.129]
  5     2 ms     5 ms     3 ms  32.114.216.13
  6   158 ms   150 ms   148 ms  165.87.71.190
  7   150 ms   148 ms   148 ms  12.127.33.6
  8   150 ms   152 ms   158 ms  cr2.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.74]
  9   148 ms   148 ms   156 ms  ggr3.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.17]
10   150 ms   149 ms   154 ms  att-gw.sanfran.level3.net [192.205.33.78]
11   157 ms   162 ms   161 ms  vlan89.csw3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.68.18.190]
12   176 ms   152 ms   160 ms  ae-83-83.ebr3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.69.134.233]

13   151 ms   155 ms   167 ms  ae-2.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.132.10]
14   148 ms   157 ms   148 ms  ae-63-63.csw1.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.3
4]
15   160 ms   163 ms   161 ms  ae-62-62.ebr2.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.1
7]
16   183 ms   181 ms   192 ms  ae-3.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.132.78]
17   202 ms   181 ms   180 ms  ae-93-93.csw4.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.166]

18   190 ms   197 ms   181 ms  ae-91-91.ebr1.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.133]

19   215 ms   214 ms   224 ms  ae-1-14.bar2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.137.153]

20   220 ms   218 ms   210 ms  ae-9-9.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.133.69]
21   212 ms   210 ms   211 ms  hostdime.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.79.118.38]

22   211 ms   211 ms   213 ms  dime151.dizinc.com [66.7.213.144]

Trace complete.