There are just a few days left to vote for your favourite architecture of 2009 in the ArchDaily Building of the Year Awards.

It is great to see New Zealand’s very own Pacific Environments Yellow Treehouse in the finals along with a number of ArchiCAD finalists from around the globe.

Check out the finalists and place your vote: http://www.archdaily.com/49280/archdaily-building-of-the-year-awards-2009-the-finalists/

Last Wednesday I visited the sunny (or not so sunny as the case was) Hawke’s Bay for Accelerate 2010.

For a number of years Rod from Xero has been wanting to hold a conference to help accelerate growth in New Zealand business’ – specifically hi-tech.

The conference was held at the wonderful Black Barn Vineyard a wonderful setting.

Apart from the delayed flight the day got off to a great start with Andy Lark giving us his latest views on the Virtual Era.

A long lunch gave ample opportunity to network with everyone and sample some of Black Barn’s wines.

The afternoon session was quite loose with a chance to share ideas and issues that people are experiencing and hear insights from some of New Zealand most successful entrepreneurs and investors.

One of Rod’s aims was to get the ‘city folk’ into the provinces and as such it was great to meet a number of new people all based in the Bay.

Overall it was a fun day and I look forward to next years event

Cheers Rod, Odette and the Black Barn.

Well it’s been 23 days since my first MBA Diary which is a direct indication of how busy it has been!

Having not been at Uni for a number of years I felt it was important to attend a number of courses regarding how to get at all the wonderful resources and it was just as well I did as with the development of the Internet the Library is far from what I remember. The ability to access enormous resources and databases is both amazing and overwhelming.

Following these seminars we had our first ‘real’ block of lectures which went amazingly well. The concept of a 6 hour lecture sounds full-on and to a large extent it is. However, the lectures break up the time well and so far 6 hours has passed incredibly quickly.

Last week was not a ‘lecture week’ but I still managed to visit Uni four times! We have a group Presentation to make this Friday so we have had a number of group sessions to pull that together. It has come together well and this week we are into the final tweaking and rehearsing. While we are looking forward to the presentation it will also be good to ‘knock it off’ so we can concentrate on other aspects of the course as well.

Last week I also attended a monthly MBA breakfast which is a great opportunity to meet others who are at various stages of their MBA. Last weeks breakfast featured Bill Payne an angle investor from the US. The breakfast helped reinforce one of the main reasons for doing the course which was to network.