San Francisco

Now that the MySQL Conference is finished I have spent the last two days in San Francisco. It’s a really great town and the weather has been fantastic but, man, those hills! Yesterday I wandered through China Town and up Telegraph Hill where I rode the elevator to the top of Coit Tower. Telegraph Hill

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Rome & Florence

So it’s been a couple of months since my last update. At that time I was up to my eyeballs in Java ME and mobile phones but thanks to some proof-reading from Andrew and some late nights from me I got my MSc project in on time. I also got my exam results which, if

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Salzburg

Februrary 27 2006 was Mozart’s 250th birthday so we made the pilgrimage to his birthplace, Salzburg. Salzburg is a beautiful baroque town. In fact the Old Town is designated a World Cultural Heritage Site by UNESCO. We arrived at our hotel, the Auersperg, late on Sunday night. It was really a very nice hotel with

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Dover

We hired a car last weekend and went for a drive. We went to Ightham Mote which is a fascinating 14th-century moated manor house in a hidden valley. Apparently its seclusion saved it from Cromwell’s soldiers who, intent on looting it, lost their way and ransacked another house instead. It eluded us for a while

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So we went to New York

We went to New York again for Kathryn’s birthday. We’d been once before and seen most of the tourist sites. For Kathryn, this meant we could dedicate the trip to shopping. Apart from spending money whenever we got the chance we also did some other cool things like visit the reopened Museum of Modern Art

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New York

It was snowing when we left London and it was snowing when we arrived at JFK airport seven hours later. We thought the terminal was rather small for New York, until we realised the whole terminal was just for British Airways. Not much later we were met by Wendy and Greg. There was a brief

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Egypt Part V

On our guide’s advice, we rose early and left for the west bank of the Nile at 6am. We were the first to arrive at the Valley of the Kings, which pleased Magic greatly. We caught a little train thing “like Disney Land” from the empty car park to the place where the men with

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Egypt Part IV

The view from our room at the Luxor Sheraton was stunning. We were on the east bank and from our balcony I could see a number of hot air balloons suspended over the opposite bank. As I stood and watched, the rising sun gradually brought colour to the steep hills surrounding the Valley of the

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Egypt Part III

We had booked a driver to take us to the Pyramids the previous day and we met Salah on the steps of our hotel early Tuesday morning. As we were driving along the eastern bank of the Nile he began fishing around behind the sun visor. This was slightly disconcerting but by now I had

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Egypt Part II

After having taken the long way to the Egyptian Museum, we made our way along the back of the Nile Hilton past the stares of heavily armed, bored looking soldiers. Kathryn soon came to realise that she was being actively stared at wherever she went. A blonde, white woman was quite a novelty it seemed.

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