Rainy Chennai

Arrived in Chennai very late Sunday night / Monday morning. There was a huge thunderstorm, the sky lit up light it was day again.

The day cleared up quite nicely later thought - it was great to see the team again.

Lufthansa

I realised I'd need to re-write some of the last post if I was to put the pic in there, so here is a new post with my Lufthansa plane in Frankfurt photo. Dead on time, but no TV's in the back of the seats! The entertainment was very 1970's, everyone had to watch the same move, and it was "Night at the museum"! Thank goodness for iPods!

Picture of big Lufthansa Jet to go here

I'm in Frankfurt airport, isn't technology wonderful - enjoying wifi at 13 eur for 3 hours off t mobile. It seems the money I gave to t Mobile for 24 hours service in 'Frisco airport is not good here.

It's weird, you hit the regular blogger website address here and it talks to you in German! My German really is non existent, but I can guess what the buttons mean as they are all in the regular places.

Germany is rainy and overcast this Sunday Morning, although my body thinks it's still Saturday night. Welcome to summer in Europe.

My faithful little iBook, not in it's first flush of youth, was a star all the way through the flight from 'Frisco to here and I have finally filed away and deleted a huge quantity of work e-mail that had been bugging me for ages. It was like re-capping on my previous three months work. There is just no way I would have found a spare three hours to sort the e-mail out in any other context than sitting on a plane for hours, even though the laptop had to be at a very strange angle due to to horrors of economy class and the person in front having reclined their seat, as ever. All the e-mail filing made the time go very fast and I only had time to watch the New York Dolls reunion gig and an episode of Heroes on the iPod.

I took a picture of the Lufthansa plane I took over, but I don't have the cables for my Leica just now, so I'll need to upload that later - so this is the first blog post with no pic, for now. I managed to forget to charge the battery for the Leica, so it took the Lufthansa photo with it's last breath of power, red battery graphic flashing away.

I actually managed to forget my charger for the iBook and leave it in the Claremont yesterday, so after a fruitless little attempt at buying a new one (in Best Buy of all places in 'Frisco - aren't they just the WORST assistants in the world there? Youth does not always have advantages) I had to go back to the Claremont and retrieve the old one. So I went from Berkeley to 'Frisco twice yesterday. It wasn't all bad, we found a nice vegetarian Chinese in Berkeley and I had pretend chicken and a nice Chinese beer.

So the flight to India is in a hours time so we better start to wonder where the departure gate is.......

Claremont

I'm staying the night at this beautiful hotel in Berkeley at the moment. I'm at an "offsite" which is a bunch of us Sun people getting together away from the phones and e-mail for 2 days to strategise.

Seemingly this is one of the few wooden hotels left in the Bay Area, all the others burned down! Our meeting room has some wonderful views over the Bay to San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. I must try to get some pics of that tomorrow.

Off to India on Saturday, more on that later. I'm not looking forward to the journey.......

Being a Tourist in the Bay Area

I haven't been doing much blogging lately as I have an old friend staying with me and I am having fun taking photographs and seeing my home area like I'm a tourist again.

This is us in Castro Street in 'Frisco on the 4th of July.

Our adventures in photographs are all here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tomreid/