Sitting here in a friend’s apartment smack bang in the centre of Manhattan I find 6 open wireless networks,all for the taking. Beats anywhere I’ve been in London.

I’m definitely in the wrong timezone. The day started with a 7.30am work call. I’m not too bad on doing late calls with the US when I’m in the UK but early calls with the UK is just difficult. I;ve then spent 4 hours with an agency in an assessment, to see if they are going to be doing one of our websites. Finally got a chance to relax and prepare for my all-on day of sightseeing tomorrow!

Hey Richard, I arrived. I’m sure IM or mobile would have been a lot more efficient that this though!!!

I walk through Waterloo Station nearly every weekday. In the 3-4 minutes I’m in the concourse, the announcer never shuts up, running through all the departures in an endless repetitive loop. Obviously, at some point, there was one massive recording session to get everything taped (digitised, recorded..) Do you think they have to go and find the guy again everytime a new train journey is added? But most important – do you think he gets residuals for everytime the recording is used???

The other thing that struck me was the status board at the entrance to the Jubilee line. It lists all the tube lines and has a number of sticky signs that can be added to the board to give the travel status of each line – saves the staff writing things out. Occasionally, everything is running OK on every single line, but they do not have enough signs to tell us this. The staff either have to space out the little signs evenly across the board or write the additonal ‘good service’ reports on their. So why is this important? It’s telling me that this is an organisation that expects to fail, when its staff will not produce enough status markers to say everything is OK.

I believe I’ve signed up for Reboot7.0 taking place in June in Copenhagen. I say believed as, so far, no invoice or confirmation has been received after a week. In this I’m the same as Tom, as well as a few other people. Trusting that all is well, everything else is booked – flights, hotels etc – so now I just need to turn up and enjoy (hopefully…)

Day trip to Edinburgh and three hour delay in getting back. Stuck at the airport lounge with a laptop which has a battery life of about 20 seconds and not able to drink as had to drive when I get back to Heathrow. Long, boring evening.

Due to the Jubilee line been messed up this evening, ended up going to Vauxhall to catch the train. So for 10 minutes I sat, starring at the MI6 building opposite the station. A very imposing building, minimal windows, full of cameras covering multiple approaches. Except for one, at the top of the building. I’m convinced the security team using it are train fans. As the trains went through the station, the camera kept tracking them back and forth. left to right. I’m pretty sure they got most of the engine numbers!

So one problem with owning a travel card is that you don’t actually get to travel for free when the whole system goes down as it did this morning. And because everyone had to go through the same exit, the queues were longer 🙁

I was in Dublin yesterday for a meeting, just a there and back trip. The Irish airport security have big signs up and procedures and have people helping you get things ready for the Xray machines. So why can’t the US.

I keep intending to spend some time in Dublin, as over the last few years I’ve just been going across for a day at a time for meetings. I love the place, it could be time for long weekend

On my last day of holiday before returning to work tomorrow, I’m having what could be called a typical Xmas Bank Holiday. Watching Zulu on the telly, drinking ice-cold Tanqueray and Tonic and perusing holiday brochures – the TV ads that started on Christmas day are getting to me at last. All I have to do now is choose where I want to go. I’m always tempted to go back to places I’ve been – I love Barbados for exmaple. But maybe I should try something different. One that has caught my eye is an activity holiday in Tuscany – the activity being the study of local food and wine – definitely my kind of holiday. So one weeek there and a scuba diving week later in the year (maybe the Maldives) is looking on the cards.

Finally got my photos set up in a gallery

Here’re some images from holiday. First we have a view from the cable car down from Kuranda. This is over 7km of cable car over rainforest – you need to be able to cope with heights.

Here’s an attempt at an arty shot – a cycad they were saying was about 2000 years old. We were in the Daintree rainforest

Next, a tropical beach – DayDream Island in the Whitsundays

A shot at sunset from my hotel balcony in Mission Beach

A view of Sydney from the harbour

Now I’ve finally got this set up, let’s start off by using this for musings on my recent holiday – a great way to share this with the rest of the family. So, soon as I’m more awake, work will commence, in the meantime, we just have a picture.

(updated 5 Nov 2012: this isn’t the original. I have no idea where the original picture is, it’s got lost in blog moves!)